Specifically, to “swash a buckler” referred to the act of pounding a buckler (small shield) against one’s own chest as a sort of macho display.
ok, this is amazing. I found a great site with short stories in 34 languages!
"WorldStories is a growing collection of stories from around the world. The collection includes retold traditional tales and new short stories in the languages most spoken by UK children.
We are adding new stories, translations, pictures and sound recordings every week. So keep coming back to enjoy new content!"
The thought of having to navigate this is very stressful to me
going to school in Japan as an undercover cop and having my cover blown within seconds
Colores Latine Colours in Latin
The two glauci there aren’t a mistake.
If you don't use Wiktionary regularly, maybe you are missing something. Something that is free and very helpful. Wiktionary, an online multilingual dictionary created and maintained by Wikimedia, is one of the tools I use literally every day. I consult Wiktionary for both my language learning and teaching tasks. It has become irreplaceable to me because the information it contains is so much more than just words and their translation! In this article, I’ll show you how to use Wiktionary to learn more than just new words.
“It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it? The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society. This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.”
—
Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”.
(via lingrix)
this is so lynchian
you simpletons. this is pure euro excellence
How Finns say ‘minä’ in different dialects around Finland
Quick fun fact I learned in ASL class:
Babies can begin signing as early as a few months old. You don’t have to wait until they’re 9-12 months to start communicating verbally; the parts of the brain that process and use language develop before a baby is able to speak intelligibly with their mouth. Teaching your kid sign language early means that they can communicate effectively months ahead of schedule, when compared to peers that only speak a spoken language.
Additional fun fact: this jumpstart in language is thought to be a possible way to avoid the “Terrible Twos”; that phase of a toddler’s life is thought to be largely due to a toddler being unable to effectively communicate their needs. If a two year old has already been speaking for a year and a half, they’re far more able to communicate to you what’s wrong. Heck, they might also start reading earlier; languages with a fingerspelling component, like ASL, mean that any speaker needs to be able to spell unfamiliar words and ask about them. This can jumpstart a toddler’s ability to recognize letters as components of a word, and teach them to spell, read, and eventually write these letters to communicate.
Which, of course, lends absolutely zero credence to the theory that ASL will inherently stunt someone’s spoken language skills. If anything, sign language fluency makes acquiring any language, spoken or not, easier rather than harder.
NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh
They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.
So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:
“I” → “thou”
“Me” → “thee”
“My” → “thy”
“Mine” → “thine”
Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.
We could first imagine it in the first person-
“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.
And then replace it-
“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”
This is perfect and the only thing missing is that when “thy” comes before a vowel it’s replaced by “thine”, i.e. “thy nose” but “thine eyes.” English used to do this with my and mine too (and still does with a and an).
The second person singular verb ending is -(e)st. In the present tense, it works more or less like the third person singular ending, -s:
- I sleep in the attic. Thou sleepest in the attic. He sleeps in the attic.
- I love pickles. Thou lovest pickles. He loves pickles.
- I go to school. Thou goest to school. He goes to school.
The -(e)st ending is only added to one word in a compound verb. This is where a lot of people make mistakes:
- I will believe it when I see it. Thou wilt believe it when thou seest it. He will believe it when he sees it.
NOT
- *thou willst believest it! NOPE! This is wrong
If you’re not sure, try saying it in the third person and replacing the -(e)st with -s:
- *He will believes it when he sees it. ALSO NOPE!
In general, if there’s one auxiliary, it takes the -(e)st ending) and the main verb does not. If there are multiple auxiliaries, only one of them takes -(e)st:
- I could eat a horse. Thou couldst eat a horse. He could eat a horse.
- I should go. Thou shouldst go. He should go.
- I would have gone. Thou wouldst have gone. He wouldst have gone.
You can reduce the full -est ending to -st in poetry, if you need to drop a syllable:
- thou sleepst, thou lov'st.
In some common words–mostly auxiliary verbs, or what you might have learned as “helping verbs”–the ending is always reduced:
- I can swim. Thou canst swim. He can swim.
Sometimes this reduction takes the last consonant of the stem with it:
- I have a cow. Thou hast a cow. He has a cow.
Or reduces the -st down to -t:
- I must believe her. Thou must believe her. He must believe her.
- I shall not kill. Thou shalt not kill. He shall not kill.
However! UNLIKE the third-person singular -s, the second person -(e)st is ALSO added to PAST TENSE words, either to the past stem in strong (irregular) verbs or AFTER THE -ed in weak (regular) verbs:
- I gave her the horse. Thou gavest her the horse. He gave her the horse.
