#language

[prokopetz]

Honestly, my Scrabble vocabulary isn't that great. My ability to consistently play hyper-obscure words that just happen to be in the dictionary is less a matter of prior knowledge and more a matter of being able to look at a seemingly random sequence of letters, think "I have no idea if that's a word, but the English language would absolutely pull some horseshit like this", and 90% of the time I'm right.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[kelaeri]

The Many Languages of Dick Grayson

Apparently, according to Nightwing #54, he can speak 12, so I went on a little quest to see just how many I could identify.

Starting off with The Essential Batman Encyclopedia, the entry for Dick Grayson lists him as being trained in French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese with having some proficiency in an unknown Romani dialect. Given there are multiple examples of him speaking these languages throughout the comics, I am inclined to trust this claim. To start, we've got several examples of French (Gotham Knights #14, Detective Comics Annual #12, Nightwing #73, Grayson #10-- also featuring Spanish)

In Grayson #1 he speaks Russian only briefly, but in Detective Comics #36 he speaks it throughout.

As far as the Chinese languages go, while I believe Dick can speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese fairly well (Batman/Superman World's Finest #3), his Hanzi recognition and literacy could use some work.

Similarly, when the Titans head off to Japan in Titans Annual #1, we have Nightwing speaking Japanese in battle; however, when it comes to the prospective job of being a manga translator in Nightwing #125, he claims he doesn't know Japanese, which leads me to believe he is only proficient in speaking Japanese/Chinese and struggles with the writing systems.

So what about the languages not covered in the encyclopedia? To start, we have another romance language: Italian (Nightwing #72).

Followed by some alleged German (Nightwing #51, JLA #44)

And conversations in Farsi (Robin #175)

While I've seen some Tumblr and Reddit posts claim he knows Kikuyu, The Power Company: Manhunter #1 only says he "brushed up" on his Kikuyu before going to Kenya, so it is unknown how much of the language he actually speaks, but to me it doesn't seem likely to be a lot.

He also, to some unknown degree, speaks Tamaranean-- at least enough to hack into an alien computer (Action Comics #842).

As far as unspoken languages go, Dick is fluent in ASL, which is proven numerous times when he communicates with Jericho (New Teen Titans 1984).

And lastly, the two languages that remain rather uncertain are Romani and Cant-- largely due to the nature of the languages themselves and their representation in comics. "Romani," for instance, has several different dialects, and when Devin Grayson introduced it for Dick (Gotham Knights #20-21, Nightwing #91), she never specified which, and based on the lines she wrote, her research into the language was questionable at best. Writers since have recognized Dick's Romani heritage, but have not otherwise suggested he retained much of the language to be considered fluent.

Cant is an even wider term than Romani and can be seen as more of jargon for a particular language than a language itself, sometimes even being called a "pseudo-language." The colloquial term for American circus cant is Carny, or "Carny speak" as Boston Brand puts it in Batman: The Brave and the Bold #14 when he and Nightwing encounter a kid who speaks it.

So... this leaves us with 11 languages Dick has notable proficiency in: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Farsi, and ASL. And ~3 languages he has unknown proficiency in: Tamaranean, Kikuyu, Romani, and Carny/Cant (if you want to count it).

Maybe memory-loss Dick was including either Tamaranean or Kikuyu in that count from Nightwing #54, or maybe he knows some other language we haven't seen yet. Given how close the family is to the Al Ghuls, I personally think it would be cool if one of them was Arabic.

But anyway, hope you enjoyed this post! A lot I've seen covering this topic are very surface-level and label some of his more iffy languages as "fluent," so I hope this cleared things up. I've read tons of Nightwing, and I swear there are more examples, but sifting through the 1,000+ comics I've read of him is a lot haha. If y'all know of some others, let me know!

[a-word-a-day-for-writers]

𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬

Gold-devouring, feeding on gold.

[yvanspijk]

Yes, yea, ja

The counterparts of the word yes in the Germanic sister languages end in a vowel, such as German, Dutch, and Swedish ja. This is because ja etymologically corresponds to English yea, a word that in Standard English is used only in voting. It's also used as a noun: 'Senators could fax in their yeas and nays'. Yes has a slightly different origin. Click the graphic to learn more.

