#linguistic irregularities

[howdoesone]

How does one describe the process of compounding in morphology?

Compounding is a morphological process by which two or more individual words are combined to create a new word with its own distinct meaning. This process is used in many languages around the world, and it is an important aspect of word formation in morphology. In this article, we will describe the process of compounding in morphology, including its types, formation, and examples. Continue…

[dynamobooks]

Arika Okrent: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language (2021)

[happi-speech]

I was trying to translate a Beyonce lyric in Na'vi with my limited vocab (💀) and got stuck on the lyric "you got me lookin ao crazy right now" because of the way I'm trying to translate "got" into "have" like this:

I stumbled upon a realization that I really didnt know how complex the word "have" is and how much I take it for granted in daily speech as a verb. Seeing it broken down like this makes it more complicated to answer how I should translate this lyric in Na'vi, which doesnt have a verb equivalent for "to have" and probably also doesnt have an equivalent for the colloqial phrasing of "X having Y".

"To have" is usually understood as a possession verb for subjects we understand as "having" a specific thing in their possession or fundamentally about their person (a trait, property, clothing, etc). So verb is usually understood as a general term of proximal deixis.

But I notice how it functions like the Na'vi intransitive copula lu when expressing "there is X to [subject]". Like saying "Have a good day" or "She has a cold" is like saying "there is a cold to her" or "[I hope] there will be a good day to you".

I'm rambling a bit but this is helping me get out of my stump of not knowing how to treat the word "have" in English to understand how to translate a colloquial, lyrical form of English into Na'vi. I could possibly use lu to express "you have me" or "youve gotten me" similarly to "have" in the sense of nominalizing (?) a clause to say "you have me in your possession" in a metephorical way. But thats not what "have" or "have gotten" feels like in the way its used English in the lyric. I cant quite articulate what it means because it simply feels right, but I know its not really about metaphorical, literal possession (💀) as much as its about someone being the influencing force for you to behave like something. I'm tryinf to shorten it in Na'vi but working around the intransivity of lu and a limited vocab is tricky for me. 😅

[pvtjoker22]

So what's peculiar is that my mother-in-law pronounces a word exactly like an extinct local dialect that their family has roots in

She pronounces 'Selkirk' exactly like this:

My mother-in-law/spouse's family is related to Spence, McKay's, etc. so it's very within the realm of plausibility that this is a generational carry-over and maybe it's just the history nerd in me, but I found it fascinating

Here's more info on the dialect:

I dunno, I just find the cross-section of linguistics and history to be interesting =)

[tower-of-hana]

Linguists are like vampires but instead of drinking your blood they harass you about a weird irregularity in your speech that no one else would have noticed.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Is Tousen prescriptivist or descriptivist? As a librarian, he would certainly have strong opinions about it. For that matter, do any other characters have a notable stance on the topic?

For those of you who are not friends with linguistics nerds:

It is two truths largely universally acknowledged that 1. Words and Gramatical conventions mean specific things and 2. Language changes over time. Perscriptivisim is the perspective that WE HAVE RULES ABOUT LANGUAGE, DAMMIT. They have a point- for a lot of things we use words for like legal documents, manufacturing instructions, and medical research- Precision is KEY. But it isn't very flexible and doesn't account for some of the nuances of language. Descriptivism is a stance that is a bit more akin to your stoner buddy going "What even ARE words?". They have a point- language is, at it's core, a massive cooperative game of make-believe. But it'd not very helpful when you need to be clear about your meaning.

This can make editing... difficult.

Kaname had strong opinions on it when he was a librarian that have only gotten more insane and intense since becoming Editor-In-Chief of the Gotei-13's newspaper, but true to fashion, has managed to pick a position that pisses off everyone.

He's a Topical Perscriptivist.

There is a Meticulously updated and catalogued database of shifts in word usage, slang and novel grammatical structures. It's an incredible academic resource, and a helpful living translation document in the Gotei-13 where the last time the division policies got updated was in the Meji era. He's working on a mobile version for the newfangled 'smart' communicators. It's an incredibly useful tool!

Kaname pisses people off by using it to be a persnickety little shit about the grammatical rules of linguistic conventions invented last week.

"You know, if you want to annoy him back, you can try hosing your boss back with the constant stream of madness from the internet!" Keigo suggested to Shuuhei once. "There's a fun new term for throwing something real hard that could use an offi- You're kidding."

