#lingfishtics

[kingofthewilderwest]

Hi! I found your account through your old Shipping Names and Linguistics post, and I was wondering, do you know of any actual sources talking about the construction of ship names in English fandoms that might back up your observations? I am actually currently in my way-too-young cocky linguistics grad student stage of life and thinking of looking into something similar regarding Japanese ship naming. So, I figured it would be good to have a solid base in English fandom conventions to compare it with if possible.

Obviously that post was quite a while ago, so no big deal if you never really delved into it further. Thank you regardless!

Hey there and thanks for popping in!!! Now I'm curious about Japanese ship naming, and I think that's a fun adventure you've got! I wish you the best luck with your exploration. XD

From your message, it sounds like you read my pinned note or the note in the comments. For others coming into the conversation, this is my note:

I was trying to hedge my words in that comment, but also give a clear warning. I'll be more direct here, hah, and hope no one minds. The fact that the shipping names and linguistics post had a reblog renaissance in 2024 has been a bane. 😅 A small bane, but oh noooooOoOoOo.

I mean, it's good people are interested in linguistics, and I had fun writing that post at the time. Maybe that post did more good than I think it has. ^^ But one of the biggest issues tumblr has with linguistics is that Most Of The Information On Tumblr About Linguistics Is Sorta Wrong (TM), and it's galled me, oh it's galled me, oh it's galled me bad that I could've contributed to that. Ahahaha. I tried to be accurate in those old posts, but as above mentioned, I went waaaaaay beyond things I knew, and a first year PhD student is not anywhere as informed as they'd like you to think. (NO SHADE ON YOU. JUST SHADE ON MYSELF. JUST SHADE ON MYSELF!!!)

I haven't read that post since I wrote it, and I haven't braved myself to, because I don't know if I'll be begrudgingly impressed with myself, or cringing so hard I pop out of my skin. I've suspected it may be the latter, so I just wrote my friendly warning, prayed no one would dig up my other old linguistics posts, and fled into the night. XD

The short and the long of it is that I do not really want that post circulating nor for me to be intellectually connected with it today. I'm not going to delete or private it because I have more control if I still have access to it as OP, but I've sorta disowned it. Ahahaha. I ended up with a career in linguistics and am working in the industry, but I left education after my first year of PhD due to personal and health reasons, and have not been in linguistics academia since. This means I have not been around any sources you could ask for, and you're more likely than me to come across them. Best of luck in your hunt for information. ^^ I hope you run into some fascinating ideas.

I hope these responses come out as humorous rather than disappointing to anyone reading. I am grateful you stopped by! And now I'll have to learn about the Japanese side of ship names. Because I love Japanese and I love fandom shenanigans and that's, when I'm not making drastic claims on tumblr, still very fun stuff!!!

Enjoy your academic rabbit holes, enjoy your grad school years, enjoy linguistics, and enjoy all else you get your paws on!

[kingofthewilderwest]

highly guilty. endless guilt.

@ Conlangers out there

who among the hordes of tumblr has developed their own conlang?

[kingofthewilderwest]

Hello! U say ur a linguist in ur bio-- me too! Could you tell me about what u do? I love hearing about what other linguists are doing hehe >:)

God this reads like a bot message im just trying not to be a creep lmfao

Oh hey, fellow linguist! Nice to meet you. ^.^

You know, I got two degrees in linguistics, did a limited amount of doctoral work in linguistics, and have been employed in linguistics-related fields since 2012 for things like improving search engine results or improving corpora resources and annotating along the morphosyntactic interphase and whatnot, but I'll admit that, truly, I don't feel like I hold any authority. I'm a nobody who remembers little more than what I touched in school, and never expanded my horizons beyond that. So when I meet another linguist, I sorta panic, duck my head, be like, "You do all the talking, you're the real deal, I'm not," and skedaddle. XD What am I doing? N-n-n-nothing. You see nothing. You don't see me heeeere, I'm inviiiiisiibbbbleeeee.

