@kelseythelinguist / kelseythelinguist.tumblr.com
The modern Greek case system is a grammatical system that highlights the function of a word in a sentence. In the case of Greek, the functions a noun can take are fairly simple:
Rosetta Stone was one of the first language tools I used. But that was over a decade ago.
Since learning German, I’ve used it for Greek, Hindi, and now Japanese.
In this review, I go over how to use the software, how it can help your learning, the main modules, and when it’s worth the money.
im looking forward to studying Modern Greek language and culture at university, and simply love your blog. i have fallen in love with this mysterious beauty! which parts of Greek culture, whether it be literature, art, history, schools of thought, anything at all, would you recommend me to look at in further depth? something less talked about, or more niche perhaps? much love x
Ohhh wishing you the best in your future studies! Hoping you will have a great time!
Some recs of things I personally enjoy from the Modern Greek culture, they are subjective, I have mentioned most before, so I am technically playing the broken record again!
If you don’t speak Greek yet, some of the recs are more niche than others and you will probably have to wait to be somewhat fluent in Greek before you can explore them properly. But music, art, philosophy… you can start with these. As for the history, you can also start, but make sure to also read Greek historiography once you know Greek better because… well.
Realizing now i spelled piece wrong. there is no hope for me...
Anyways hello. Marathi time . There will be no complaints .
April 21, 2023: After the sound defeat of language calling for felony charges against librarians and educators in SB 12 and SB 380 earlier in April, the Indiana legislature is once more considering criminalizing librarians and educators for the materials on their shelves.
Here's the Indiana Capital Chronicle on the situation:
The legislators themselves don't know yet what bill the language will be slipped into, but we expect they'll hear it next week, possibly as early as Monday, April 24.
They're moving fast, so if you live in Indiana and feel strongly about libraries and censorship, please call your reps and senators NOW. Even if you already contacted them earlier this session!
Here's how to find and contact your legislators: https://iga.in.gov/legislative/find-legislators/
Here are some talking points and the general gist of our concerns:
And here's our own webpage where you can catch up on the situation and stay updated: https://www.lcplin.org/billupdates
Please do not contact the Indiana legislature about this! Instead, you can just hit that reblog button and help us reach as many people as possible.
Thank you, everyone, for your continued support of libraries and librarians!!
literally: to be at the end of one's Latin
to be at one's wit's end
Chadic Languages You Haven’t Heard Of — 13 Miyazya, 2015 EC
It’s Eid today! Eid Mubarak! This is everyone’s collective Eidi from me.
I’m only doing this once. Absolutely only once. Every time I start a new sub-series of “Afroasiatic Languages You Haven’t Heard Of” my goal is to get as many languages in a branch done as possible—if I did this for Chadic I would have to post every day for 6 months to get that kind of result in a timely fashion. Of course this is because most Afroasiatic languages are Chadic languages. Not Semitic, or Cushitic, but Chadic. The branch with over 200 or so languages spread across a corner of West-Central Africa typically not associated with Afroasiatic given the inherent quasi-racial status many of us assign to this languages due to the most accessible languages being always associated with the SWANA area. But no, really the story of Afroasiatic is the story of Chadic at least so as far as individual histories are concerned. There is much more to reconstruct with Chadic than there is anywhere else, and for that it’s best to start not with a sibling of Hausa but instead a language only distantly related to it—Wandala.
What is the language known as to linguists and to the speakers?
This is actually pretty interesting of a topic because while the proper name of the language is [w-á wándàlà] which literally translates to ‘mouth of Wandala’—and just all around this is how they identify as a whole. The name of their language and synonymous with being ethnically Wandala as well as demonstrated by their own endonym for a single person of their ethnic and speech community is [ùr wándàlà] but this is not the name the language historically was known to linguists by. This is the language that provides the “Mandara” name to the Biu-Mandara branch of Central Chadic and this is easy to misconstrue with the name of the mountains, which ultimately could come the exonym of the Wandala people. It’s actually not a stretch to see how one can go from [wàndàlà] to /mændæɹə/ in English given that all you need is perhaps a perception error of the [w] and [l]; perhaps in rapid speech this could happen especially since there’s tone involved and the colonial authorities who administrated this area (the British and the French) aren’t well known for pronouncing endonyms correctly and this follows over into academic exonyms that become mainstays over time. So all and all, this is pretty straightforward. There’s not much to say because there’s that single mistake and the speakers self identify as Wandala.
Where does the language fall in Chadic taxonomically?