[chroniclesofajewishteen]

Controversial opinion of the day: It’s okay to have accents. It’s not your native language. If they make fun of you that’s messed up.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

A List of "Beautiful" Spanish Words

for your next poem/story

Alumbración - enlightenment

Anteayer - before yesterday

Arrebol - afterglow

Camino - path

Dar - to give

Desear - to desire

Desenlace - outcome

Enternecer - soften

Friolero - somebody who gets cold all the time

Gavilán - sparrowhawk

Lluvia - rain

Mareas - tides

Niebla - mist

Pájaro - bird

Petricor - the scent or odor that is released when rain falls on dry soil

Primavera - spring

Querer - to want

Sobremesa - time spent talking at the table after finishing a meal

Sonreír - to smile

Ternura - tenderness

If any of these words make their way into your next poem/story, please tag me, or send me a link. I would love to read them!

Sources: 1 2 3 4

More: Word Lists

[elveny]

One of the more absurd mistakes I see online A LOT and from native speakers to boot is “would of” instead of “would have”.

Like.

???

Makes zero sense. Wh… why???

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[mehilaiselokuva]

do you have any recommendations for (preferably free/low cost) online websites/classes/apps that teach finnish? i know duolingo is a thing but i've been kinda wary of them ever since the ai debaucle, plus ive heard theyre really only helpful up to a point

Hi!

The Duolingo course for Finnish SUCKS from what I have seen. I've been testing it out since it came out to see if I can recommend it to the learners and I can say that I wouldn't recommend it at all (unless you really like game-type learning, it might help you start but the vocabulary doesn't get you too far and the grammar isn't explained at all)

Here's my past master post on resources (with the even older one linked in there too so check both out)

I can also always respond to any asks about grammar or vocab if anyone has any questions!

[a-word-a-day-for-writers]

𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞

Gold-coloured, golden-hued.

[langwij]

love how sumerian was a language isolate. like mfs were the first civilisation to appear and just kinda decided to not spread out at all. absolutely based. like literally no traces of their shit anywhere outside of their own language. making it real difficult for thise linguists to figure out. i fully support making the jobs of future people way harder. also means that their language changed so little in the like 4000 years they were around that is was never able to be classified as a language seperate from the first traces sumerian.

[tikister]

BABEL BABBLE

Aziraphale has a baby??

BEGINNING • PREVIOUS • NEXT

We are all united through song, as demonstrated by the popular "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" song. There are so many different ways you can sing it, and yet you can still convey the same emotion. Within those differences, you see how different cultures interpret concepts or what words are similar if you decide to translate.

Likewise, you can sing any song to anyone, and they'll understand the strength and emotion behind it regardless if they know the language. That's what's beautiful about language.

[Apologies for any mistranslation! I noticed it for the Spanish ver. But I can not correct it since the file crashed] :(

[student2022]

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Virginia Woolf: On Words

Listen to the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice.

A transcript of Woolf’s broadcast, ‘On Craftsmanship’, BBC, 29 April 1937.

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations.

They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.

And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today — that they are stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

The splendid word ‘incarnadine’, for example — who can use it without remembering also ‘multitudinous seas’?

In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them.

Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we cannot use them because the English language is old.

You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but is part of other words.

Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence.

Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word ‘incarnadine’ belongs to ‘multitudinous seas’.

To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business.

Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is.

How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?

That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer.

Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn, the art of writing.

Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, or would create beauty.

But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words.

For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still — do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticised, untaught?

Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan?

Well, where are we to lay the blame?

Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words.

It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.

Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries.

But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none.

Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order.

But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.

Look once more at the dictionary.

There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs.

It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order.

But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind?

Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together.

It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are.

Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy.

Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on [words].

All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that [words] seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different.

They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious.

They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed.

If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for Impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans.

They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society.

Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately.

They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time.

They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public.

In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change.

It is because the truth [words] try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty.

We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.

Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy.

Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious.

Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light...

That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty.

But no — nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night.

The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? ‘Time’s up! Silence!’'

Source Virginia Woolf: The Censorship of Books

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

The thing is that Americans do have diverse accents but we pummel them out of each other. Either because your job insists your natural accent is too bumpkin or impossible to understand. Or because you move somewhere new and instead of letting you pronounce things slightly off we pummel the shit out of each other for pronouncing things in a different way.

In Colorado alone there are war lines drawn about how to pronounce Pueblo with like 3 different versions I hear float around. Went to Kansas once and pronounced El Dorado like it was spanish and had twenty people shout "It's El Door-AIDE-Oh!" at me.

The 100 people from my hometown want to kill everyone who pronounces the name with an awwnt sound instead of an int sound. You can't have accents in this country unless they're recognizably foreign.