voiceless alveolar lateral fricative

I remember seeing many maaaany years ago like within my first years of Tumblr, a handy post/chart for learning the differences between shared (and unshared) symbols used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and so I wanted to throw something together quick to help people learn the differences between languages using the Arabic script– they’re not all Arabic!! These are just some of the more common ones you see online.

Many many languages use a modified Arabic script, and I couldn’t possibly detail each and every one, so here are links to some info about others as well! Including:

This is also just a basic list of all languages current using a modified Arabic script in one way or another

WHOA

this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to translate on the fly 😭 monoglots just don’t understand and think you’re bad at the source language 😟

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!

@copperbadge

Whenever I see stuff like this I wonder how people even come up with it. 

i’m so glad you people are out there being clever so i don’t have to be

Kory Stamper has a snappy post up at Harmless Drudgery about lexicography and “real” words. Excerpt: 

Perhaps the simplest way to sum this up is: “X is not a real word” is almost always a logical fallacy. Unless we’re talking about literal keysmash (asljfalkfslf is not a real word, but no one really bothers to go about declaring this), what confers real-word-hood is simply people using something as a word, not a dictionary or lexicographer or linguist. 

In Irish, “December” is “Mí na Nollag” which is literally “The Month of Christmas” so I feel completely culturally justified in treating today like the beginning of one long holiday, honestly.

In scottish gaelic its ‘an Dubhlachd’ which effectively means the blackness and i feel like this is one of the fundamental differences between irish and scottish gaelic.

In traditional Irish folktales, the elves only understand/respect Gaelic: the English language revolts them, so don’t expect to be winning any of those famous riddle contests or song tournaments in English. I’ve idly considered making one of those memes where it’s like [THE IRISH] *brofist* [THE JEWS] and the point of agreement is “our language is magic,” but the joke would take too much explaining to be funny. A lot of Irish Gaelic is structured around speech and the power of language. There isn’t, for example, a word for “yes” or “no.” In order to answer a direct yes/no question, you have to use a form of the verb that was used to ask the question. So basically, if the question is–say–”did you murder your wife” then there is no way to simply say “Yes, Your Honor” or “No, Your Honor.” Your minimum required effort involves using the verb that was invoked in the question: “I murdered,” or “I didn’t murder.” Of course you can just as easily, in just as few syllables and maybe fewer, change the verb. “I was framed,” maybe. Which is to say that the most basic speech acts in Irish involve constructing a narrative, assenting to others’ narratives or challenging them, and most crucially elaborating on the narratives that have already been established. 

(I chose murder just to be a colorful example, but actually I need to go back to my language reference books and check because I bet this interacts interestingly with the tendency in Irish for the narrator never to be the subject of her own story. You’re always the object, in Irish: you can’t drop a plate, for instance, the plate drops itself at you. You’re not thirsty but a powerful thirst is on you. You didn’t murder that woman but she very well might have gotten murdered in your general vicinity.) You see this lots of other places in the language too. For instance there’s also no word for “hello” or “goodbye.” If you want to greet somebody your required minimum is to cough up a formulaic blessing: Dia duit, God be with you. Here’s the thing. The second person can’t just be like “yup, uh huh. dia duit.” No. The stakes have been raised. The second person’s required minimum answer is now Dia’s muire duit, God and Mary be with you. If a third person joins they have to invoke St. Patrick on top of the two already mentioned. I’m not kidding. At four people you do hit a limit where you’re allowed to just say “God be with all here,” but in the very traditional country pubs it’s an insult to cross the threshold without saying at least that to cover everyone inside. Actually worse than an insult; basically a curse. That’s the burden you bear when you start speaking a magic language.

jp sign gag from the beginning of book 5 that I’m tling now because I’m inordinately amused by it for some reason~

‘rouka wa shizuka ni arukimashou!’ (”Please walk quietly in the halls!”) -> ‘rouka wa kani aruki shimashou!’ (”Please do the crabwalk in the halls!”)