I… this is going to be rough. So all thing considered Chadic is a massive branch of Afroasiatic. It is the biggest branch of Afroasiatic, and makes up the majority of Afroasiatic. The branch that Wandala belongs to, Biu-Mandara, is larger than the Amazigh and Cushitic branches combined so as far as known languages. Nested within this group is the so-called Mandara group which is named after Wandala, which luckily is defined in terms of its phonological innovations in Gravina (2014):
So for those who cannot read standard sound change notation, the sigma (σ) represents a syllable boundary indicating this change is not word final, in this case it is word medial. The hashtags # represent word boundaries, meaning that Wandala changed Proto-Mandara *m to [w] both word initially and word finally. And of course the latter two are fairly straight forward, with the Proto-Mandara velar fricatives merging with [h] and [w] respectively. While to most people reading this who aren’t into historical linguistics this doesn’t really matter, but to those who like to know about sound changes and taxonomy this is hugely important to have because it means that there’s a framework under which Biu-Mandara is understood and sound changes that are recognized at various levels of reconstruction. Chadic is debatably one of the most poorly studied parts of Afroasiatic so it’s huge to be able to point at Wandala be able to point at its ancestral form, and understand how it relates to the other Biu-Mandara groups such as the Margi and Mofu groups which have other identifiable sound changes that set them apart from the other languages such as *n > r / _#. The issue here is that from a wider perspective which some sound changes that characterize the the Biu-Manadara and Masa branches as their own thing apart from East and West Chadic, forming a Central branch, it’s hard to tell at present moment how the whole situation pans out overall. Chadic by no means is a lost cause of a branch, there’s a very good overview in The Afroasiatic Languages (2012) which was even consulted for this post but when it comes to understanding exactly where Wandala fits in the scheme of things, it’s hard to make precise judgements especially when you have disagreements if Biu-Mandara and Masa are actually the same branch and where Chadic even fits in Afroasiatic. For all we know ultimately Wandala could be more closely related to Somali in terms of divergence in time and space than it is to say Biblical Hebrew. So to incorporate ideas I’ve mentioned on here before regarding Chadic’s wider relationships while also giving a simple overview of what goes on regarding Wandala outside of suggestion, here’s the taxonomy:
Distinctive innovations both grammatical and phonological
Here goes my favorite part of these posts because the grammar always gives something interesting to talk about and by all means Wandala delivers on this front. Now for weeks if not months I’ve been going on about been conjugation this and verb conjugation that—this is not how Wandala verbal morphology works. In Wandala the verb itself is not marked for tense via conjugation but instead the tone marker on the subject pronoun that proceeds the verb and the tone marker on the verb determine the tense of the verb:
The future tense differs in that it primarily is expressed via the auxiliary verb [də́] ‘go’—this lack of a future tense that functions like the other tenses is similar to something I said about the Omo-Tana languages in Lowland East Cushitic, in which many languages outright don’t have a future tense and instead a progressive aspect is used in its place. This deviation from normal conjugation in Afroasiatic is also carried over into how aspect is expressed in Wandala—for instance the perfective is expressed via the root form of the verb i.e the unmodified form, placed before the pronominal object. The imperfective conversely only marked with the suffix /-a/ before the pronominal object. Transitivity also plays a roll in the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood) system of the language which is widely distinct from what is seen in say Cushitic or Semitic. But of course these are wildly simplified explanations of how these portions of the verbal morphology work; the grammar is over 600+ pages long and there’s multiple chapters on the TAM system. Chadic, like Cushitic, makes a distinction between object and subject pronouns—this is characteristic of Afroasiatic’s plausibly original marked-nominative alignment with there being a nominative and oblique distinction in the independent pronouns. This is where conjugation might come back into play because in the perfective you can have suffixed pronouns but they are on the surface relatively distinct from those found elsewhere in Afroasiatic on first glance. Such as /-ítàrè/ for the third person plural, which undergoes the aforementioned *n > [r] change mentioned for Mandara languages. This means the older variation of this suffix was perhaps *tVnV. Likewise the same applies to the second person suffix /-kùrè/. I don’t have data available at the moment for the related languages, so I’m not able to fully suggest vowel qualities at this time but it’s interesting how in a sense Wandala has a vestige of a “k-perfect” which is something I primarily only mention in the context of Semitic. But moving onto the phonology let’s look at the phonemic inventory:
This is indeed an odd inventory for an Afroasiatic language if you’ve only ever seen the handful of languages everyone talks about. Wandala is a fairly typical Chadic language having alveolar affricates and prenasalized stops, alongside the only non-pulmonic consonants being implosives. Wandala only has 3 phonemic vowels, but anyone familiar with Chadic has probably heard of its cousin Moloko having a single vowel—but I’ll be honest there’s an analysis out there where Wandala has no phonemic vowels just as is suggested for Proto-Central. No, I’m serious, some vowel qualities are almost impossible to demonstrate a phonemic contrast for and instead easy to find environments for, but this isn’t uncommon for Chadic. West Chadic itself is suggested to only have 3-vowels at its higher order of reconstruction and Wandala is an exceptional case of a complex-yet-simple vocalic system particularly when it lacks vocalic length as a phonemic feature (like most Chadic languages).
