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ive seen ppl using /gen, but what abt /nom, /voc, /acc, /dat and /abl?

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Sueño & sueño: sleep & dream

In Spanish, tengo un sueño means 'I have a dream'. In contrast, tengo sueño – without un – means 'I’m sleepy', literally 'I have sleep'. Why does sueño mean both 'sleep' and 'dream' – two very different things?

It’s because sueño and sueño are actually different words – with a different etymology. In other Romance languages, they're still distinct: Portuguese tenho um sonho versus tenho sono, and Italian ho un sogno versus ho sonno. My new graphic explains how Spanish ended up with one single form: sueño.

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Sometimes, I Wonder if I Accidentally Bumped Off JD Salinger

This story is true and goes back to 2008 when John Hamilton at Penguin commissioned me to design the book jackets for JD Salinger's entire back catalogue.

Mr. Salinger was alive then, in his early 90s and, by all accounts, a belligerent and grumpy recluse. The chain of command was unusual and went like this. Salinger directed all his feedback via his New York lawyer, who then communicated with his London lawyer, who then communicated with Penguin, who then communicated with me, in my tiny home studio in North London. This process was somewhat intimidating, and went back and forth for weeks. It must have cost him a fucking fortune.

John told me Salinger was a very sensitive and emotional man and had always hated the first book jacket design for 'The Catcher in the Rye', a book which to this day still sells over a million copies a year. He had instructed Penguin to redesign the jackets using lettering only. "No pictures!" Salinger had stated. That's when John thought of me.

I designed three options, and Salinger chose the third — bespoke Inline Roman Capital letterforms with minimal and carefully considered flourishing to add a touch of refined elegance and unify the set. Salinger was shown the designs and signed them off himself, making only one change to the ‘Catcher’ jacket. He wanted the junction on the 'Y' in 'Rye' raised, which he felt made it more legible.

A day later, Salinger died. John said signing off the jackets was probably Salinger's last creative decision.

To this day I sometimes lie in bed at night wondering if the surprise of my stark, graphic and (back then) avant-garde new covers for his life's work tipped the poor fella over the edge. Fuck me, I hope I didn’t accidentally bump off JD Salinger. I just want to get this off my tits after all these years. Rest in Peace, Mr Salinger. What an intense privilege to be involved in a project of such literary magnitude.

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If you catch a linguistics student bent over a book of strange symbols, holding their throat in one hand and making a bunch of strange, disconnected sounds, leave them alone!! They’re studying

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To celebrate rawdog winning word of the year per the American Dialect Society, I'd like to tell the story of how I learned that the meaning of rawdog changed in the past couple years.

If anyone doesn't know, the original and long-held meaning of rawdogging was fucking without a condom. The new meaning has extended to doing any kind of action unshielded, plain, or without preparation.

So, about a year ago, I'm eating lunch with coworkers. It's an office job and we're generally pretty professional. People swear a lot, but there's never any innuendos or sex talk.

A coworker is describing a recent trip she took to a vendor to get a demo of equipment we were considering purchasing. Someone else asks "Did you meet Bob LastName while you were there? He's kind of an interesting guy."

"Yeah I did, and he is a little strange. I walked into the breakroom one morning and he was rawdogging two blueberry bagels"

Cue my high-pitched shriek of "He was DOING WHAT."

Followed by my coworkers explaining the meaning and my faint, flustered reply of "ah...well... I'm used to that meaning.... something else." Some people knew what I was talking about, but unfortunately others did not, and I had to face the ordeal of explaining as delicately as possible to a group of coworkers aged 22 to 60

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The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

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on reconstruction and historical linguistics

to follow up on today's reblog, i want to comment briefly on the apparent misapprehension that linguistic reconstruction is just guesswork with a fancy name, because that's not accurate!

reconstruction is based on specific, well-attested constraints of linguistic development. we know from centuries of investigation that languages tend to change in predictable ways. we also have a decent understanding of the complexities introduced by phenomena like language contact, which can result in borrowing on multiple structural levels. our methods are well established and borne out by evidence.

comparative reconstruction involves applying these known constraints ("rules") in reverse on a collected body of words in related descendant languages. when possible, we also incorporate historical written evidence, which often provides midpoint references for changes in progress. it is always recognized by historical linguists that reconstruction can be imperfect; we cannot know what information has been lost.