Shuuhei shook his head, handing the Official Conjugation of Yeet Document from the 9th division's Database of Current Linguistics to Keigo. "The Captain had this drawn up within an hour of the term hitting the 10th Division reports page. It's got a regular Perfect Tense, but Irregular and different Imperative, Continuous and Conditional tenses for maximum confusion."

"...That motherfucker." Keigo groaned, looking over the conjugation tables. "...I yeet, He yeets, we yote, I had yeeted, she had been yote, they will have been yet- Its so stupid but it makes so much intuitive sense! It's the perfect joke conjugation for a joke word!"

"That's why he's The Captain." Shuuhei nodded.

"I thought he was captain because he beat the crap out of Mugurama-san for the job? Twice?"

"Listen here you little shit-"

[shalotttower]

The Unknown Variable

Title: The Unknown Variable Fandom: Death Note Summary: Special was never your brand. Now the weight of it is simply too heavy. Word count: 2600+ Characters: L Lawliet x Reader (female) Notes: yandere L, kidnapping, L and Reader were together in Wammy's House, Reader is tricky: there's some sort of imposter syndrome, but it's not too pronounced, L is a little bit of a dick, explicit language, triggering words.

You came to Wammy's House the same year as him.

In your simple dress, with scratched shoes and hair cut short by your previous caretakers, no one paid you much attention. Just another orphan for Watari's collection, just another face to pass through the halls, that's what you were. Densely packed with brightness - bright children with bright futures - you got lost among their splendor very quickly. Intelligences and minds were relative, and it didn't take long to understand that there existed more than one tier in the hierarchy of extraordinary.

You weren't exceptional.

You weren't dim.

Not slow, not dense, merely the kind of gifted that fit into Wammy's definition of "gifted" without exceeding it. The kind that was too smart to go to a public school, but unable to stand out in this environment.

It was fine. You didn't come there to be special.

You came because you had nowhere else to go and Wammy's House gave you a bed, a roof over your head, food on the table. It was as close to a home that you'd ever get and certainly better than your time in foster care. You could ask for toys, books, whatever caught your fancy, and count on it to be provided without much question.

What you couldn't ask for was affection. Not from Watari nor his staff nor the other children, and you think...you think all of you shared that same affliction to a various extent - a kind of general numbness, a disconnect between where a heart was beating and a brain was processing.

In this, you suppose, L fit right in, while failing miserably at everything else.

You found him odd, with his hunched back and wide eyes and messy hair. He wasn't rude or cruel but seemed to lack the basic social graces and had this air of superiority around himself, like he knew he was smarter, quicker and stronger than everyone else and didn't bother to pretend otherwise.

He played alone and hoarded toys that he liked. He answered questions before they were fully asked. You watched L solve puzzles in minutes when it took older children at least fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty. Maths, sciences, linguistics, history, law - he seemed to sample them all, eventually moving onto the next. Slept irregular hours, and the blue glow of his computer screen was an ever present feature every time you got up at night to use the restroom and passed by his room.

L was brilliant and strange, and looked down on you since the very first moment.

You didn't like him much.

You watched him grow into his gangly limbs, become more lanky and hunch a few inches more, a quick-draw intellect with a tendency to chew at his thumbnail whenever he concentrated, stare too much and pick people apart as easily as he solved problems.

He got under your skin more than once, and seemed to have a vendetta of sorts or at least you thought so, with the way he liked to study your words or personality. He never outright called you stupid, but you once found him flipping through your journal and when you confronted him about it-

"You write simple."

"What?"

L turned another page, then tapped his nail against the margin. "Simple," he repeated, looking at you. "Short sentences, simple punctuation. Not bad necessarily..." He closed the journal with a soft thump. "But simplistic. You should-"

"I'm not vying for the Booker Prize," you said and took your journal back, he didn't resist. "It's just a diary, meant for me and me only. It doesn't need to be complicated, and you had no right to stick your nose in."

You were never meant to be special, but what you undeniably had was the lack of restraint in expressing your exact opinions.

"You left it on your desk," L said, unfazed. "You shouldn't leave personal belongings lying around if you don't want others to touch them. And the cipher key isn't difficult to figure out."

