Some languages are lost due to colonization, its long tail still erasing native tongues across generations. Others disappear under authoritarian regimes that ban minority languages as a means of control. #RareTongues #ThatWordChat #Linguistics

The sound of "baby crying" in Finnish!
#language #linguistics #onomatopoeia #maps

A propos of a highly enthusiastic tumblr post I saw today, rejoicing in the appearance of a very large shark as a 'SHORK!', I'm struck by how diminutive ablaut in English seems to run counter to universalish tendencies of sound symbolism. [o] is not typically a diminutivizing vowel, yet:

borb
shork
smol

Ahir vaig estar tafanejant amb l'alfabet de les llengües amazigh* (es diu alfabet tifinagh) i no me direu que no és pura fantasia i que açò t'ho compra fins i tot Tolkien #rpg #rol #linguistics #worldbuilding

*because reasons**

**les reasons son que estava fent faena escoltant música de Tinariwen (+lO:l)

Now I need to learn to swear professionally!

@linguistics @linguisticsmemes @humour
#LinguisticMemes #Memes #Linguistics #Words #Humor #Humour
#Repost #From #Old #Account

The sound of "stuttering" in Chinese!
#language #linguistics #onomatopoeia #maps

This angle on how people talk to animals delights me

Quick question: Is there a specific English-language term for "the cousin of one's father"?

Your attention please. Verbing nouns and nouning verbs is common practice, but this should be extended. Your task for this week, class, is to verb a different adjective every day.

#linguistics musings
Some of the terms commonly used in Scottish politics appear to be #kennings

Red Tories = Labour party, the "red" part referring to the traditional labour/socialist colour in Europe, but the "Tories" reference implying that the colour of their rosettes is all that distinguishes them from the Conservative party.

Butcher's Apron = the union flag, referring to Great Britain's involvement in many massacres, including local genocides like the one in Glencoe.

One thing I am struggling with in my translations of 19th century German folk tale is how to translate the pronouns for a child of indeterminate gender.

In Germany, "Kind" is a "neutral" word, and the usual pronoun is "es" - the counterpart of the English "it". But I am not sure if "it" is the proper pronoun to use in this context.

So what is appropriate here? Note that I am talking about texts where there is _no_ other clue to the child's gender!

Yet another reason why #AI #MachineTranslation will never replace us #translation and #localization workers.

they can only dream of trying to get on our levels of slang

Hangul "is not the only [writing system that we know and can trace who exactly created it]. We know exactly who created the Cherokee and the Cree-Inuk syllabaries. There are also several new scripts in parts of Africa and elsewhere who’s creators are still alive among us, e.g., Herman ‘Mogri’ Mongrain Lookout for the Osage alphabet."
#TIL #alphabets #linguistics
https://xcancel.com/avzaagzonunaada/status/1907497588074672518
https://www.osagenation-nsn.gov/news-events/news/osage-nation-master-language-teacher-herman-mongrain-lookout-receives-k-state

Ha! This is interesting. What it's basically saying is that Malay lost the word for earthquake (which is still extant in other Austronesian language cousins eg Indonesian languages for example, like Javanese) that we had to re-import it from Sanskrit because we have so few of it

I bring you the most important paper ever contributed to the especially crackpot-prone field of Minoan studies. A paper that will defeat Reviewer 2 once and for all. A paper that I definitely didn't write based on ideas I had while direly ill with a flu.

academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/128559713/The_Utterly_Unhinged_Elamo_Minoan_Hypothesis_April_Fools_

clean direct pdf: https://0xabad1dea.github.io/bin/Utterly-Unhinged-Elamo-Minoan-Hypothesis.pdf

I entered the #ComputationalLinguistics field in 2018 by enrolling for a Bachelor's degree.

Since then, a lot has changed. Almost all the things we learned about, programmed in practice and did research on are now nearly irrelevant in our day-to-day.

Everything is #LLMs now. Every paper, every course, every student project.

And the newly enrolled students changed, too. They're no longer language nerds, they're #AI bros.

I miss #CompLing before ChatGPT.

Im Rahmen der Interviewreihe "Bausteine einer empirisch fundierten Sprachtheorie" am Marburger Sprachatlas habe ich Jürgen Erich Schmidt zusammen mit Stefan Rabanus Rede und Antwort gestanden und dabei über einige Grundannahmen meiner "Instruktionsgrammatik" gesprochen. (Dieses Jahr erscheint noch eine Einführung.)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h9bxayeKdtc&pp=0gcJCfcAhR29_xXO

In the ARC that I won, Proto by Laura Spinney: “Modern English-speakers can understand the Middle English of Shakespeare”

I hope they correct this before the final version. I’m just like whoa. Yikes. If they got that wrong… (he wrote in Early Modern English not Middle English!) #Reading #Books #Shakespeare #Linguistics

”Ryssiä”

This is a finnish slang verb for failing, to fuck it up.

It literally translates: ”to Russian it”
#folkwisdom #finnish #linguistics #russia