alanguageaday

[alanguageaday]

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

[alanguageaday]

Is there a scientific theory about how the diversity of languages evolved? Or are linguists just like, "language is weird, we tried our best but we can't really splain it good?"

I'm kind of baffled by the question, to be honest. On the one hand, the world's languages are all quite similar, in that they use a sign system to encode meaning, and, beyond that, they all seem to have hit on nouns and verbs. If you've got that, surely the rest of the variation isn't that wild. But also it doesn't require much theory...? Like language change is observable in real time. Everyone experiences it by observing subtle variations in the speech of those who are younger than them—and in different regions. Multiply that by many generations and many different places and pretty soon you rather naturally end up with a lot of diversity.

In short, linguists have been able to explain this pretty well for a long, long time, but it was rather low-hanging fruit, I'd say.

[alanguageaday]

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I'm posting it here for all to enjoy

[alanguageaday]

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?

[alanguageaday]

it really hurts me to see so many gazans asking us for help, though that's through no fault of their own. they've been forced to use a social media site that they're probably not familiar with (because tumblr has kind of faded out of popular consciousness), to interact with us in a second language, to distinguish themselves from the scammers who are taking advantage of genocide, and to ask strangers for help. i don't think there are any cultures where it's easy to ask for help like this, but i'm intimately familiar with how humiliating it can be in arab culture. please be kind, gracious and helpful to the gazans in your inbox. this is a desperate time for them, and in addition to the physical danger inflicted by "israel", the prices of basic resources in gaza are extremely high due to scarcity, and those that manage to escape to egypt are financially exploited by landlords there and have an extremely difficult time finding work due to their unofficial status as refugees. these families will continue to need our help and i hope we can all continue to provide it to the best of our ability.

[alanguageaday]

you know what? accents are actually lovely. like you can learn all the languages in the world and you still have a part of your own with you. that’s cute

[alanguageaday]

Naja.

[alanguageaday]

i wonder what it says about romanians that we have an expression that's the polar opposite of "enjoy your meal". "sta-ți-ar în gât" literally means "may it sit in your throat" or "choke on it". and i think that's beautiful

[alanguageaday]

I'm gonna reblog with some videos of people speaking various American Indian/indigenous American languages, because I think most people don't even know what they sound like. Not to be judgement of that—just, you know, I think people who want to be informed should know what they sound like!

[alanguageaday]

Gotta start treating english like monolinguistic english speakers treat other languages

Did you know English doesn't have a word for the Irish word 'mar'? Instead they have to say 'is the cause' of or 'because' for short

[alanguageaday]

“fish don’t even know theyre wet” and? you don’t even know youre luft (air equivalent of wet)

[alanguageaday]

I was about to make a post about like… how my family has this lemon tree out front, and one of the funniest things about having a lemon tree is occasionally I’ll be out in front doing whatever and I’ll see someone walking past and quickly grab a lemon off the tree and stuff it in their pockets as quick as they can like they’re shoplifting. 

I was about to make a post about how that’s funny and how, y’know people can have our lemons, it’s not a big deal because the tree pumps them out like gangbusters, but I really can’t make that post without thinking of… them…

[alanguageaday]

Reblog this if you had to learn cursive writing as a child

If you were ever told or were made to learn cursive writing when you were in grade school. I wanna see how many of you suffered like I did.

[alanguageaday]

Level 1: I didn't assume that these two words with similar spellings and related meanings share a common origin because I don't think about things like that.

Level 2: I'm completely certain these two words with similar spellings and related meanings share a common origin because it's fucking obvious just from looking at them, you absolute simpleton.

Level 3: I didn't assume that these two words with similar spellings and related meanings share a common origin because I know what a false cognate is.

[alanguageaday]

Did you know…

The pronoun ‘I’ in Old Russian used to be called the same as the first letter of the alphabet, азъ (-> the modern а), whereas now it corresponds to the last one, я.

[alanguageaday]

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?

[alanguageaday]

my friend and i were going to study a language together and wound up having to cancel our plans due to scheduling pressures, but! through research we came across a really cool resource for reading in a TON of languages: bloom library!

as you can see, it has a lot of books for languages that are usually a bit harder to find materials for—we were going to use it for kyrgyz, for example, which has over 1000 books, which was really hard to find textbook materials for otherwise. as you can see it also has books with audio options, which would be really useful for pronunciation checking. as far as i can tell, everything on the site is free as well.