"It's still not an invitation," you told him, pointedly hiding the notebook behind your back.

It was the last time you spoke with L before leaving Wammy's House and entering adulthood; and you hardly considered it a great loss. You learned to make better ciphers and keep your things close without letting them out of sight, along with how to buy groceries, open a bank account, cook your own meals, do your own laundry and many other mundane skills which an orphanage resident had no real reason to practice.

A chance or probability of ever running into him again could be easily calculated as zero. Special was never your brand, no genius lurked beneath the surface, no brilliance that could solve mysteries in less than twenty four hours. You were observant, definitely, and had your own strengths, but on the scale of extraordinary you'd rank yourself somewhere in the middle, a notch above average and below exceptional.

That's why waking up years later in an unfamiliar bedroom, surrounded by deceptively familiar walls, furniture and bookshelves, with absolutely no memory of how you got there, made no sense.

In fact, it should have ended with boarding a plane, you were heading home after a lengthy business trip. That's what you clearly remembered - getting into the car that had arrived to pick you up from the hotel. Fastening the seat belt, and then nothing. The timeline smudged into one single faded splotch.

You reached for your phone only to find it missing. Bag, wallet, documents - everything was gone.

That...that didn't look good.

You carefully scanned the room. It held an uncanny resemblance to your own, with the same layout and furniture. Same closet, same bed. A twin to the quilt thrown over you. No windows. Your suitcase lay in the corner, and provided no insight as to how and why you'd been brought here. Everything was a replica, an almost-perfect duplicate, but somehow not.

It smelled wrong. Pleasant yet not the way it should; cleaner, less dusty, and warmer.

You mind went through the loops of what it could be: ransom (why? you had a humble income and no significant family), organ harvesting (too nice of a bedroom for such purposes), trafficking (again: too nice, no traffickers were known to transport people into neat and homey places), a bizarre accident (hardly, the door and the rest of the interior pointed towards careful planning).

Nothing seemed plausible, and that was the most unsettling part, the obscure, unknown variable which didn't let you make a prediction. The room...someone tailored it to you, your interests, that much you could say with 100% certainty.

But who and why - that remained a question.

The door opened.

"You," the word hung, suspended.

"You're awake." His posture hasn't changed, if anything it was worse than you remembered, hunched shoulders and slouching spine, hands buried deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans. Still slender but not as gangly anymore, he entered the room and closed the door behind him. "How are you feeling?"

The dark circles under his eyes were bigger and even more pronounced, like diluted ink spilled on a napkin.

You didn't answer.

"What am I doing here?" you asked instead and pushed yourself upright. The blanket fell from your lap, pooling down on the floor.

L's expression was familiar, one he used to wear whenever he was thinking. He rubbed his lower lip but otherwise chose to stay silent.

"Well? Are you going to explain or keep standing there?" You crossed your arms and glared at him, hiding the trembling of your fingers. You both did this sometimes back at Wammy's House, tried to over-stare each other in a contest, stubborn to a fault and unwilling to yield first. It always surprized you that he indulged in something so childish and silly.

Of all people you expected to see him least; the last conversation between you happened over six years ago.

L won the game again and you looked away.

"A series of events occurred, and I felt it to be beneficial for your well-being that you stay here," he replied after a moment, choosing each word like it was an item on a menu and not an explanation of your abduction. "You will find everything provided and within reach," L looked around the room, lingering on the bookshelves and desk. "If you prove cooperative."

You felt you eyebrows slowly rising to your hairline. "Excuse me?"

"Cooperative. The faster-"

"I'm not deaf."

His mouth twitched, like he disapproved of your manners - you ignored it. Took a deep breath and rubbed your temples, counted to ten, then exhaled through your nose.

"I'm leaving. Where's my phone?"

He didn't attempt to stop you, not when you slipped into your shoes, not when you headed for the door, not when your fingertips reached for the handle. It turned just fine, and for a second you were almost convinced that he decided to prank you (a very weird and fucked up prank, you had to admit).

What was on the other side looked like a regular apartment with an open floorplan, spacious and absolutely ordinary, except for the blackout curtains covering the windows, and the main door - thick, metal, - more suited for a vault, rather than a house. The locks appeared equally sophisticated. You swallowed, and a voice that always told you when something was not quite right, came out full force.

"Where's my phone," you repeated, voice quiet and dull, more of a statement than a question.

