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le chat

more on my instagram @matialonsor

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Menton, Cote D'Azur

more on my instagram @matialonsor

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More amazing windows and balconies from Olhão. The architecture of this small town is really, really interesting.

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La Bikina de Luis Miguel, del álbum Vivo (2000)

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me: *wants to become polyglot, historian, poet, artist, master four instruments, travel the world, have a social life and a romantic relationship*

also me: due to my personal reasons i will now completely detach myself from reality, sit in my bedroom and contemplate existence for four (4) hours straight.

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Shelby GT500 Convertible, 1969. Only 355 GT500 convertibles were made in the final year of Shelby Mustang production though some unsold cars were marketed as 1970 models. The GT500 was powered by a 428ci Cobra Jet V8

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How new words are created

We constantly create new words: e.g. photobomb, binge-watch, fake news, etc. But how exactly does this happen? Is there a certain process? What is needed for a newly created word to be successful?

There are different processes for how a new word can be created:

Different processes:

1. Word creation:

invention of completely new words with no formal or semantical background

arbitrarily chosen, not deducible

thus, linguistically and cognitively uneconomical and little chance of success

2. Borrowing:

‘importing’ words/morphemes/expressions from another language

often: source language = origin of new concept 

3. Semantic transfer:

similarities between two domains (often figuratively), e.g. mouse and (computer) mouse

existing lexeme receives new meaning -> similarity facilitates understanding/deduction

4. Word-formation:

existing morphemes combined in new ways -> new lexes, e.g. photobomb

lexemes with a complex structure – polymorphemic -> complex lexemes

Different phases:

There are different phases for the establishment of a new word in a language community: 

Phase 1 – Creation: new word is spoken/written for the first time

Phase 2 – Consolidation: word is adopted and used by an increasing number of speakers

Phase 3 – Establishment: word becomes part of the normal lexicon

Thus, three perspectives are important to ensure the success of a new word:

structural perspective: constructing form & meaning

sociopragmatic perspective: spreading in speech community

cognitive perspective: embedding & conceptualising in mental lexicon

Phase 1 - Creation:

 Sociopragmatic perspective:

mostly spontaneous creation or ad-hoc formation (nonce formation) -> reasons: brevity, lack of word, humour, etc.

often depend on context to be understood

in texts: put into inverted commas

Structural perspective

aim: innovative combination of pre-existing morphemes

usually using established word-creation pattern -> type-familiar

also new form-meaning complex -> item-unfamiliar

recipient is highly dependent on linguistic & situational context

Cognitive perspective

ad-hoc formation ≠ entry in mental lexicon, BUT single morphemes have entries and should be easily identifiable

recipient can easily make hypotheses about what the new combination might mean -> meaning deduced from individual parts

new form: no existing concept/cognitive category -> no entry in mental lexicon

Phase 2 - Consolidation:

Sociopragmatic perspective

beginning stage: neologism

spread and diffusion of new lexeme -> success depends on use by speech community -> various factors

factors influencing spread of new lexeme: medium, prestige of users, ‘fame’ of denoted object, appeal of lexeme form, originality of idea described, ease of segmenting and computing new lexeme

Structural perspective

-> stabilisation of form and meaning -> ambiguity reduced & context-dependence reduced

orthography/pronunciation may change, e.g. e-mail → email; German: eMail → Email

Cognitive perspective

tentative entry in mental lexicon

no focus on individual parts -> focus on meaning as a whole, e.g. ice cream → {ice} + {cream}

development of connections to other entries & syntagmatic relations, e.g. collocations

Phase 3 - Establishment:

Sociopragmatic perspective

institutionalisation -> lexeme known and used by majority of speakers

-> no clear line between phase 2 & 3 -> difficult to measure objectively

Structural perspective

lexicalisation

lexeme displays formal properties exceeding results of word-formation processes -> semantic features are more than the sum of its parts

Cognitive perspective

analysis as a whole, not single parts

is directly retrievable from mental lexicon

has own set of associations & connections

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Best language learning tips & masterlists from other bloggers I’ve come across

(these posts are not my own!)

THE HOLY GRAIL of language learning (-> seriously tho, this is the BEST thing I’ve ever come across)

Tips:

Some language learning exercises and tips

20 Favorite Language Learning Tips

what should you be reading to maximize your language learning?

tips for learning a language (things i wish i knew before i started)

language learning and langblr tips

Tips on how to read in your target language for longer periods of time

Tips and inspiration from Fluent in 3 months by Benny Lewis

Tips for learning a sign language

Tips for relearning your second first language

How to:

how to self teach a new language

learning a language: how to

learning languages and how to make it fun

how to study languages

how to practice speaking in a foreign language

how to learn a language when you don’t know where to start

how to make a schedule for language learning

How to keep track of learning more than one language at the same time

Masterposts:

Language Study Master Post

Swedish Resources Masterpost

French Resouces Masterpost

Italian Resources Masterpost

Resource List for Learning German

Challenges:

Language-Sanctuary Langblr Challenge

language learning checkerboard challenge

Word lists:

2+ months of language learning prompts

list of words you need to know in your target language, in 3 levels

Other stuff:

bullet journal dedicated to language learning

over 400 language related youtube channels in 50+ languages

TED talks about language (learning)

Learning the Alien Languages of Star Trek

.

Feel free to reblog and add your own lists / masterlists!

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“Bilingualism strikes me as a kind of synesthesia. Instead of seeing colors associated with letters and words, instead of hearing melodies, what I hear with language is the play and echo of the other language. The option to say it differently, and thus to live it differently. Language is not only a means of communication or description. It’s a framework in which we process existence. Yi writes: “It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language.” As every bilingual person and translator knows, there are certain words—a feeling, a way of being—that is absent in one language but perfectly brought to life in another. A word that, by existing, gives permission to be. What if you need that which does not exist in your language?”

