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

one of things I noticed in the Netherlands and Belgium, is that menus often list bottled drink sizes as "25cl" or "50cl", and people usually say kwart liter and half liter

whereas in South Africa we always write "250ml" or "500ml" and we'd usually say twee(honderd) vyftig mil and vyfhonderd mil when speaking Afrikaans

now, it's perfectly obvious what all of those mean, like it's all the metric system. but it's precisely these small and subtle differences which I find fascinating ! and that's probably why I enjoy the Dutch language so very much. people always talk about how similar the languages are, and it's true. if communicating is your only goal then they're almost perfectly intelligible. the classic example is wandel[en] which in Dutch means "to walk", but in Afrikaans means "to take a leisurely stroll". if communicating is all you care about, that distinction is irrelevant. the person is going on foot. but — if you're into languages and linguistics or poetry, then that's a huge difference !! (this example might actually work better in Flemish than Hollandic ? but that just adds a whole extra layer of excitement to things)

I find that so much more interesting and rich than the super obvious differences, like how a "receipt" is bonnetje in Dutch and strokie in Afrikaans. or even the false friends like the word aardig, which means "friendly, nice" in Dutch, but "weird, unpleasant" in Afrikaans. because the subtle ones can slip by you unnoticed

in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other

scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.

scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device

scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk.

@brilliantyears

You think you’re tricking me? You’re the one being tricked.

The Handmaiden | 아가씨 (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook

So i was trying to make one of those aesthetic one word pictures....and idk why that's the first thing that came to mind

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includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb

if there’s a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!

(X)

@holdwine @evergrove is this accurate?? 🤣🤣

@niuniente

#fjsdfs #when i studied in denmark #they spent an entire class showing us simple words and how similar they were across danish #norwegian #etc. for the express purpose of ragging on how different the finnish word was #the teacher literally said ‘we can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb it’s finnish #also the delivery on this video is just delightful (via @destinyandcoins)

I find it hilarious that denmark has to stoop to ragging on the finns (instead of doing it for I guess shits and giggles like the others), because all the other nordic languages rag on them for sounding like they’re mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD

Oh! Oh! That’s because Finnish is from a different language family! The Uralic languages!

:D

Yup! The roots of the majority of European and many nearby languages is Indo-Eropean, which is the root of everything from English to Russian to Hindi to Persian and more!

Finnish however, as you said, has its roots in a different branch than Indo-European, the Uralic languages. There aren’t many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but there’s a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.

Read the whole article. 

I love explaining Brabants dialect to non natives

please explain Brabants to me, a non-native

So my favorite things to explain are:

- standard dutch doesn't allow pronoun drops. Brabant basically adds the pronouns to the verbs and can drop the pronouns, or leave them in the sentence! (For example: hedde = heb jij)

- the Brabants second Person singular pronouns are gij/ge instead of jij/je (with velar fricatives, not uvular fricatives!!) Some people also say gullie (for jullie) but I'm not sure how common that one is

- when you want to ask someone if they know something, in standard dutch you'd ask "weet jij (he)t", the Brabants version of this would be "witte gij 't" which, if said without context sounds exactly like "witte geit" (meaning 'white goat')

- for saying goodbye we say "houdoe", that's a telltale sign of a Brabander because other Dutch people bully us for it :((( just like the zachte g (soft g) which is honestly superior bc it's not as harsh :)

- we call everyone someone's person: ons mam/pap (instead of mijn moeder/vader), jullie mam/pap (instead of jou moeder/vader), menne mens (what women call their husbands)

- and my favorite thing: diminutives! You've heard of -je now get ready for -(s)ke. Meiske(meisje), huuske (huisje), panneke (pannetje), etc. Whether you add the s or not is still hard for me to understand (I wasn't directly raised w the dialect) but it makes everything sound much cuter imo. The belgians do the same which isn't surprising since they're right around the corner, but I like that it's a unique thing compared to standard Dutch :D

i hate languages

Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of English poetry, then matches its sounds to those that appear in the Chinese language. Those sounds produce their own, separate meaning. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no languages at all, with multiple meanings that can be read multiple ways.

[Image ID: A line that reads, “早上好” which is Simplified Chinse for  “good morning,” followed by a line of English text that reads, “good morning,” followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, “gũ dé mào níng.” Then a line of Chinese characters which is read phonically the same as the above pinyin (I couldn’t find the characters to include in the transcription, sorry), followed by a line of English text which is the translation of the above Chinese, reading, “Even alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.” End image ID.]

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Such a cute comic! <3

I like the implication that the Chinese have mastered every human language and are only confounded by the speech of the undead.

Marathi Word of the Day

11th August 2020

ओठ

[oṭh], noun (masculine), plural ओठ

lip

Origin: Prakrit ओठ्ठ [oṭṭha] or होठ्ठ [hoṭṭha], from Sanskrit ओष्ठ [oṣṭha].

So I’m just going to give a small reading list with links for languages in Africa, because apparently it’s “hard” to find introductory resources even if they’re niche. So:

• “The Languages and Linguistics of Africa” (2018); Güldemann ed.

• “Beyond ‘Khoisan’: Historical Relations in the Kalahari Basin” (2014); Güldemann & Fehn ed.

• “ The Bantu Languages (Second Edition)” (2019); Van de Velde, Bostoen, Nurse, & Philippson ed.

• “Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective” (2015); Grossman, Haspelmath, & Richter

• “Dotawo: Journal of Nubian Studies (vol. 1)” (2014); Jakobi, Ruffini, & van Gerven Oei ed.

• “Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes” (2016); Blackwood, Lanza, & Woldemariam ed.

• “Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages” (2011); Dimmendaal

• “Nilo-Saharan: Models and Descriptions” (2015); Mietzner & Storch ed.

Of course, this doesn’t cover the entire breadth (minus Güldemann 2018) and there does need to be a degree of critical reading that’ll surely lead you to a plethora of other paths and so forth—but I chose these mainly because of either their broad reach, or their familiarity. Like I said, they’re good starting points and just always remember Nilo-Saharan is not a valid phylum. Also, yes these are all works from the 2010’s but all of them do require again, critical reading! I cannot say that enough.

I could list for days the grammars I myself would recommend and am in possession of but if those are what you’re looking for, message me an ask or something and I’ll see what I got.