L remained silent, with that same blank stare which you used to despise as a child and a slight curve of his mouth. You know the answer, it said, now ask the right questions.

It was quiet, except for the ticking of the clock and the low hum of an AC unit.

A faint noise to your left caught your attention, the hairs on the back of your neck rose. In the middle of the carefully decorated living room, between a couch and a coffee table, you covered your mouth.

There were more wrinkles around Watari's eyes than you remembered and he looked older, hair gone to silver. Dressed in a black suit and a simple apron, it was him without any doubt or confusion. A chopping board and several ingredients covered the marble counter in a clear pattern of a soon to be cooked meal, carrots and mushrooms, bell peppers, fresh parsley. Celery. A single potato.

A needle with a plastic cap near the fruit bowl.

'I'm leaving.'

The words died on your tongue.

"No," you heard L's voice reach you from the layers of white noise which buzzed inside your head, "you're not. And I would prefer to not use force to persuade you."

There was a strange sort of finality in his tone, calm and absolute, and Watari, the man who raised all of you at Wammy's, the man who provided a roof, and books, and games, and never denied a request, simply nodded, then went on cutting carrots. As if this, as if your entire situation, was a mere triviality, not worth addressing.

Maybe it was a bad dream, you wondered. You fell asleep in the car and hallucinated an elaborate scenario, a noir plot plucked straight out of a movie.

It wasn't a movie.

They weren't joking.

In those few seconds while your mind processed everything in a scattered swirl of jumbled-up conclusions, you had a thought. A vase on your left looked sturdy enough. Two, three strides, grab it and swing - Watari was old. L was slim and thin.

"As you are now, I estimate 46% possibility of you injuring yourself and 8.3 % of you injuring me should you attempt to physically overpower me," L sounded close enough but you didn't turn around to check. "Along with 57% probability of Watari having to sedate you."

How did you go from nothing out of the ordinary to this, you often wondered later. In the apartment that looked normal, but was as far away from it as possible, with the orphanage prodigy whose brilliance used to frighten you back in your childhood, and the elderly man who used to serve tea and biscuits during breaks.

You looked down and found your fingers shaking. The odds were...against you.

"You're sick," you said finally. "Both of you." The irony of it was not lost, no. Of all people, someone to commit a crime of this audacity were the two individuals supposed to represent the pinnacle of legal justice.

Watari continued chopping vegetables. L made a step forward - you felt it more than saw - and it urged you to back away and out of his immediate reach, until you hit the wall. He studied your every move, steady, patient, not bothered by your accusation nor offended.

"No," you whispered and raised one trembling hand, as though it could offer you any kind of protection. Your throat felt too tight, like something was wrapped around it, pressing harder with each breath. "You fucking stay where you are."

L stopped moving.

"I can assure you," he said after a moment. "You're perfectly safe here. I have no intention of harming you, unless you prove unwilling to cooperate."

Your eyes darted towards Watari again. L's gaze followed.

"He won't hurt you either."

That didn't make you feel much better. Your phone was gone. Your documents - also missing. If you managed somehow to pass that door, you had no idea where you'd end up. It could be a regular apartment complex, or it could be the middle of nowhere. "Why am I here?" You asked again, but the question held different tone this time with the underlying implication.

L tucked his hands back inside his pockets. "I enjoy your company. My efficiency increases when I think about you and decreases by 17.3% when you're not in my vicinity."

Company. You blinked and rubbed your face, fingertips cold and clammy. "We talked four times when we were kids and none of those were pleasant experiences."

"Six," he corrected, "we talked six times, and our conversations, while short, were often...entertaining. Stimulating. You possess a particular way of thinking which I find intriguing. You're not intimidated by my intellect. You are not intimidated by many things."

"I don't want to talk with you," you said flatly. "You kidnapped me. I want my documents, I want my phone, I want to get the fuck out of this-" you inhaled slowly and focused, felt your heartbeat steadying just enough to not run across the room, yelling and screaming bloody murder, "whatever this is."

"Well, I do."

Despite the fact that you've just woke up, you felt tired. Arguing with him as a child was like running against a brick wall. Talking to him as an adult proved similar - exhausting and fruitless, nothing you said ever made the smallest dent in whatever notions L had in his head, not back then and definitely not now.

