Tag: language

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. 

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

allthingslinguistic:

superlinguo:

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone – so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker?
Psychological Science

27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

So many interesting potential follow-up studies! For example, do Turkish-English bilinguals use the appropriate gestures in each language, or do they show transfer effects from their first language? It also seems plausible to me that there might be some gestures that come with language while others might be learned by imitation (perhaps iconic gestures like rolling and down versus arbitrary gestures like thumbs up). 

signs as words in other languages

aries: Hanyauku (v) to walk on tiptoes across hot sand // Rukwangali
taurus: Hygge (n) the absense of anything annoying, taking pleasure from the presence of gentle or soothing things // Danish
gemini: Jayus (n) a joke so poorly told and unfunny you can’t help but laugh // Indonesian
cancer: Mångata (n) the glimmering, roadlike reflection the moon creates on water // Swedish
leo: Komorebi (n) the interplay between light and leaves when sunlight shines through trees // Japanese
virgo: Tsundoku (n) the act of buying a book and leaving it unread, often piled together with other unread books // Japanese
libra: Ubuntu (n) the belief that we are defined by our compassion and kindness towards others // Nguni
scorpio: Mamihlapinatapai (n) the wordless look between two people who both desire something, yet are equally reluctant to intiate // Yagán
sagittarius: Fernweh (n) a longing to travel, missing a place you’ve never been // German
capricorn: Meraki (v) to do something with soul, creativity, or love; when you leave a piece of yourself in your work // Greek
aquarius: Dépaysement (n) the disorientation felt in a foreign country or culture; the sense of being a fish out of water // French
pisces: Embasan (v) to wear clothes while taking a bath // Maguindanao

allthingslinguistic:

panda-robot:

justindennis4:

the verb “can” is so fuckin weird

for starters, most verbs have a “to” like “to love”, “ to want”, “to fight”, but you can’t say “to can”. in fact, you’d say “to be able to”.

which brings me to the fact that “can” is basically a random substitute for “to be able to” depending on the indicated time ???

like for example:

Past: I wanted
Present: I want
Future: I will want

Past: I was able to (or I could, it depends)
Present: I can
Future: I will be able to

like you can say “I can go to the store” but you can’t say “I will can go to the store” you have to say “I will be able to go to the store”.

and like technically I guess we could replace the present “can” with “to be able to” and it would work but just sound hella awk like “I’m able to go to the store”

PLUS it doesn’t get conjugated AT ALL

ex:

I want, he wants
I fight, she fights
BUT
I can, he can
You can, she can

IT NEVER GETS AN “ S” it’s never “he cans” or “she cans”

like I’m sure there’re very logical yet bizarre and fascinating linguistic reasons for all this but just like whatthefUCK “can” ????!??!??

“Can” isn’t a “full-fledged” verb. It’s a modal/auxiliary verb like could, would, should, may, must, might and will. All of these have the same quirks that you talk about.

They generally have specific temporal meanings so they can’t be used in some tenses. They don’t conjugate for person either!

they all have to go with another verb, even if the verb isn’t pronounced. Generally if you say “I can”, it’s understood that you can X because of context

My favourite thing about modals is that they originally come from full verbs (”can” has the same root as “know”, “will” is related to “be willing”), but we also have a set of currently-being-created modals that still have a pretty transparent relationship to their full verbs: gonna, hafta, wanna, gotta.

allthingslinguistic:

casispie:

hugealienpie:

thechubbynerd:

just-shower-thoughts:

Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.

This post needs some kind of warning sign.

I did not see that coming.

Some people say the English language is confusing. To which I say… It’s.

That’s the kind of linguist I’m.