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Bilabial Fricative

@bilabialfricative / bilabialfricative.tumblr.com

MA in linguistics. You probably don't know as much about language as you think you do. Quintus canem pulsavit
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When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

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bophtelophti

This is delightful! I checked the OED, and it appears that this is not the correct etymology of grapple; the OED doesn't support this etymology of sniffle but some other dictionaries do; and quite a few of these words are only tentatively attributed to this suffix, with etymologies along the lines of "origin unknown, but perhaps...".

But in any event, this is definitely a real suffix, and involved in the etymology of at least some of those words! And I'm sure Tumblr will be delighted to know about another word, not listed above, that also contains the same suffix: twinkle.

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its really funny that they call westerosi the common tongue when obviously high valyrian should be the lingua franca. free cities folk speaking westerosi okay i can handle that. but anyone east of them? literally why would you bother. westeros is a cultural backwater...

*confused headtilt* It's the Common Tongue of Westeros, not of Essos. As said from the very first mention of it:

They had no common language. Dothraki was incomprehensible to her, and the khal knew only a few words of the bastard Valyrian of the Free Cities, and none at all of the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms. —⁠AGOT, Daenerys II

And repeated in many other mentions, for example:

"You speak the Common Tongue well, Arstan. Are you of Westeros?" —⁠ACOK, Daenerys V

The Common Tongue is called that because it is what is spoken commonly in Westeros; it's mostly an evolution of the original Andal language, probably with a few minor elements of the First Men's Old Tongue (and Rhoynish in Dorne).

And Free Cities people don't speak the Common Tongue. They speak "bastard Valyrian", the ASOIAF equivalent of Vulgar Latin. (Each city's variant dialect is well on its way to becoming its own language, like the Romance languages developed, but they're not quite there yet.) Sam and Tyrion both have to use their High Valyrian (learned from a maester, typical for highborn, as in our world noble children were taught Latin) to communicate, which they do so badly, though enough to be mostly understood. Arya spends months learning the Braavosi Valyrian dialect, but even though she learns it fluently (and eventually starts learning the dialects of Lys and Pentos too), her character as Cat of the Canals is still a Westerosi because of her "barbaric accent".

And they certainly don't speak the Common Tongue further east? In Slaver's Bay they mostly speak in a "mongrel" dialect mixing Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian. Very, very few people speak the Common Tongue -- for example it's notable that Mirri Maz Duur does, and only because she was taught by Archmaester Marwyn when they were both in Asshai. The few that speak it are usually traders who often travel to Westeros, or trained translators like Missandei, or some mercenaries (as they might get hired in Westeros).

But there is a lingua franca in ASOIAF that serves as a way for people from different native languages to communicate. It's called the "trade talk" or "trade tongue", and it's a pidgin, "the language of the wharves and docks and sailor's taverns, a coarse jumble of words and phrases from a dozen languages, accompanied by hand signs and gestures, most of them insulting." Maybe it too will evolve into its own true language one day, but it probably won't sound that much like the Common Tongue.

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Welsh is an official language of Wales. This means, legally, it cannot be treated less favourably than English in any part of daily life. So we have bilingual signs and sometimes the translations are… well just awful.

This is a classic and made the news.

Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.

Welsh reads “Wines and ghosts

Welsh reads “Warning workers are exploding

In English these drinks are alcohol free in Welsh the drinks are free “Alcohol for nothing”.

Um- Welsh reads “Free erections” yes really!

This seems a tad harsh “Injure yourself now

Wording is fine but the English and the Welsh disagree on right/left

The sign says “Parcio I Bobi Anabl” which is “Parking to bake the disabled” which I don’t think Tesco were going for.

@margridarnauds​

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womble1

Oh god! I literally lost 20 minutes of my life trying to explain this to a Londoner. No we can’t just let some random person translate our stuff! Welsh is complex, Welsh is regional, and by god if you get it wrong you will make an absolute tit of yourself!

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eirabach

The return of Free Erections! A great week in the Cambrian News.

*snort*

This post made my day

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bougonia

kind of interesting how the boop feature makes tumblr feel so much more active? like idk usually you see people reblogging stuff but you never know if that's a queue and you forget that there are real people behind the blogs. but if ur getting booped? somebody saw you and acknowledged your existence. wild.

the boops are like a pure instantiation of phatic expression and I'm really excited to have a new one!

In linguistics, a phatic expression (English: /ˈfætɪk/, FAT-ik) is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. In other words, phatic expressions have mostly socio-pragmatic rather than semantic functions. They can be observed in everyday conversational exchanges,[1] as in, for instance, exchanges of social pleasantries that do not seek or offer information of intrinsic value but rather signal willingness to observe conventional local expectations for politeness.[2]
Phatic communion at first appears to break Grice's conversational maxims, because it denotationally appears to give information that is unnecessary, untrue, or irrelevant. However, phatic communion plays an important role in language and has important connotational meanings that do not break these maxims[6] and needs to be understood as an important part of language in its role in establishing, maintaining, and managing bonds of sociality between participants,[7] as well as creating feelings of solidarity and familiarity, and putting participants at ease.[8]

to be clear, things like the "like" button are also phatic but the boops are phatic in a different way and I just think that's!!! cool!!!

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I like the expression new-fangled. I don't know what it means for something to be fangled, but I sure as hell know it was recent

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maniculum

It’s from the Old English word feng, which can mean “to take”, or also “to grasp, hold, or embrace”. So something that’s newfangled is something that was taken up recently.

The reason it’s using this pretty archaic root is that it’s an older word than a lot of people think. Here it is in the Canterbury Tales.

Minutes after posting: "Why did I write archaic when I could have gone with old-fangled?"

Reblog to fangle this post

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yvanspijk

Cockroach stems from Spanish cucaracha. When cucaracha was borrowed, it was opaque to English speakers. Trying to rationalise it, they associated it with the familiar words cock and roach and changed its pronunciation. This type of change is called folk etymology. Here are more examples.

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Also shout-out to the Swedes for just borrowing the French "adieu" into their vocabulary and just spelling it "adjö"

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legov7

German has borrowed the italian "Ciau", spelling it "Tschau" and only using it as a goodby instead of also a greeting.

I had completely forgotten about this, this is fantastic.

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erlanmizu

If you enjoyed "ciao" becoming "tschau", you'll definitely want to hear where "tschüss" (German, also meaning "goodbye") comes from!

Borrowed from German Low German tschüß from earlier adjüs, from Dutch adjuus, back-formation from adjuusjes, from French adieu.

We can't let the French keep getting away with this

I mean the french very much aren't getting away with it. Everyone else is taking their language and running off with it cackling with glee. We're all getting away with fucking up french words on purpose

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aokozaki

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

Is almost like cool factor is culturally dependent or something

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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.

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lolotehe

Three languages enter, one language leaves.

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marnanel

Latin scala also gave us the Welsh ysgol, with the same meaning of “ladder”. But another meaning of ysgol is a school, which comes from Latin scola.

They look like they should be related (climbing up through grades etc) but they’re not.

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