A laugh bubbled in your throat, and it probably seemed more hysterical than intended. You pushed away from the wall. "You need professional help, and I need to sleep. Don't," you pointed a finger in his direction when he twitched forward. "Don't come near me."

You headed for what was supposed to be your bedroom, or rather a cell - matters of perspective. The absurdity of the situation didn't lessen when the door closed behind, but at least huddled up in a ball beneath the quilt, with the muffled sounds from the outside you could rest your head and think clearly again.

Tomorrow you will assess everything from the new angle and then...

Then everything will be fine.

Everything will be normal.

Okay.

Okay.

[max1461]

Here is an observation of common attitudes I see in tech-adjacent spaces (mostly online).

The thing about programming/tech is, at its base, it's historically and culturally contingent. There are of course many fundamental (physical and mathematical) limitations on what a computer can and cannot do, how fast it can do things, and so on. But at least as much of the modern tech landscape is the product of choices made by people about how these machines will work, choices that very much could have been made differently. And modern computing technology is a huge tower of these choices, each resting on and grappling with the ones below it. If you're, say, a web developer writing a web app, the sheer height of this tower of contingent human decisions that your work rests on is almost incomprehensible. And by and large, programmers know this.

I am not dispensing some secret wisdom that I think tech workers don't have. On the contrary, I think the vast contingency of it all is blindingly obvious to anyone who has tried to make a computer do anything. But tech is also, well, technical, and do you know what else is technical? Science. I think this has lead to a sort of cultural false affinity, where tech is perceived, both from within and without, as more similar to science than it is to the humanities. Certainly, there are certain kinds of intellectual labor that tech shares with the sciences. But there are also, as described above, certain kinds of intellectual labor that tech shares to a much greater degree with the humanities, namely (in the broadest terms): grappling with other people's choices.

From without, I think this misplaced affinity leads people to believe that technology is less contingent than it actually is. But I think this belief would be completely untenable from within; it just cannot contend with reality. I've never met a tech worker or enthusiast who seems to think this way. Rather, I feel there is a persistent perception among tech-inclined people that science is more contingent than it actually is. I don't think this misperception rises to the level of a belief, rather I think it is more of an intuition. I think tech people have very much trained themselves (rightly, in their native context) to look at complex systems and go "how could this be reworked, improved, done differently?" I think this impulse is very sensible in computing but very out of place in, say, biology. And I suppose my conjecture (this whole post is purely conjectural, based on a gut sense that might not be worth anything) is that this is one of the main reasons for the popularity of transhumanism in, you know, the Bay. And whatnot.

I'm not saying transhumanism is actually, physically impossible. Of course it's not! The technology will, I strongly suspect, exist some day. But if you're living in 2024, I think the engineering mindset is more-or-less unambiguously the wrong one to bring to biology, at least macrobiology. This post is not about the limits of what is physically possible, it's about the attitudes that I sometimes see tech people bring to other endeavors that I think sometimes lead them to fall on their face. If you come to biology thinking about it as this contingent thing that you must grapple with, as you grapple with a novel or a codebase or anything else made by humans, I think it will make you like biology less and understand it less well.

When I was younger and a lot more naive, as a young teenager who knew a little bit about programming and nothing about linguistics, I wanted to create a "logical language" that could replace natural languages (with all their irregularities and perceived inefficiencies) for the purpose of human communication. This is part of how I initially got into conlanging. Now, with an actual linguistics background, I view this as... again, perhaps not per se impossible, but extremely unlikely to work or even to be desirable to attempt in any foreseeable future, for a whole host of rather fundamental reasons. I don't feel that this desire can survive very well upon confrontation with what we actually know (and crucially also, what we don't know) about human language.

I mean, if you want to try, you can try. I won't stop you.

Anyway, I feel that holding onto this sort of mindset too intensely does not really permit engagement with nature and the sciences. It's the same way I think a lot of per se humanities people fudge engagement with the sciences, where they insist on mounting some kind of social critique even when it is not appropriate (to be clear, I think critique of scientific practices/institutions are sometimes appropriate, but I think people whose professional training gives them an instinct to critique often take it too far).

So like, I guess that's my thesis. Coding is a humanity in disguise, and I wish that people who are used to dealing with human-made things would adopt a more native scientific or naturalist mindset when dealing with science and nature.