A lot of this panic derives from my ten-year-old linguistics posts which, to my horror, still get reblogged to this day on the internet. I get asks on them still! AAAAH! So I'm afraid to say anything re:linguistics for fear it'll again turn into my bane bwahahaha! The bravest I get is to salt to friends in DMs being like, "Yet again, a viral post on language is Inaccurate As Fuck and everyone's getting hyped over Nonsense That Makes My Skin Crawl." I let people know that's my profession juuust enough so that when I privately tell folks, "That axolotl post is steaming bull," "That fourth-person pronoun post about the word chat is bull," etc. they'll believe me.

This is an awful non-answer, and I apologize for non-answering. But maybe it's best for my sanity to let my work be my work and hide the details from tumblr henceforth. XD You're not a creep at all, and I love the friendliness. I'm sorry for being a little scaredy spider scampering off. XD Best of luck with your linguistics endeavors and career, present and henceforth! May the vowels be with you!

[kingofthewilderwest]

I saw your post about #tag linguistics and it was fascinating! I was wondering if you knew any online resources/references describing the phonotactics of different languages for a mostly inexpert audience? When I poke around with my meager googling I tend to only turn up English, but I'd be really curious to see the basic rules laid out for comparison among a few different languages!

Oi! Hey there! ^.^ Hope you're doing well and thanks for the kind words!

Unfortunately I've been out of the academic loop since 2016 and I only remember a handful of resources, most of which aren't inexpert audience friendly(?).

The resource that pops to mind, regardless, is WALS Online - The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. It's a cross-linguistic feature comparison tool. It allows you to generate and investigate global maps based upon a single linguistic feature or multiple features simultaneously. I think it's a cool shortcut because it checks plausibility (for people who might not know interrelatability) on whether a language might have a combination of features. It helps visualize patterns across languages, language families, and regions.

For instance, since we're talking phonotactics, here's the map for syllable structure. Problem is WALS pulls no punches on jargon, and most of the sources it cites are, like, grammars you'd only find in print on a campus library.

On WALS, each language has a page where its features are listed. To learn the details of how the feature manifests, you'd have to use other sources. But WALS at least provides the relevant starting point of individual languages to investigate. Wikipedia ain't... always accurate or comprehensive, of course, in something like linguistics... but it's an easy way to start poking once you know the names of languages you want to snoop at.

You could try your luck with the currently-defunct World Phonotactics Website on the Wayback Machine, though that's not one I know much about, and there is the whole, uh, defunct thing going for it.

I'm sorry I can't be more help!

Nice stopping in, and thanks for the kind words of that viral post. Funny (if typically tumblr) story about that. I posted it eight years ago intentionally at an off hour of night in hopes it'd get two notes and fade into obscurity. That's why it has nicher fandom-specific references; it wasn't anticipated to escape containment, just be a convo between two friends. Yeah oops bwahaha. Gosh I was so energized at the time. Anymore I don't think it holds up remotely, factually, from any academic standing, and the inaccuracies make me twitch, but I doubt most people notice, and I hope it gives people the fun and excitement about linguistics I was feeling. ^.^ Linguistics is so cool!! And I s'pose it's been cool that one of my most-spread posts is nerdy. Oh, alas, science side of tumblr, I was amongst y'all once.

[kingofthewilderwest]

“You can tell someone is from X USA state if they say...”

[insert linguistic phenomenon that half of North America uses]

[kingofthewilderwest]

There is something beautiful about teaching teenagers about phonetics

Just, having a room of student go "AAAAA! AAAAA!" is just very cathartic, because sometimes you just gotta yell!!

I remember when I got to phonetics as an adult in college, there were lots of folks nervous about making noises in class. But you gotta sound it out!!! Be bold, have fun, it's the only way you're gonna learn it. Having a room full of students yell woulda been a blast.

I would walk around campus, making noises to myself all day long, as I worked out pronouncing non-English phonemes I wasn't familiar with, trying to get them down.

