Tag: language

a6:

“lmao ____ people cant pronounce the _____ sound!!” wow ur right……. its almost like… there are thousands of languages other than english….. and they each use a certain set of sounds and dont use others……. and wow its almost like ur making fun of them when if you were 2 try and pronounce a ق or a ح u would sound like a fucking loser wow isnt that strange

superlinguo:

prokopetz:

Here are 7 emotions foreign languages have words for, but English doesn’t!

  • [long-winded definition of word that just means “sad”]
  • [wild misinterpretation of idiomatic phrase]
  • [plagiarised entry from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows]
  • [not actually an emotion]
  • [stark illustration that author doesn’t understand how loanwords work]
  • [neologism used once by one particular 19th Century poet]
  • [obligatory appearance of “schadenfreude”]

Just your semi-regular reminder that just because a language has a word that can’t be translated into your language in only one word doesn’t mean that it’s ‘untranslatable’. I guess “untranslatable as an isogloss” just isn’t as catchy.

whatiflifeweremoreliketheater:

watashiwahaksaeng:

fuking-homestuck:

j-z-millier:

louxisalhama:

spaceisforlovers:

jethroq:

danadelions:

ja ja ja ja ja
a spanish person laughing or a german person during sex???

you decide

Finnish person struggling to remember what they were about to say next

polish person trying to get themself noticed

portuguese person trying to hush other people

Chinese person trying to do calculations

swedish person wanting to get out of a conversation

Korean person about to drop a fact

Neapolitan person that tries to beg somebody else to earn something.

allthingslinguistic:

Thanks to Linguist Twitter for finding this example of how some things just don’t change!

Modern historians tend to characterize the time where English borrowed a lot of words from Norman French as a period of richness and innovation, but sure enough, writers at the time were grumbling about how kids these days were speaking absolutely terrible Anglo Saxon. 

Full quote, from Bokenham in 1440 (notice how he’s ironically using lots of Latinate words in his complaint, like “corruption” and “familiar” and “augmentation”):

And þis corrupcioun of Englysshe men yn þer modre-tounge, begunne as I
seyde with famylyar commixtion of Danys firste and of Normannys aftir,
toke grete augmentacioun and encrees aftir þe commying of William
conquerour by two thyngis. The firste was: by decre and ordynaunce of þe
seide William conqueror children in gramer-scolis ageyns þe consuetude
and þe custom of all oþer nacyons, here owne modre-tonge lafte and
forsakyn, lernyd here Donet on Frenssh and to construyn yn Frenssh and to
maken here Latyns on þe same wyse. The secounde cause was þat by the
same decre lordis sonys and all nobyll and worthy mennys children were
fyrste set to lyrnyn and speken Frensshe, or þan þey cowde spekyn
Ynglyssh and þat all wrytyngis and endentyngis and all maner plees and
contravercyes in courtis of þe lawe, and all maner reknygnis and countis yn
howsoolde schulle be doon yn the same. And þis seeyinge, þe rurales, þat
þey myghte semyn þe more worschipfull and honorable and þe redliere
comyn to þe famyliarite of þe worthy and þe grete, leftyn hure modre tounge
and labouryd to kunne spekyn Frenssh: and thus by processe of tyme
barbariʒid thei in bothyn and spokyn neythyr good Frenssh nor good
Englyssh.

Here’s a translated version if you don’t feel like puzzling through the Middle English:

And this corruption of Englishmen in their mother tongue, begun, as I
have said, in the every-day admixture of first Danish and then Norman,
was greatly augmented and increased after the arrival of William the
Conqueror by two things. The first was by the decree and ordinance of
the aforesaid William the Conqueror that children in the grammar
schools should leave off and forsake their own mother tongue and learn
their Donatus in French and construe it in French and do their Latin in
the same way, which is something which goes against the habit and
custom of all other nations. The second cause was that in the same
decree the sons of the lords and the children of all the nobles and
worthy men were first set to learn and speak French, before they could
speak English and that all writings and indentureships and all manner of
pleas and controversies in courts of law and all manner of calculations
and accounts in households should be done in the same (language).
And seeing this, the rural people [saw] that they might seem to be the
more esteemed and honorable and the more easily open to the
acquaintance of the worthy and the great, abandoned their mother
tongue and labored to be able to speak French: and thus in the course
of time mutilated them both and spoke neither good French nor good
English.

The translation is via these course notes (pdf), which also make interesting reading about the history of English in general (see also these pdf exercises for other quotes). 

You would think eventually we’d learn to just chill out about how people are talking. 

How to pronounce Celtic words and names

allthingslinguistic:

prettyarbitrary:

madmaudlingoes:

prettyarbitrary:

breelandwalker:

rubyvroom:

literary-potato:

todosthelangues:

Step 1: Read the word.
Step 2: Wrong.

A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS:
Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN”
Aoife – “EE-fa”
Aislin – “ASH-linn”

Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”

Caoimhe – “KEE-va”

Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)

Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”

Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah”
Méabh – “MAYV”
Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV”
Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een
Órfhlaith – OR-la
Odhrán – O-rawn
Sinéad – shi-NAYD
Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)

I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG

As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.

This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.

No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.

The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.

Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse. 

They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.

And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.

My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.

I love it when snarky quips lead to real info.

And moreover, there are some really good linguistic reasons why the Irish monks picked these particular letter combinations to stand for these particular sounds (note that this is based on a Scottish Gaelic course I took many years ago so bear with me if I get a few details wrong).

Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/. 

So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>. 

Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”). 

Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels. 

Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)

And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.  

Mutation (changing the initial sound of a word for grammatical effect) does seem to be particular to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree, although various kinds of mutations are found in other languages. 

Irish spelling looks weird if you take English as a starting point, but if you take Latin as a starting point (which it was), both Irish and English do different (but sometimes related) weird things.

schmergo:

When people get all snippy about enforcing antiquated grammar rules, all I can think of is Edmund Spenser.

In the 1590’s, some dude named Edmund Spenser decided to write a flowery epic poem, basically a transparent allegory praising Queen Elizabeth. Fair enough. He was like, “I want this work to be remembered forever, so I don’t wanna use, like, MODERN SLANG or the CASUAL DISREGARD FOR GRAMMAR or FOREIGN INFLUENCE that THESE YOUNG UPSTARTS keep using. Nobody will read or understand their stuff in the future. I know, I’ll write in the style of Chaucer, because Chaucer is a ‘well of English undefiled.’ Now my piece will be a classic of pure and untainted English. 👌👌👌”

So he wrote this semi-incomprehensible fake-Chaucer poem. But FUNNNN FACT, guess who else was writing poetry in the 1590’s? Some young upstart using modern slang and casual disregard for grammar and foreign influence named William Shakespeare. And his stuff was good enough that a huge chunk of literary education is devoted to understanding his use of language… meanwhile, who’s ever heard of a Spenser Theatre Troupe, a Spenser Studies degree, or Spenser in the Park?

So ease up on that grammar policing. Shakespeare is widely praised for his inventiveness with language, creating and popularizing tons of new words and being the first recorded example of loads of common slang terms. Let’s appreciate it when 21st-century creators do the same!