What is the current sociolinguistic situation of the language?
I have yet to see any report stating that Wandala is in any risk of going out of usage, and to be fair the speech community is both fairly rural and fairly vigorous in their usage of their language. It also helps that part of being Wandala is to speak like a Wandala, and the interplay between language and identity strongly suggests that evidence of language shift is rather weak. As suggest in the grammar of the language in the early-to-mid 2010s there was no more than 25,000 speakers of the language at the time which isn’t exactly small for a Chadic language in this area. Most Chadic languages are small and tightly clustered into small geographic areas, unlike Wandala which has a stretch going between northeasternmost Nigeria and northernmost Cameroon. In Moore (2009) it’s mentioned that Wandala is a common second language in the area anyways, implying that the Wandala community might have more linguistic and social clout than neighboring communities, which is good for Wandala but perhaps not smaller languages that are spoken in single villages assuming the speakers don’t have the same association between identity and language. That’s where this part of Africa gets complicated because rates of multilingualism are rather high and defining what is a “threatened language” becomes substantially more complicated than one would assume. David Crystal even mentions this in his magnum opus, ‘Language Death’.
the different relationships maghrebi authors who write in french have with the french language is something that's so interesting to contemplate, the different political convictions and material conditions that lead writers of the revolutionary era like Kateb Yacine or the newer wave of lgbt authors like Abdellah Taïa to the french language.
politically, for Kateb, writing in french meant putting into praxis the belief that french, tool of opression, has been retaken and conquered in bloody revolutionary struggle and combat. Taïa describes it somewhat differently, that writing in french as someone from a very poor moroccan background meant dressing your thoughts in a language not meant for ppl like you, almost like a form a linguistic drag, it reminds me of the part in Paris is Burning that talks about "emulating the great white american way of living". in that regard a moroccan novel in french has something of a self-sewn pseudo Saint Laurent ballgown.
and then there are of course the material conditions, Taïa's novels dealing so explicitly with homosexuality probably couldn't be published that way in arabic in Morocco so writing them in french is not 100% a free choice but somewhat of a prerequisite to get them published at all. then having them translated into arabic is different, translation allows for a certain level of distance, you can say well you see, this is a french novel translated into arabic, one wouldn't have to agree with its contents to read it. it allows you a greater level of ambiguity when the writing is part of a literary tradition in a language that carries prestige and cultural elements that are frowned upon at the same time. so where a translation into arabic would be fully in line with Taïa's reasoning for writing in french, the same might not be true for Kateb.
so from there it would be interesting to trace these relationships to the writers who came after, given how both are great figureheads of literary and cultural streams, the ones taking inspiration from Kateb Yacine, the ones taking inspiration from Abdellah Taïa, and see how their usage of french delineates
The Lingít language is really cool because (among other reasons) it has glottalized nasal consonants!
random Greek thought but do foreigners know we call "cereal" Demetriaka?? (Δημητριακά)
I hadn't made the connection 😯 I was wondering if they knew we (also) had it
Requested by @okaylinguist | Part 1/2
This does not cover every possible way of expressing sounds, as regional varieties are very diverse, this is just a general guide based on my experiences with my family's language.
There are 4 core vowels in Navajo:
These vowels can be modified in three different ways: lengthening, shifting to a high tone, and/or nasalization.
Lengthening is indicated with double letters (aa, ee, ii, oo). The core sound listed in IPA above is maintained for all lengthened/double vowels except for ii, which turns to [i] instead of [ɪ].
A high tone is indicated with an upper accent mark (á, é, í, ó). When applied to a long vowel, it can either affect the whole lengthened sound (áá), or show a rising (aá) or falling (áa) tone.
Nasalization is indicated with a "hook" under the vowel (ą, ę, į, ǫ). Some nasal vowels are not written with the hook (for instance, after the letter 'n' typically). Nasal markings can be combined with the high tone mark (ą́, ę́, į́, ǫ́), and obviously also can apply to lengthened vowels. Though unlike the high tones, which can be over the first letter but not the second and vice versa, nasalization always affects the whole lengthened sequence
The 4 main diphthongs are:
Similar to the simple vowels, they can also be modified.
When lengthening them, typically the second letter is what is repeated (aii, eii, aoo) however for oi, I mostly only ever see ooi written. Another semi-irregular one is aai - some people I know pronounce it as long [aɪ], while others separate the long aa from the i sound more so. This is a case where the regional variety plays a greater role in my experience, as well as some words just preferring one to the other on a case by case basis, so I recommend just following what your teachers/resources tell you.