[dapurinthos]

so i finally got around to actually reading @dedalvs's the art of language invention for the purposes of its purpose (nine years later. this is why you buy the books, people! that giant pile is going to be read). i have copious highlights and notes on paper and here are some of the replies i had for parts of the book.

(i always get a kick out of when someone positions themselves as the ‘default’ for pronunciations because i have some quirks in my pronunciations, like the absence of the cot-caught (lot-thought, also father-bother which makes me go ??? those aren’t even near the same vowel) merger present in nearly all canadian english (most north american english, really) in my vowels. that was a fun day in linguistics class (everyone else: /kʰɒt/ /kʰɒt/. me: /koːt/ /kɔːt/).)

anyway, select passages behind the cut as to not crowd up your flist dash.

oh hildegard. you would have loved the bardcore version of 'hips don't lie'.

this is the gospel truth. go look at how japanese verbs function. they’re categorized as godan, ichidan, and irregular. how are they categorized? like a nightmare. godan verbs are ones that end with -u and move through the whole fucking vowel row of the hiragana chart, which is why they’re called ‘five-level’ verbs. u want to know where this vowel change takes place? oh it’s not a suffix or a prefix. nooooo it’s in the middle of the word (only the end when it’s the -u form). kikanai > kikimasu > kiku > kikeru > kikou, for the base godan verb bases (negative, polite, dictionary form, potential, volitional conjugations).

ichidan bases are easy in comparison. the -ru ending is the only thing that changes. and then there’s the godan ones that disguise themselves as ichidan verbs.

the irregular ones are fine. they're normal. there are only two of them — suru: 'to make'; and kuru: 'to come'. they're like particles so you get things like kaiten suru: 'to rotate, spin', where it's made up of the noun kaiten: 'revolution, rotation' and my verb friend suru: 'to make', so it's literally 'to make' + 'rotation'.

i took one look at japanese godan and ichidan conjugation, kidnapped the way the irregular verbs work (suru: to do/make/etc, kuru: to come; used like particles, after an action & such, like kaiten suru: to rotate, spin, lit. rotation + to do/to make), and then backed away slowly, not making eye contact. this was the correct choice. i also believe it was why i chose not to go further in my japanese study when i was eleven/twelve-ish. that and it was impossible to study japanese in a 20 000-person town excuse me unincorporated community in southern ontario during the previous millennium.

this poor caribou. i need to work this word into my vocabulary immediately.

i have the opportunity to do something really funny with what the word for the number four will be in taizhan-jen, in the grand tradition of four = death like: sì/sǐ (mandarin), sei3/sei2 (cantonese), shi for both (japanese), tứ/tử (vietnamese), sa for both (korean). like how i decided andobi (the name of a mountain range on ando) was a compound of ando + obi, so obi now means 'mountain', 'fixed/firm' and adding the adjectival suffix gets obi'i: 'steadfast'.

[saja-star]

I swear every time I talk to someone about my work and they say "Oh! I took Linguistics 101 once!" what follows is the wildest misconception I have ever heard.

One time it was, "I took Linguistics 101 once, and I learned that language was actually invented three separate times!" I assumed she had just misspoken and clarified that writing was likely invented three times. We went on to have a longer conversation about it, which I thought was going well, until she said "So before Native Americans saw Europeans use writing, did they just communicate in grunts or something?"

Another time it was "I took Linguistics 101 once, and I learned Swahili is the perfect language!" She went on to confidently state that Swahili has no irregularities, there are no phonological rules, and everything in the language is perfectly consistent all of the time.

At least the second person was older and took linguistics a while ago. The first one had taken it last year. At my university.

[howdoesone]

How does one investigate the relationship between morphology and syntax in a language?

Morphology and syntax are two fundamental branches of linguistics that are concerned with the study of the structure and organization of language. While morphology deals with the study of the internal structure of words, syntax is concerned with the study of the structure of phrases and sentences. Both branches are interconnected and have a significant influence on the meaning and interpretation…

[kylobith]

The Languages and Linguistics of Middle Earth

Gin suilannon!