the results of reconstruction can be mixed, but i'll let campbell (2013:144) explain:

How Realistic are Reconstructed Proto-languages? The success of any given reconstruction depends on the material at hand to work with and the ability of the comparative linguist to figure out what happened in the history of the languages being compared. In cases where the daughter languages preserve clear evidence of what the parent language had, a reconstruction can be very successful, matching closely the actual spoken ancestral language from which the compared daughters descend. However, there are many cases in which all the daughters lose or merge formerly contrasting sounds or eliminate earlier alternations through analogy, or lose morphological categories due to changes of various sorts. We cannot recover things about the proto-language via the comparative method if the daughters simply do not preserve evidence of them. In cases where the evidence is severely limited or unclear, we often make mistakes. We make the best inferences we can based on the evidence available and on everything we know about the nature of human languages and linguistic change. We do the best we can with what we have to work with. Often the results are very good; sometimes they are less complete. In general, the longer in the past the proto-language split up, the more linguistic changes will have accumulated and the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct with full success. (emphasis mine)

or, to quote labov's (1982:20) pithier if less optimistic approach:

Historical linguistics may be characterized as the art of making the best use of bad data, in the sense that the fragments of the literary record that remain are the results of historical accidents beyond the control of the investigator.

in sum, historical linguists are very realistic about what we can achieve, but the confidence we do have is genuinely well earned, because linguistics is a scientific field and we treat our investigations with rigor.

---

Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Labov, William. 1982. "Building on Empirical Foundations." In Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Winifred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Pp. 17-92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Do you know about ghoti? What's your opinion on it? Imo it doesn't work because sounds actually have to come in a certain order to make those sounds but idk if I'm just wrong

lol yeah it's just a dumb internet thing, without the full context of the explanation that is absolutely not how english pronunciation rules work

(this is referencing the claim that you could spell "fish" as "ghoti" if you use the pronunciation of <gh> as in "enough," <o> as in "women," and <ti> as in "motion.")

(<gh> is never expressed as /f/ word-initially. <o> being pronounced /ɪ/ is conditioned by the change in the second vowel. <ti>, similarly, has to occur with the following <on> to be conditioned into expressing as /ʃ/.)

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See, when I originally posted this, it was because I love every language on this beautiful Earth and wanted to share a tweet that expressed it better than I ever could. And a lot of people who reblogged it shared the same sentiment.

But, because the post mentions "special characters", a lot of people with no apparent interest in linguistics have been reblogging it, mentioning their favourite fictional characters from movies, shows, books, games, etc.

I never expected this, but I absolutely love seeing it! All characters are special!!!!

Source

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Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

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This is about the result I expected, but honestly, as a native Spanish speaker, I always feel the urge to use "piquant" for "spicy", even though my intuition tells me that's not a very common word, and "spicy" for... I don't know, is "spiced" a word?

...actually that's another poll idea :)

As a non-native speaker, I'm trying to see something...

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Calvin and Hobbes — what is a pronoun?

thx @ppasdeprobleme

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I can't believe "open sesame" translates directly to japanese and I also can't believe I've never questioned the origins of open sesame before

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On recursive reference

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As a non-native speaker, I'm trying to see something...

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Hello! (I apologize for any incorrect terminology in advance) Today in class we had a conversation about Pidgin and Creoles (part of it being how creoles are born out of pidgins and evolve more complicated linguistic features) and one student asked if this means every language is a creole. (We eventually came to a rough consensus not every language is, but English was especially debated and I don't know if we got to an agreement on that one.)

All that to say, I'm curious on your opinion about whether English (or other languages not traditionally considered a creole) are considered creole, or if you have any unrelated facts or opinions you're interested in sharing related to pidgins and creoles that'd be cool too :D

english is not a creole. it was already established as a distinct language variety with a full germanic grammatical structure before borrowing lots of french vocabulary during the norman conquest, and there are no pervasive borrowed grammatical patterns overtaking the original germanic across contexts.

why do people want to paint english as being uniquely susceptible to borrowing??? we can retire the trenchcoat thing, it's ok