If I ever returned to academia and finished that damn PhD, I would try to instigate this screech session. ;)

[kingofthewilderwest]

I don’t have any degree in linguistics just an interest in internet language and fandom terminology - I saw your post on the 7 principles of ship names - for the 6th one something jumped out at me- it’s a joke that the ‘top’ of the ship goes first - especially for mlm and wlw ships- y’know how people have ended up making whole character archetypes out of this And that’s it’s own set of problems - i mainly am in anime fandoms and it definitely fits there. I’ve never sent one of these so nerves tm

Oh wow, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing your experience with anime fandoms and ship names! I appreciate it so much and your message was a wonderful addition to my day. I hope you’re fine with me responding to this, even while I see that you’ve been nervous after the fact about sending the message (between this message and the second message you sent me that I won’t publish publicly <3). I know it can be scary to message someone and, as a big introvert myself, sometimes I question my judgment after I’ve sent a message to someone I’ve never talked to before (or even sometimes people I’ve talked to before!). I think you’re awesome for sending your thoughts and think it’s cool. :) <3 <3

I am not in many anime fandoms so it was cool to hear more information about ship names for fandoms I have less contact with. You might not have a degree in linguistics, but no one needs a degree to have valid, interesting experience and knowledge I don’t--valuable things to share. <3 I hadn’t heard that top joke in my social circles before and I was wildly excited to hear it from you. It was cool to see whether or not my post about ship names could be applied to those other fandom areas I’m less familiar with, too. Wow!! Thank you!!! Linguistically, I think it’s cool and fascinating that my observations about other fandom circles ended up meshing with your experiences, too.

You do have a point, too, in that sometimes fandom archetypes or linguistic structures underlie problem-some things. “And that’s it’s own set of problems.” Yeah. Good call. My post focused on objective observations of what exists in language rather than discussing any moral implications or odd characterization choices. But it’s definitely true that language and values can get intertwined, whether for good or ill!

Thanks so much again for sending these observations! I always love learning. Seriously, you rock. I realize you’ve had some anxiety sending this, but I hope with this response, you can feel better and have a wonderful day, too, friend!

[kingofthewilderwest]

1. You have to tell the world now, my friend >:) but also: 7, opinion on a controversial linguistics issue, and 15.

unusual asks

1. who’s your celebrity crush?

For the love of... [laughter] Of course. Of course. I KNEW that the second *YOU SPECIFICALLY* saw this ask set, you would send me this prompt.

Celebrity crush? Earl Scruggs! One can do worse than the best banjo picker in the history of recorded music, right? ;) Especially when he was a freaktastically wonderful human, too.

We’ll just ignore that he was born around the same time as my great-grandfather.

7. Opinion on a controversial linguistics issue.

Uff-dah. XD Which issue do I pick? Ummm.... the over-reliance on Chomskyan linguistics in some academic circles is to the huge detriment of linguistic study. Noam Chomsky with his position on things like universal grammar is not the best approach. His ideas (that we all are hard-wired with an internalized innate grammar) have not stood the test of scientific research and is too extreme on one end for nature vs nurture factors. For the sake of not turning this post into a long discussion (I don’t want to turn this into a discussion at all bwahahahahaha), I’ll leave it at that! XD

15. what’s a question you constantly get asked?

On tumblr? “Do you think rtte is canon?” Answer: Yes. Feel free to check out my FAQ tag and see my consistent rants about how canon =/= consistency. XD It’s like. The number one hill I will die on on tumblr: the only distinction that matters in material being accepted by someone in the fanbase is whether or not something is published from an official source. Everything else is an obnoxious debate missing the point of why and how consumer fiction is made in the first place. I want to stuff that discussion in a rocket and launch it to a distant, uninhabited planet to be forgotten about forever. XD Haha, with all love guys, I’m so sick of that discussion. <3 <3 <3 It’s become a pet peeve.

Irl? The usual linguist’s nemesis: “How many languages do you speak?” Answer: I know my field of research isn’t as well-understood by the public, so let me explain! Linguistics is the scientific study of languages. It is not the pursuit of speaking as many languages as we can. Just as you wouldn’t ask a heart doctor how many hearts they have, asking a linguist how many languages they have is technically irrelevant to the heart of what we do.

That said, because linguists like languages (there’s a reason we study ’em!), we often do choose to learn how to speak several languages. And it’s very valuable to know several languages to better study languages.

I personally am only fluent in English. But I am borderline conversational in Spanish (great reading/writing, shitty speaking/listening). Also, I have learned bits of Khmer and Koine Greek, and am teaching myself Japanese.