PSA: no name is impossible to pronounce. no name is too hard to learn, no name is justifiably butchered. kids with 'different' names should be taught again and again that being called by their name is a right, not a privilege

there are over 2000 unique phonemes (individual sounds) in the world’s languages, and each language has anywhere from around 20 to 60. you stop learning new phonemes it’s theorized at around age 12. this is where accents come from -- using your own language’s/region’s phonemes to speak

so no name is impossible to pronounce world-wide, but it is very easy to not have the linguistic archive necessary to pronounce a given name entirely correctly. it is a simple case of physically not knowing where to place your tongue, whether or not to vibrate your vocal chords, etc. the only one of the dictators of sound you could be shown is how to position your lips

that being said... obviously you should still try. saying a name as correctly as you physically can goes a long way for making someone feel respected and humanized, and dismissing a name entirely as too hard goes a long way to disrespect and dehumanize people. just also accept that someone’s accent interfering with their pronunciation isn’t a sign of lack of trying, but a sign of physical limits

This is very true. I met a baby at my old store whose name was Navajo. I did my best and actually got a bit frustrated because there was a syllable I could NOT get, and her dad was like “it’s very hard if you don’t actually speak Diné, but thank you. Most people won’t even try.”

Be the one who tries.

I’ve got most of Dine to a decent approximation, but the glottal stops continue to elude me, which is a bit of a problem if you want to say, for example, “Thank you”‘. That said, I’ve never met a Navajo who wasn’t delighted to hear me try (once they figured out what the hell this crazy bilagaana was trying to say.) It’s really easy to try.  Try.

not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)

AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:

this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.

babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!

I do believe Roman Jakobson pointed that out almost a century ago. 

To mess things up, add the word(s) for milk and (female) breast to the list. We’re mammals after all. 

tHIS WAS THE ONE TIME STAR TREK GOT PSYCHOLOGY RIGHT, actually!!!

Humans are biologically programmed that during the acquisition of language if something is pointed at and a word is said, we assume that word is a NOUN. Every human in every culture and every language does this. But there’s nothing to say in an alien language their biology would be the same. That word could just as easily be an adjective or a verb or the objects location in space or a million other things.

Good job Star Trek. Just this once, you managed to not piss off every psych student to watch your shows.

In linguistics, this is known as the gavagai problem: 

Parent rolls a red ball in front of an infant, and says a word. Is that word:

The answer tells you some essential things about the language–which details are considered most important, how they perceive the world, and so on.

An alien language might say any of those. Or it might say “floor” - look, kiddo, perceive the foundation on which things happen. Or it might say “grab” - here’s something you can grasp in your hands. Or it might say, “one” - there is one object here. Or something else.

Language families are important for this. Related languages will tend to use the same types of words in the same types of situations: in English, Spanish, and French, it’s most likely the parent is saying something that means “ball.” In Apache, it’s likely to be “rolling.”* 

We don’t know any nonhuman language families. We don’t know what they consider to be the core elements of communication.

See also: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

* Suzette Haden Elgin’s Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense books mention this. I don’t remember which one(s).

@deadcatwithaflamethrower - linguistics!

Further point - this nouniness isn’t even a universal; one example that comes to mind is Caddoan, where many apparently nominal expressions are verbs, meaning that the ball example above may in fact literally be best translated as “it is rolling”.

It’s pretty well known that many English words meaning “bad” or “evil” ultimately trace back to the English-speaking world’s obsession with social class. “Villain”, for example, was originally just another word for peasant, and even the word “mean” simply meant “commonplace” before it picked up its connotations of brutishness and nastiness by association with, well, commoners.

Today, however, I learned one that maybe isn’t so well-known: apparently, the word “lewd” originally meant “not a priest”.

Like… I can see how you’d get from that original meaning to the one we have today, from an etymological standpoint, but it still raises several questions!

