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language gremlin

@language-gremlin

| american | 21 | native english speaker | russian | german | spanish
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language-gremlin
cureklibatur

I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli

  • Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
  • Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
  • Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
  • Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly
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memory-thought

The span of human experience is so insane.

  1. why would you hide this in the tags
  2. i desperately want to learn hebrew right this very minute
language-gremlin
fruitviking
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fruitviking

Some internet language things I really like:

  • Phrases like “that’s certainly a thing”, “it’s so shaped”, or “one of the most animals” (is there a name for this?)
  • when people write with little to no punctuation like they are just so done
  • More specifically, asking questions without punctuation i.e. ‘what’ or ‘why’. It’s like, you want to know but also you are resigned to the answer?
  • When people capitalise The Thing for emphasis - particularly if they add a trademark symbol to really drive The Point™ home
  • How we use both bold and italic text for emphasis, but they convey it in different ways and I can’t quite explain how
  • Responding to things exclusively with punctuation, because sometimes words fail you and all you can say is !!!
language-gremlin
slagathorius-maximus
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slagathorius-maximus

there is something so cool about the prefix dis- in words. dispassionate. disillusioned. disuse. dis- doesnt just mean an absence, it means the essence of the word has been leeched out. your passion has been sucked dry. your blissful ignorance has been torn away. the object is forgotten somewhere knowing the joy of being loved and used and the shame of becoming unneeded even more so.

language-gremlin
i-the-ginger
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i-the-ginger

i love the linguistic trend of expressing something difficult to describe by just not including an adjective where there usually would be one. “i had a day today,” or “he’s definitely one of the characters of all time.”

it’s like i can’t describe this so i just won’t. you get it tho.

language-gremlin
daystarsearcher
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daystarsearcher

Current linguistics obsession: the difference in English between “few/little” and “a few/a little”

“He convinced few people” Negative connotation; he did not convince that many people.

“He convinced a few people” Neutral to positive connotation; he did manage to convince some people.

“They found a little food” “Neutral to positive connotation; it might not be a lot, but they did manage to find some food.

“They found little food” Negative connotation; that’s not going to be enough food.

language-gremlin
puddox
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puddox

EDIT: Since posting this I've discovered that David J Peterson has already posted this thread on his own tumblr account. That post will be linked here. I encourage you to reblog that post instead of this one https://dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/174184511352/awesome-childhood-spelling.

What I originally posted appears below, unedited.

I see the original post going around every so often and it saddens me a little that it's rarely accompanied by this thread explaining why it's completely understandable how a child would arrive at these spellings in accordance with english phonetics

language-gremlin
janmisali
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janmisali

(TERMINOLOGY NOTE: "productive" means it's regularly used to form new words, as opposed to nonproductive suffixes that generally only appear as part of a static set of established words)

language-gremlin
evilios
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evilios

In Russian, a very common form of showing adoration is calling someone “my sun” (“солнце моё”) or “my little sun” (“солнышко моё”). Calling someone “my little (sun)ray” (“лучик мой”) is acceptable, too.

language-gremlin
nordic-language-love
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nordic-language-love

i see a lot of people talking about how awesome it is that countries are singing in their own languages at esc and that there should be a year where everyone has to sing in their native language, and then they add “and the uk should have to pick a language from a different country” and i just want to take this opportunity to remind you that the uk does, in fact, have multiple indigenous languages that we would be able to choose from other than english: scots, scottish gaelic, welsh, irish, cornish and manx. most of them are vulnerable to some degree, and two of them (cornish and manx) have been revived from extinction as a first language. just imagine how awesome it would be to see a song in one of those languages.