The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

What about fuckface?

Ignoring the joke (sorry), that IS a curious one because! Any of the compound words mentioned above would, if switched from exocentric to reg compound, have the boring-ass -er ending and the noun positions would trade places, right? I.e. thriftspender, pocketpicker etc. The meaning remains the same.

So fuckface would turn into Facefucker. Buuuut. That changes the meaning entirely! It implies that the target… let’s call him Wulfric, is a fucker of faces. However og Fuckface means Wulfric’s face is the face in need of a thorough fucking, and definitely on the receiving end. Poor (lucky?) Wulfric. So would that still make it a true exocentric compound noun? Since it doesn’t keep its meaning? SO FASCINATING!!!

As an aside, the German word for Fuckface is Backpfeifengesicht, meaning a face in need of a slapping. While less severe, it’s endlessly more delightful and pleasing to say.

Carry on.

Map of the World’s Writing Systems

by futuresponJ_

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

The closer a language is to yours, the easier it is to understand, the further it is from you, the harder it is to understand. But there's a sort of uncanny valley right in the middle that makes a language sound silly.

I'm an English speaker. German sounds similar, I can even find cognates sometimes. Mandarin Chinese sounds completely alien, but I can understand that it is a language.

But Dutch, Dutch sounds hilarious. Dutch sounds like a clown version of English. I wonder why that is.

I've heard Spanish speakers say similar things about Portuguese, which makes me think there's some sort of linguistic Silly Zone.

Y'all are already doing this but I am fascinated. Tag this with your native language, and what languages are in the Silly Zone for you.

Fun fact, “blond” is one of the few words in English that technically maintains its French-rooted gender-based spelling breakdown.

Blond = a male with blond hair

Blonde = a female with blonde hair

Blonds = more than one male blond or a mixed gender group of blonds

Blondes = and all-female group of blondes

Very few people follow this rule anymore. I doubt anyone but the worst pedant would dock you points for it if you got it wrong. But technically the rule is there. And I notice it. And try to get it right in my prose.

(Yes it applies to brunet vs brunette too)

(Now excuse me, I wrote “blond” so much that the word lost meaning to me. Blond. Blonde. Blondondondonnnddd…)

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

**UPDATE**

I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some

Please let me know any further suggestions

….holy shit. You found the holy grail.

….. is this a DIFFERENT person keeping gigabytes worth of language books on google drive? Holy crap.

This. This here. Is why I love Tumblr.❤️❤️❤️

Update from OP:

UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w

Holy shit. OP you are a wonderful human being.

O.O Linguistic Holy Grail…

— Noam Chomsky

it's mildly annoying when people compare emoji to hieroglyphs. like I get where the misconception comes from, but it's still a little bit frustrating to see

egyptian hieroglyphs were not a system of pictograms, and this becomes readily apparent from looking at any substantial amount of text. some specific concepts had one-character ideographs to represent them, but most things would be spelled out phonetically (but with a similar-ish semantic character next to it to imply the general category that the word you're spelling belongs to)

Couldja explain more? I know very little of hieroglyphics, and you seem knowledgeable.

sure.

so as an example, the ancient egyptian word for "cat" was written like this:

or, using unicode characters your device may or may not display correctly, "𓏇𓇋𓅱𓃠". this was pronounced something like /mi(ʀ)juw/, transliterated as mjw (the similarity to "mew" is not a coincidence.)

this word consists of a sequence of four characters. the first three represent the three consonant sounds in the word, with the first character covering the first two consonants together. then the fourth character is a cat, because this word means "cat".

so, together, this word is spelled something like my-y-w-[cat]. there's both a phonetic component and a semantic component. it's very cool!

It is cool! Does a similar concept apply to verbs or other parts of speech, or is this mostly for nouns? Was this a way to avoid homonyms causing confusion? Also, you mentioned that the first three represented consonants — do they not write vowel sounds?

(I know very little about Egyptian hieroglyphics, so forgive me if these are a silly questions)

Love chatting with coworkers from other provinces, it really puts some things into perspective

Like how having a language police to enforce the use of French in the province is a batshit idea

From an academic view of language policy (as in the studies done on this over time both here and abroad like in Luxembourg, German/French boarder towns, etc.) I understand the why of the rules per social policy trends and social acceptance/success rates. However as a linguist I love looking at everything QC does in language policy and laughing because I know what will/won’t work, and just how well it will/won’t work with a pretty small margin of error. It’s like laughing at L’Académie Française trying to ban the word hashtag or cool.

-hold on wait what is #pastagate

Oh man, pastagate is my fave oqlf fuckup because it made them look so stupid lmao

Basically, in 2013, they sent an Italian restaurant a warning notice (which is standard procedure when a business doesn't respect the law) for having Italian words such as antipasto, calamari and even pasta in their menu instead of the French equivalent

And it basically generated public and international outcry ("Quebec wants to ban the word pasta!" etc) and it ended with the head of the language police resigning partly because it was just such a ridiculous complaint and partly because it had also come out that the oqlf had been harassing business owners for years

After that they stopped being so strict with the language enforcement or so they say

Masterlist for learning languages

|

Requests / Asks:

-> you can find all my answered asks by searching for #ask, #ask response or #request

How to improve pronunciation

Salut! How would you recommend someone to improve their pronunciation in French if they don’t have access to a class/live in the country where French is spoken? I’m trying so hard but I struggle a lot with pronunciation but it’s so so important to me to be able to pronounce words properly and speak well because I love this language so much and it’s very important to me but I’m struggling a lot

You don’t have to live somewhere in particular or go to school to get any kind of skill. Practice and hard work will always be enough. Now :

Some resources :

Audiobook/ebook combo :

Hope this helps! x 

A Quick Guide on POVs and Tenses

First person perspective uses I/my and typically also accompanies present tense:

However, it can be used with any tense. It is the closest you can get to the character—it tends to have unfiltered access to their thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories, etc. and is the most intimate. It goes great for stories that want to stay ‘in the moment’ and rely on lots of internal dialogue.