Some people include subtle little "pauses" in their long vowels - not fully stopping and separating it into two vowels, but having a little dip in their tone, as if bridging a gap between the two vowels, especially if it is in the high tone register.
As someone who is interested in and is learning Bengali, and as someone who enjoys linguistics, I love digging into dialects. Also I love languages that are diglossias, for some reason. 😅
I’m this article, I detail some of the main dialects (some of which are controversial as speakers may consider their language separate), and some common differences between them and the standard.
I’m not a native speaker though, so if there are any mistakes, do let me know. 😅
this comic brought to you by my bachelors degree in linguistics
Hesitations and filler words—what linguists sometimes call disfluencies—actually serve an important purpose: they can help signal to the listener that the topic being talked about is a new piece of information that they should pay attention to.
In the English-speaking world, generally, very little is known about Chinese Philosophy and its rich history. The average person probably has heard of the Tao te Ching/Dao de Jing, but maybe they associate it with Winnie the Pooh. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that Confucius was merely some mystic quoted on fortune cookies. And yet, one of the most popular courses at Harvard University, one that promises to change student lives forever, is Chinese Philosophy.
In this article, we’ll summarize some of the leading figures in Chinese intellectual history, key classical texts, offer some philosophy-specific vocab, and list additional resources for in-depth study.
Curious about linguistics but not sure where you can learn more? The Linguistics Starter Pack is for you! This is a curated list of my top recommendations for getting started in linguistics. Most of the items on this list are popular science books, aimed at a general audience, and written in a non-technical way. I’ve also included a few highly accessible introductory textbooks if you’re looking for something more structured instead.
Note: The links on this page are Amazon affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from any book you buy through these links (at no additional cost to you).
If there’s one book on this list you should read to introduce yourself to linguistics, it’s this one. Consisting of short, bite-sized chapters each focused on a different myth, this book dispels some of the most common misconceptions about language and linguistics. The book is almost a quarter-century old, but remains one of the best places to start learning about linguistics.
A collection of tiny essays answering some of the most common questions about language and linguistics. This book is a more up-to-date take on Language myths (see above), except the style is more FAQ than myth-busting. This third edition is sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America because of the great impact that the first two editions had on educating the broader public about linguistics.
Hands down the best introductory linguistics textbook on the market. Extremely easy to read, and covers a variety of topics not typically included in other introductory linguistics textbooks. It also includes a number of language profiles, illustrating the rich diversity of languages in the world. The chapters are written mostly by the linguistics faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one of the top linguistics departments in the world. Proceeds from the book help fund fieldwork with endangered languages.
How does language influence the way we think and see the world? This book is a brilliant journey into the relationship between language and thought, covering everything from how color terms shape our perception of those colors to how grammatical gender shapes the way we categorize people and things in a surprisingly captivating writing style.
A long-overdue introduction to language and the mind for a general audience, this book explains how humans bring to bear a huge array of cognitive skills to make language possible, debunking the idea that language is an instinct and that we all possess a Universal Grammar. Written by the foremost scholar on cognitive linguistics, this book is perhaps one of the most important popular science books published this century. Think of this book like a non-technical introduction to cognitive linguistics.
This book showcases the incredible diversity of ways that Indigenous languages work, and highlights just how much of this diversity and indigenous knowledge is being lost as more and more languages stop being spoken. The book covers topics like Indigenous ways of telling time, spatial orientation, and number systems, while serving as a poignant introduction to linguistic diversity and language endangerment.
An enthralling introduction to how languages change over time, and how languages develop their incredible grammatical complexity, evolving from rudimentary utterances like “man throw spear” to the beautifully intricate Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ‘you are one of those whom we couldn’t turn into a town dweller’. This is the second book on this list by author Guy Deutscher (see Through the language glass, above), and for good reason, because his writing style makes his books impossible to put down. Think of this book like a non-technical introduction to historical linguistics.
A history of the world told not by tracing the development of civilizations and empires, but by following the growth of the world’s major languages. Ostler weaves together a fascinating narrative that gives a fresh perspective on history. This book is a must-read for any history buff.
Weaves together the latest research in archaeology, anthropology, neurology, and linguistics to tell the story of how language evolved.
Want to get your hands dirty with some actual problem sets in linguistics? This is the book for you. Half textbook, half workbook, Language files is one of the most widely-adopted textbooks for introductory linguistics courses, packed with problem sets illustrating each concept in the book.
If you’re interested in learning about specific languages and language families, this is the book for you. It introduces the field of linguistics by taking you on a tour of the world’s languages. This is one of the most unique textbooks in linguistics, and a lot of fun to read.
A survey of the incredibly diverse ways that languages work. This is the most technical / advanced book on the list, but is the ultimate guide to the grammars of the world’s languages. This is a great reference to keep on hand when reading other books and articles about linguistics.
