@gollyplot / gollyplot.tumblr.com
Map of Native American etymologies for “horse”. There were no horses in the Americas before the colonists arrived. Native Americans quickly developed new words for this strange animal, often associating them with dogs, their one other domestic animal before contact with Europe.
@coyotecure your tags have me cackling omfg
Mystery dog…
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
The Spanish: Look at this animal we brought with us.
Native Americans: oh that’s a uh. Weird fucking dog you got there.
Spanish ningun and Portuguese nenhum 'no; (not) any' have the same origin as the German and Dutch negative articles kein and geen. The changes they underwent have made them quite different, but they all stem from a combination of two words that meant 'not even one'.
We should turn Speak Your Language Day into Speak Your Language Week, in my opinion. Maybe Month. Que tal?
RB if you agree :)
Or maybe a monthly thing. First Sunday each month or something.
or perhaps the first Monday of the month, as in :
Mother-tongue Monday
Moedertaal maandag
Muttersprachemontag
Lundi des langues maternelles
יום שני של שפת אם
Δευτέρα του δημώδους διαλεκτου
Понедельник просторечий
اثنین لغة الـأم (I tried... the alliteration is a bit of a stretch and I'm not entirely sure the grammar is right... in fact there may be a few grammatical errors in the other languages too. but as a proof of concept ? and we do like alliterative holidays here on tumblr.edu)
Honestly “thanks I hate it” is one of the funniest phrases in the English language
i one time told my italian professor “grazie lo detesto” and she lost her shit, so it’s not just english
“¡Gracias! ¡Lo odio!”
“Danke, ich hasse es.”
“Merci, je déteste”
Tak, jeg hader det.
Bedankt, ik haat het.
Спасибо! Я это ненавижу.
go raibh maith agat, is fuath liom é
どうも！ それが嫌い。
411 Writing systems of standard forms of languages
.شکریہ! مجھے اس سے نفرت ہے
(shukriah! mujhay isay nafraat hai.)
kiitti! mä vihaan tätä.
תודה! אני שונא.ת את זה. Toda! Ani sone.t et ze
谢谢，我厌恶它！
Takk, jeg hater det.
Hvala, mrzim to.
Dankon! Mi malamas ğin.
Ευχαριστώ, το μισώ.
Gratias tibi ago; id odi.
Do kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts?
Well, you see, kids, almost twenty years ago Apple produced a portable audio player called – wait, I need to go back further.
Okay, so in the 20th century, the new inventions of radio and television were known as broadcast media – no, wait, that’s not really the start either –
Broadcasting originally refers to throwing, or casting, handfuls of seeds onto prepared ground, typically used with grain crops, which, uh –
– the Agrucultural Revoution, which begain circa 10,000 BC in the Levant, was when humans began preserving seeds for replanting –
I’ve always found it funny that every native speaker of any language will always tell learners how awful their language is to learn so question time
Also if you reblog pls tag with your language and answer cause I’m really curious to see
Quick summary of the notes so far:
Schroedinger’s Catalan - globalist shill language or separatist menace?! 😱
the origin of the letter 🇦
(from the documentary The Odyssey of the Writing, 2020)
Documentary is called “The Secret History of Writing” done by BBC
this has always fascinated me. I first learned it about 25 years ago, and ever since, every time I see a capital letter A a tiny voice inside me goes “bull!”
Fun to see an actual scholarly version of this, because I first read it as explained (-ish) by one of Kipling’s “Just So Stories” a very, very long time ago…
Every single person studying a language when they recognize the most basic word of the language in a text or a video
Reminder that capitalism is the death of art
I had this at my first job at a translation agency (one of the big global ones). When I first started there, post-editing (editing a machine translation) was about... 40% of the translation work we did. By the time I left four years later, it was more like 95%. I worked in house so I was salaried and this didn't affect my pay, but we also had an enormous pool of freelancers who were being paid significantly less per word for post-editing jobs, even though they were frequently just as time-consuming as translation from scratch, cause you had to repair all the engine's mistakes, which any half-decent human translator would never have made. And yeah, sometimes it would take less time and effort to just re-translate a sentence from scratch yourself
On top of that it was just boring - one of the joys of translation is struggling for a while with a tricky phrase or sentence that doesn't quite translate into your target language, and then finally coming up with a clever solution that ticks all the boxes. If a machine has already done half of the job for you, you often miss out on that satisfaction
In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. Since we last saw them in our episode on the grammar of singular they, Kirby is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pensylvania, USA, where they’re doing fun new research about neopronouns (like xe/xer) and reflexive pronouns (like themself) and have two new cats (pic below!).
We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, like final -e in Spanish and Portuguese and using the -ende (-ing) form in German and Swedish, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language’s canonical pronouns, such as ey/em/eir and xe/xem/xer in English, iel in French (from il+elle), elle in Spanish (related to él/ella), Swedish borrowing a gender-neutral pronoun from Finnish, and fruit-related pronoun riffs in Vietnamese. Plus: experimenting with pronouns for fun and cats and if you know of more examples in more languages, you should send them to Kirby! Listen to this episode about neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
If you picked the second option, please please please tell me abt your conlang in the tags and if you have a conlanging tag please link it <3333
yes me it’s me i love conlanging
My current main conlang:
Oñ Fruwi, englang
https://conlang.fandom.com/wiki/Oñ_Fruwi
I was wondering last night if it was at all possible to translate sign language poetry into writing, when translating poetry from one spoken language to another that uses the same communication devices is already a headache. So I found a book about sign language poetry (by Rachel Sutton-Spence) and it is a delightful read! At one point the author describes a poem by Clayton Valli about a boat, in which the rising and falling pattern of the words he chose (which are located at different heights in the signing space) evokes the bobbing motion of a boat on the water as it approaches a bridge. And, okay, it will never be the same thing but you can tinker with written words to create similar effects, like how Victor Hugo’s poem The Djinns uses rising and falling line length to convey quietness then frantic action then a return to stillness.
Then the author analyses a Christmas ASL poem by Dorothy Miles and at first you’re like, this is translatable—she lists things children ask for Christmas, and includes signs like “pets” and “cake” which both involve touching the back of one hand with the other, creating a visual rhyme. The English translation pairs “pets” with “candy cigarettes” to preserve the rhyme. The author adds that symmetry in signed poetry is comparable to assonance: instead of signing ‘2 people walking’ with one hand the poet might sign ‘1 person walking’ with the right hand and ‘1 person walking’ with the left hand, for poetical effect. As English doesn’t have this opportunity for symmetry, you can translate the intent behind this deliberate, aesthetic symmetry as a rhyme. But then the author goes on to describe how Miles uses gentle, fluttering-open ‘5′ handshapes to convey a feeling of magic and excitement, and adds extra finger-wriggling or fluttering to some signs to make them ‘sparkle’, so the poem goes something like magic-shivers-up-arms, magic-run-downstairs, magic-feel-bumps-through-stocking and as a translator, how do you not ruin the specific charm of this poem?? You would have to draw actual sparkles around every verse to convey a similar effect.
I really love poetry for how great it is at making us aware of all the resources and hidden treasures of our own language, that we often overlook in everyday life, but I also love the other side of the coin, how poetry in translation gleefully makes us aware of all the cool things our language lacks.
Oh, oh, this reminds me of the only known bilingual palindrome:
Anger? ‘Tis safe never. Bar it! Use love.
Spell that backward and you get:
Evoles ut ira breve nefas sit; regna!
Which is Latin for:
Rise up, in order that your anger may be but a brief madness; control it!
Whenever I see stuff like this I wonder how people even come up with it.