[kingofthewilderwest]

Okay. Please. For once. Could a fictional character who's a "linguist" not be written as just some fucking polyglot translator? I know fiction isn't going to get everything right and I don't expect it to, but you don't even have Basic Fundamental Linguist Fact #1 Right. A linguist *might* know several languages because they like languages, but that is NOT at ALLLLL what makes anyone, academically, a linguist. A kidney doctor is not someone who has twelve kidneys. An academic linguist is not someone who speaks twelve languages. Aughhh.

[kingofthewilderwest]

Social media post comparing different languages’ words:

Indo-European language 1: says word Closely related IE language 2: says very similar word Closely related IE language 3: says very similar word Closely related IE language 4: says very similar word Language which borrowed IE term: says very similar word Unrelated language from different (but still IE) branch: DIFFERENT WORD

Social media post’s conclusion: LOL THAT LANGUAGE IS SO WILD AND WEIRD

[kingofthewilderwest]

Hi. I have a friend who I haven’t spoken to in a while, but last I heard was experimenting with pronouns and gender identity. He told me his pronouns were he/his/them, which was fine, until he got annoyed I said they/him. Did I completely disrespect them with this assumption? How common is it for someone to prefer pronouns based on what part of the sentence it’s in? Sorry if I come off as rude; it’s not my intent and I’ve been wondering this for a while now. Thank you.

Hey there! It sounds like you’re a friend who wants to get it right, and to understand what your friend’s pronouns are. I think that sounds respectful and caring rather than rude. :) 

I admit I haven’t heard before about one individual choosing differently gendered pronouns based upon grammatical role. Anecdotally, that means I would assume it’s not common, but I don’t want to make conclusions based upon my experiences alone. I know I don’t know everything that’s happened grammatically with English pronoun usage and the queer community. How he identifies is how he identifies, and that’s valid.

I can relate, in my own different way. I go entirely by he/his/him on tumblr and discord and stuff, but in the broader world, I go by he/his/him in informal situations and she/her/hers for formal situations. In other languages, formality is more grammatically encoded, so one could argue I’m vaguely in the same boat as them. I would technically be grammaticizing formality in English through my gender pronouns.

If I understand you right, what happened between the two of you was a miscommunication about his pronouns - it sounds like he specifically wanted the object pronoun to be “them,” while you interpreted his pronouns request to be any mixed combination between masculine he/his/him and singular they/their/them. While mistakes inadvertently hurt someone, honest miscommunication isn’t disrespect because you were trying your best to get it right, and you simply misunderstood. Misunderstandings happen to all of us. Your intent sounds pure. A desire to get it right comes from a heart of respect. It would be disrespect if you didn’t make the effort to get it right, told them it was too challenging or something, gave up, or ignored his feelings for getting it wrong.

If others have more information to add, I’d always be happy for someone to reblog and add to this post, and help me learn more, myself.

I hope you have a good one, and take care!

[kingofthewilderwest]

A friend of mine: Oh yeah I'm majoring in linguistics. Me, pretending as though all the knowledge I have of linguistics isn't from a single tumblr blog (yours): oh yeah I love words! they're so funky!

Ahhhhhhasd;hfaorijg;aoij but I’m glad you got some exposure to linguistics, even if just through my blog! Like honestly, that’s more than many people I’ve met! And I’m flattered and touched that you’ve spent the time reading some of my posts and reblogs on the topic. <3

[kingofthewilderwest]

IF YOU DON'T USE "LINGFISHTICS" AS YOUR LINGUISTICS TAG I WILL PERSONALLY COME TO YOUR APARTMENT AND HOLD YOU HOSTAGE YOU WITH YOUR OWN VOLTRON ACTION FIGURE ***I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP***

WHOAAAA HI THERE TABI O.O

1. I AM TERRIFIED BY THIS THREAT, LISTEN TO ME SCREAM (hahaha I love you)

2. THAT IS THE BEST PUN EVER AND I AM IN LOVE YOU ARE A MIRACLE

Ngl I’ve always felt shy and awkward using #linguistics as my tag (as I’ve done in the past). It’s too... vague? Generic? On occasion, inaccurate? Making a special tag is a really good idea. And there is no way to improve upon something as clever as lingfishtics. I mean, holy thor, I think I’m going to do that. That is such a great idea. YOU HAVE SUCH GOOD IDEAS. OH MY GOSH.