#lingblr

[yvanspijk]

The words right and rectum have a common origin. Right comes from Proto-Germanic *rehtaz ('straight; right; just'). This word shared a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor with Latin rēctus ('straight; right; just'), from which the medical term rectum ('straight terminal part of the large intestine') was derived. The infographic shows more.

[ducksarebloodthirstylittlebeasts]

I mean that about sums it up

[salvadorbonaparte]

I have a linguistics degree so I can also claim insanely wrong things. French is just badly pronounced Latvian.

[pantheraleo04]

I was trying to check when the great English vowel shift happened and got the strangest ad I've seen lol

I'm now obsessed with the idea of buying a phonological change. Like, popping down to the store and completely changing the way you speak.

[linguisticdiscovery]

Map of British English dialects

by Ryan Starkey (Starkey Comics)

Author Ryan Starkey accompanies the map with a great article:

I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. […] The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made.

He also discusses “Why this map is wrong, and always will be”, and just how difficult it is to create a precise map of dialect regions.

Why is there so much dialect diversity in the U.K.? Because the longer a language is in a region, the more it tends to diversify. This is partly why, for example, there is a much larger variety of dialects spoken in the Eastern U.S. than the Western U.S.

Further Reading

The stories of English (David Crystal)

This is the perfect book to read if you want to know more about the history of dialect diversity in English, because the entire focus of the book is to show that English is not just one unified language (hence the plural “stories” in the title). It’s one of my favorite popular language books.

[markadoo]

People say that "they" is often used as a third-person singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender. This is true. But it's also used as a third-person singular pronoun for a person of known gender but unknown identity. Like, when I was at a boys-only boarding school, I would still say things like "Someone left their notebook here." I know that the person whose notebook it is is a he, but the pronoun that goes with "someone" is "they". "Someone left his notebook here" sounds grammatically incorrect, or else it means that "someone" and "he" are different people.

[lingwistyka-balto-slawistyka]

Very curious about the results

[tower-of-hana]

Dictionaries be like: Instead of using the ipa we made this fake phonetic alphabet made up of esoteric runes. Please find a European with a wild beard to decipher them.

[drlinguo]

Source

[yvanspijk]

The French word for a werewolf is loup-garou. Etymologically, this compound is pleonastic: garou means 'werewolf' and loup means 'wolf'. It's also hybrid: loup stems from Latin lupus whereas garou was borrowed from West Germanic *werwulf. Click the image for more.

[linguisticillustrations]

Table with the partinioning of the TREE-WOOD-FOREST semantic domain.

Georgakopoulos, Thanasis & Stéphane Polis. 2018. The semantic map model: State of the art and future avenues for linguistic research. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(2). e12270. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12270.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Help save the Yiddish Translation Fellowship Program

I wanted to ask my followers and fellow language enthusiasts to donate to the Yiddish Book Center so that they can continue to train translators and make Yiddish literature accessible (or at least share this post if possible) 🐐

[gege]

What is up with some of these new duo widget images?? Why does it have a butt? Why does it have a face butt??! What is even happening in that first sixth one? Haalppp

UPDATED I think I've managed to collect them all except the ones where you lose your streak because I'm simply Not Doing That.

[linguisticdiscovery]

The unequal proportion between the number of languages and how many speakers those languages have

The median number of speakers for a human language is only about 5,000 people.

From the incredibly good book, When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge.

[meichenxi]

I don’t want to be told, ‘You’re going to be brilliant!’. I want to be told that it’s ok if I’m not. 

I don’t want to be told, ‘There’s nothing to worry about!’. I want to be told that it might be scary, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

I don’t want to be told, ‘You won’t make a mistake!’. I want to be told that it’s ok to make mistakes, because it shows you are learning, and because you can always try again. 

I don’t want to be told, ‘I’m sure you’ll pick it up quickly!’. I want to be told that how quickly you learn something and whether you learn it at all isn’t a part of your personality, and doesn’t reflect on your worth as a human being. 

I don’t want to be told, ‘Everybody’s in the same boat!’ I want to be told that even if I struggle with things they don’t, my learning process is just as important as theirs, and I am just as deserving of help. 

You don’t know why somebody is nervous. You don’t know their history with this particular struggle or environment.  You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Telling someone ‘You’ll be great!’ isn't the reassurance you think it is.

If you want to encourage learning and growth, you need to establish that it’s safe to fail.