- I made a pie. Thou mad’st a pie. He made a pie.
- I wanted to go. Thou wantedst to go. He wanted to go.
This is different from the third person!
- *He gaves her the horse. He mades a pie. He wanteds to go. SO MUCH NOPE!
It’s not wrong to add -(e)st to a long Latinate verb in the past tense, but it’s unusual; it’s much more common to use a helping verb instead:
- I delivered the letter. (Great!)
- Thou deliveredst the letter. (Not wrong, but weird)
- He delivered the letter. (Great!)
- I did deliver the letter. (Normal if emphatic, or an answer to a question; otherwise, a little weird.)
- Thou didst deliver the letter. (Great!)
And a couple last things:
1.) Third-person -(e)th is mostly equivalent to and interchangeable with third-person -s:
- I have a cow. Thou hast a cow. He hath a cow.
- I love her. Thou lovest her. He loveth her.
- I do not understand. Thou dost not understand. He doth not understand.
HOWEVER! Third-person -(e)th, unlike -s but like -(e)st, can, sometimes, go on STRONG past-tense verbs:
- I gave her the cow. Thou gavest her the cow. He gaveth her the cow.
This never happens with weak verbs:
- *He lovedeth her. NOPE NOPE NOPE!
And even with strong verbs, from Early Modern (e.g., Shakespearean) English onward, it’s quite rare. But you will see it from time to time.
2.) In contemporary Modern English, we invert the order of subjects and auxiliary verbs in questions:
- Will I die? I will die.
- Has she eaten? She has eaten.
If there’s no auxiliary, we add one–do–and invert that:
- Do you hear the people sing? You (do) hear the people sing.
In Early Modern English, this process was optional, and mostly used for emphasis; all verbs could be and were moved to the front of the sentence in questions:
- Hear ye the people sing? (Or singen, if we’re early enough to still be inflecting infinitives.)
Do-support was also optional for negatives:
- I don’t like him. I like him not.
- Thou dost not care. Thou carest not.
- She does not love thee. She loves thee not.
3.) Imperative verbs never take endings:
- Hear ye, hear ye!
- Go thou and do likewise!
- Give me thy hand. Take thou this sword.
4.) Singular ‘you’–that is, calling a singular person by a plural pronoun–arose as a politeness marker; and ‘thou’ fell out of use because it eventually came to be seen as impolite in almost all contexts. In general, once singular ‘you’ comes into use, it is used for addressing
- people of higher social status than the speaker
- or of equivalent status, if both speakers are high-status
- strangers
- anyone the speaker wants to flatter
‘Thou’ is used for
- people of lower social status than the speaker
- family and intimate friends
- children
- anyone the speaker wants to insult
It is safer to ‘you’ someone who doesn’t necessarily warrant ‘you’ than to ‘thou’ someone who does.
5.) And finally, that ‘ye’? That’s the nominative form of you–the one that’s equivalent to ‘I’ or ‘we.’
- I → thou → he/she/it → we → ye → they
- Me → thee → him/her/it → us → you → them
- My → thy → his/her/its → our → your → their
- Mine → thine → his/hers/its → ours → yours → theirs
Any time you’re using ‘thou’ for the singular, the second person plural– ‘y’all’– declines like this:
- ye: Ye are all a bunch of weirdos.
- you: And I love you very much.
- your: This has been your grammar lesson.
- yours: This grammar lesson is yours.
i know hearing people on this website love to pass around those posts with links to free sign language lessons but you know you need to actually put effort into learning about Deaf culture, too, right?
resources for other Deaf cultures include, but are not limited to:
- Black Deaf Culture Through the Lens of History (BASL and ASL-centric)
- Understanding Deaf Culture by Paddy Ladd (which can also be found on archive.org)
- Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities
- the British Deaf Association website
- directory for Deaf Australia’s “Our Deaf Ways” video podcast (presented in Auslan with audio from an interpreter and accurate closed captioning for all episodes)
- The Irish Deaf Community by Patrick A. Matthews
- Breaking the Silence: The Education of the Deaf in Ireland, 1816-1996
- the Canadian Deaf Culture Center website
- History of Hawai'i Sign Language and Hawai'i Deaf People by Barbara Earth, with Linda Lambrecht
- ‘We did it ourselves’: The Deaf Social Movement and the Quest for the Legal Recognition of the Libras Sign Language in Brazil
Hey man, whatever lorems your ipsum
You get me.