— Yoojin Grace Wuertz, “Mother Tongue”

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hay un término propio pa los verbos que solo se conjuga en 3a persona singular como llovar, nevar, etc?

There is a special term for verbs like this, but it's not specifically verbs like llover, nevar, granizar etc

The linguistic term is called "defective verbs" [los verbos defectivos] or sometimes the alternate term is "incomplete verbs" [los verbos incompletos]

What it means is that they're verbs that don't have complete conjugations, or their potential conjugations aren't used. They're a verb that exists but one you can't use fully [for every pronoun and in every tense], so it's "defective" or "incomplete". Many of the defective verbs are specific weather or nature related [specific verbs that people and most things cannot do], or they're very particular verbs

The most common examples people use are llover "to rain", nevar "to snow", granizar "to hail", tronar "to thunder", or relampaguear "for there to be lightning" as well as amanecer "for dawn to break", atardecer "for dusk to fall", and anochecer "for night to fall"

However, there's some linguistic caveats

Not all defective verbs are defective in every sense. Some verbs have secondary meanings that make them "not defective" in some contexts.

What makes a defective verb defective is that it can only be used a certain way for a specific situation. If a verb has a secondary meaning it reads as differently

Some verbs have these secondary meanings, and others do not. From what I mentioned, nevar "to snow" and granizar "to hail" do not

hacer by itself is not defective, but in the context of weather [hace viento "it is windy", hace sol "it is sunny", hace calor "it is hot" etc.] it is defective. And you could consider it at least partially defective when hace or hacía are used as "ago" as in "it happened a while ago"

While hacer itself is used in every tense and mood, the weather/time aspects of hacer only exist in 3rd person singular... that is to say hace frío "it is cold", hacía or hizo frío "it was cold", hará frío "it will be cold"... but all of those are 3rd person singular. Someone can "make something cold", but it's not the same weather/time expression

Or consider: llover "to rain" is defective in the sense of weather. But llover can be used figuratively as "to fall upon" or "to come down", sort of like "inundated with" or "flooded with" but this is less common.

As another example tronar "to thunder" is defective when talking about the weather, it only exists in 3rd person singular. But its secondary meaning is "to boom" or "to make a loud noise" and when used with people it can mean "to scream" or "to roar". And relampaguear is "for there to be lightning", but when talking about electronics it means "to flash" so you might see it with camera flashes etc

The same is true for amanecer, atardecer, and anochecer. While they usually refer to different parts of the day "happening", there are cases where people would use amanecer as "to wake up", or use these parts of the day verbs as "to spend the morning/evening/night"

There's also rare cases where you'll see a defective verb used in a non-defective way. The biggest example is in Don Quixote where there's a mini-story called El loco de Sevilla "the madman of Seville"

Short summary: There's an insane asylum that someone visits because there's a rumor that someone got sent there by their family to get them out of the way. With that bias in mind, the guy visiting has a decent conversation with the "madman" and is ready to have him released since he seems sane. On the way out, one of the other patients calling himself "Jupiter" (god of storms) says that if that patient gets released he'll make a drought to punish the city. The madman responds something like "Don't worry about him, I'm Neptune (god of the sea/rain) and I'll make it rain whenever I feel like" and that's when they realize he actually isn't mentally all there, and that they were fooled by their own bias

...In the original Spanish what the man calling himself Neptune says is Yo soy Neptuno, el dios de la lluvia, y lloveré todo lo que me dé la gana which is "I am Neptune, the god of rain, and I will [make it] rain however much I want"

Typically you never use llover with yo, but lloveré is future tense yo; so this is a special "non-defective" use" and it's used as a kind of outrageous emphasis that this person who seemed sane really does believe they're a god and that they "rain" instead of rain... happening on its own. It reads as extremely unusual and delusional, but also really funny in context

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There are also a handful of verbs that are used defectively in some cases like adir which is a really weird one and not super common but it means "to accept" usually in legal contexts regarding inheritance but it's never conjugated it only exists in the infinitive form

There's also some debate over whether one can consider hay "there is/there are" to be defective. Though it's derived from haber which is complete and totally non-defective, this particular iteration hay is only used as "there is/there are", and it's a clear kind of conjugation but one that cannot be used in any other situation and only used in a 3rd person setting

[To be clear, the other tenses have something similar to hay; había, hubo, habrá, habría etc. but they are all part of the regular conjugation of haber, so they don't count. The strange thing is that haber already has a conjugation for present tense - he, has, ha, han, hemos... but hay is a separate present tense conjugation for a separate present tense construction. That's why hay is considered defective, but haber is not]

Other verbs that I would consider more on the defective side of things are soler "to normally do" since it never gets used in preterite and it isn't always used in other tenses (aside from present tense, imperfect tense, and maybe subjunctive). And also abolir which is "to abolish" and extremely uncommon because of its weirdness except in random cases, but I would say seeing it conjugated at all is a rarity - typically people will use anular "to annul/abolish" or a separate verb... it's something to do with how abolir looks like it should be an O->UE verb but that would be really awkward [abuelo would be the yo form which you can see is also "grandfather" so confusing all around], and because it can sound a tiny bit vulgar

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Belmonte Calabro, Calabria, Italy

Photos by @ziggymario

Follow us on Instagram, @calabria_mediterranea

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crazy how much ppl do not care that you are literally losing your mind if you are a quiet woman who doesn’t inconvenience others much