Ling & Lang Bingo sets — how to play:

Multiplayer version:

Each player gets a randomly selected piece of popular journalism dealing with language(s), linguistics, or linguists. Taking turns, you could read one paragraph each, everyone crossing off what they think they detected in the presented passages. The first one to complete a row (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) shouts “Bingo!” and wins.

Note: Of course one should rearrange the table cells, otherwise there’d be multiple winners. (Do some actual copying and pasting if necessary.)

Solitaire version:

Grab yourself a news article on ling & lang or listen to anyone from outside linguistics talk about ling & lang. Make sure you only yell “Bingo!” if that doesn’t get you expelled from a lecture.

Pro tip:

If you want to make the game a little bit harder, do the same with scholarly articles.

Someone in facebook also posted this too

Omg

Mediglyphics

This shit’s infuriating

Oh, this is a type of shorthand!

There are 3 main types, but from my research, this looks to be American Gregg Shorthand.

As you can see, there are set symbols for every letter.

Let’s break one of the words down:

Using the Gregg Alphabet as reference, we can see most of the letters in “atrophied” are present. But why no “o” vowel, and why is “ph” written as “f”?

Simple. In shorthand, you cut out all vowels in a word when writing it down, with the exception of words that BEGIN or END with a vowel (hence the “a” at the start being present), or like in the “i” in “atrophied”, to make it more readable when the sound could be harder to distinguish if it isn’t written. In “atrophied” if the the “i” isn’t written, it could be hard to tell if the writer meant a “fud”, “fad”, “fod” or “fid” sound, for example.

Also, since Shorthand is a phonetic writing system, you are encouraged to write down the phonetic sounds of words rather than the actual letter blends - in this case, write an “f” instead of a “ph”.

So in actuality, these aren’t just meaningless scribbles - it’s Gregg Shorthand, a writing system developed to take down notes more quickly than when written out in full, which is very useful in a medical or journalistic environment.

Some people can even write over 100 words in a minute! And, it’s been in use since John Robert Gregg invented it in 1888! Wow! So old!

Isn’t language amazing~?

no language should be mocked other than french

Birds is “oiseaux” in French.

No letter is pronunced the way it should.

And there are seven of them.

ITS PRONOUNCED “WAZO” AND YES, I WILL DIE MAD ABOUT IT

oiseaux hits every vowel in the french alphabet and manages to only be pronounced with 2 goddamn syllables

got vowels coming out the oiseaux

Phonemian Rhap-phony, A linguistics version of Bohemian Rhapsody

Collaboratively written on twitter: 

Interesting statistics on frequencies of the char depending on a language and position in a word. Source and some comments.

Non-broken link for source and also the original just-English version.

Some re-sorting would probably improve the presentation, e.g. don’t order letters by their alphabetic order but by their average overall popularity, & maybe separate vowels from consonants.

A few other observations:

– Graphs with stable distance counting from the beginning (instead of the weird histogram-as-line-graph approach used here) could be a good way to also display differences in word length across languages.

– Given the source corpus, I guess a lot of the low-frequency graphs such as ‹k w› in Romance langs are dominated mainly by proper names.

– The voiceless peripheral consonants ‹f k p q› seem to group together as strongly initial-biased (this is, I believe, a general cross-linguistic statistical universal). I suspect so would ‹h› if digraphs like ‹th› were filtered out. Interestingly though so does ‹w›, even though the voiced peripherals ‹b g m v› in general are not very initial-biased. I guess this reflects something like a tendency for medial /w/ to be vocalized/lost at least in Germanic.

wait WHAT

Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter? 

Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.

I love etymology!!!!!

The word “blog” is another example. It’s a rebracket and subsequent shortening of “web log.”

Another good one is alcoholic (comes from “alcohol” and the suffic “ic” but has been rebracketed such that the suffix “holic” is used to indicate affinity for other things - chocoholic, etc).