2. Second person

Probably the least common—I’ve only ever seen it in fanfic and maybe a choose-your-own-adventure novel or two. This perspective uses you/your, and also tends to go with present tense.

                “You walk over to the stall and survey the goods.”

It’s a really unique way of telling a story that brings the reader the closest to the action—however, it doesn’t have a lot of room for character development as it relies on fitting anyone who is reading it, leaving the POV ‘character’ a shell to be filled by the reader rather than its own character.

3. Third person omniscient

Third person perspectives are outside of the character. Typically they are joined with past-tense. They use pronouns he/she/they/his/hers/theirs, etc.

'Omniscient' means this narrator has full access to the knowledge of the narrative, as well as all the characters in it. It is a bit of an uncommon perspective, as it means the narrator can and will easily “head-hop” which can be a difficult technique to do well.

                “He inhaled, staring icy daggers at Kate across from him. She knew instantly she had said the wrong thing, but had no idea how to take it back.”

                (Notice how we’re both in the male character’s head, as well as Kate’s.)

                This perspective keeps the readers at a distance, but allows them access to every character in the story. Beware, it can be difficult to build tension or keep secrets when using this perspective!

4. Third person limited/subjective

This perspective is probably the most common and my personal favourite. It has the same rules for third person, but instead of the narrator having full access to all the information, they only have access to the information the character they are following knows, or the thoughts/feelings they are having.

                “He inhaled, staring icy daggers at Kate across from him. She had said the wrong thing, and now just looked back at him with big eyes, her mouth agape as she hesitated on what to say next.”

                (Notice how in this example, Kate’s thoughts are only guessed at from our character’s POV. He doesn’t actually know what’s going on in her head, so neither does our narrator)

                Third person limited is probably the most popular because it is really effective at being a very invisible way of telling story. As well, it’s great for building tension, keeping secrets, and can explore unique character perspective and miscommunication.

Things are happening right now.

“I begin my walk to the store.”

“He says as he steps through the gate.”

“You follow a long path through the trees.”

2. Past tense

Things already happened.

“I began my walk to the store.”

“He said as he stepped through the gate.”

“You followed a long path through the trees.”

3. Future tense

Things will happen—things to come.

“I would begin my walk to the store.”

“He will say, stepping through the gate.”

“You will follow a long path through the trees.”

languages, like people, have been made into the objects of politicized aesthetics—not only is this about the dichotomy between "melodious", "soft", "musical" &c. and "harsh", "guttural", "rough" &c. as generalizations applied to entire languages (even language families), but also (and more importantly) the fact that these descriptions track non-linguistic attributes like racialization and class at least as often as they track phonology. please think about who, historically and presently, is most likely to have their language(s) described in one vs. the other way.

Common adverbs

Adverbs of time:

Adverbs of way:

Adverbs of quantity/intensity:

Adverbs of location:

Adverbs of affirmation:

Adverbs of negation:

Adverbs of doubt:

Please note : an -ent adjective becomes a -emment adverb (ardent : ardemment, indifférent : indifféremment) and a -ant adjective becomes a -amment adverb (brillant : brillamment, incessant : incessamment)…

really fun part about reading english poetry is finding words that are meant to rhyme but do not rhyme but actually they do rhyme bc the poet is writing in their accent and not yours. humbling and illuminating.

#fun fact: historical linguists analyze old poetry to see how pronunciation of words change over time!#e.g. if two words were used as rhymes in a poem hundreds of years ago but the poem doesn't rhyme today it indicates a pronunciation shift

One of my favorite examples of this is that 19th century poetry consistently rhymed the verb ending -ing with words ending in -in not words ending in -ing, for example, "pursuing" with "ruin", showing that the pronunciation now written -in' was in fact the prestige pronunciation, whereas today that's a stigmatized pronunciation!

Also, an interesting example in Japanese, although not rhyming but syllable count. The modern past tense ending -ta is derived from an earlier -taru, which in turn was derived from -te aru. We find poetry in the Late Old Japanese period which uses the -te aru spelling, but where pronouncing it that way would create a line with too many syllables (poetic forms in Japanese requiring specific numbers of syllables (or more precisely morae) per line), thus showing that they had already reduced -te aru to -taru while preserving the etymological spelling

The -ing one is especially weird

Because the original form (of this sense of the suffix -ing) in Old English was -ende, so a pronunciation like -in is arguably more conservative than -ing, and modern varieties with -in are likely retaining this rather than innovating from -ing

But that means we must have had -ende > -in, but then -ing became the norm (as evidenced by it's adoption in spelling), so if -in was also the prestige form at that point it must have switched back again, before switching back to -ing again again

See also the dialectical use of "aks" for normative "ask", where both ascian & axian are attested in Old English, and both seem to have been accepted and there's been a bit of see-saw-ing

My favorite is a pun from Hamlet where “onion” and “union” are supposed to be pronounced the same, but we don’t do that anymore.