In the context of my minor programme in Celtic studies and languages, I am following a course called From Táin to Tolkien and Beyond, and today, we had a guest lecture about the languages of Middle Earth, more particularly Sindarin. Since it might be useful to some of you (out of curiosity or for your fanfictions), I thought I would share my notes and my conversations with the guest lecturer here. This was a very linguistics-driven lecture, so I will try to add explanations where I can and, hopefully, make the information more accessible. If you have any questions, you can react to this post or DM me! And beware, this is a very long post. So, without further ado, here is what I learnt.

✽ Notes on Historical Linguistics, Manuscript Tradition and the Languages of Tolkien's Middle Earth by Dr. Aaron Griffith

✣ Shared histories of languages and manuscripts are often visualised with tree diagrams to see the evolution and how they branch out

✣ Little material was published about Middle-Earth and the Elves during Tolkien's lifetime -> Most of it is part of the Legendarium -> Main periods of writing (here we only mentioned the writing processes or when a project was finished, not when they were published): - The Lost Tales (1916-1926): infancy of the Elvish languages - Sketch of The Silmarillion (1926-1930): revision of The Lost Tales and some changes brought to Elvish - Quenta Noldorinna (1930): further reworking and significant expansion of the sketch - The Hobbit (1933): originally intended as an unrelated story - Quenta Silmarillion (1937): fullest expansion of The Lost Tales and significant refinement of the languages - The Lord of the Rings (1950s): use of the mythology of all the earlier writings as a basis, reworking of the languages and massive changes in their interrelations - The Silmarillion (post-1948): based on Quenta Silmarillion, which was heavily revised after The Lord of the Rings

✣ Tolkien rarely dated his works and compositions, so it is difficult to establish a precise creative process or linear chronology of the changes brought to Middle Earth. However, he did leave us some clues: - Absolute Dating -> occasionally, Tolkien did attach dates to his manuscripts, but it remained a rare occurrence - Relative Chronology -> some compositions are dependent on changes to earlier works, so a logical chronology can be estimated (this can also be made possible by the scrap papers from Tolkien's personal records and drafts) - Handwriting -> can be misleading, but it can be a helpful tool to date pieces of distinctly different chronological layers - Nomenclature -> Tolkien frequently changed character names, so particular names can be matched with letters and extracts in which they appear - Christopher Tolkien -> his manuscript order from the twelve-volume The History of Middle-Earth series

✣ Critical asymmetry -> languages frequently split into dialects and other languages of their own, but when manuscripts are retraced according to their version of the same text (think of Arthurian romances and oral tradition being recorded at different points in time and therefore presenting different themes or characters), narratives (stories) cannot be regrouped as easily -> However, there are 2 relations between stories and languages: 1. How changes can propagate in a language system or narrative tradition 2. The relations of language families in real- (at the time of composition) or book-time (time as it passes in the stories)

✣ In natural language, change moves forward in time. This is a trend which also applies for errors in manuscript copies (irregularities in tropes, character changes, etc.)

✣ In stories, a plot development can be carried forward just like a sound can evolve in a language. However, change can occur backwards, too. For example, if a character's ancestry is modified, this can change the whole manuscript history of the story being written (by this, understand that the story must be readapted to fit the new information to maintain some consistency).

✣ Historical linguistics is concerned with the study of language change and the formation of language families (Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic languages, etc.). It does so by examining and comparing systems from different languages to see if they can be retraced to an original, common system (Welsh and Irish stemming from Proto-Celtic, for instance).

✣ Some of Tolkien's languages were intended to be related. The following languages and dialects are related in a clear, 'historical' structure, which mimics the way that languages evolve in our world: - Quenya - Sindarin - Lindarin - Noldorin - Telerin - Doriathrin - Ilkorin

✣ Elvish languages were constantly revised by Tolkien, making it challenging to determine a single 'history' (or creative process) of Elvish tongues. In their case, it is more accurate to speak of a series of histories or continua, which refer to the times at which Tolkien brought significant changes (often 1916, 1937 and post-1948). A tree diagram is thus no longer fitting to visualise them all. The diagrams overlap in a three-dimensional visualisation instead, with each layer representing the changes of each major revision.

✣ Some changes were brought solely for aesthetic purposes. Tolkien found the phonetics of Welsh and Finnish particularly pleasing to the ear and, therefore, based Sindarin and Quenya on their structures. As you probably already know, these are the two most-developed languages in the lore of Middle Earth, but he fleshed out at least four other Elvish languages (Telerin, Ilkorin, Doriathrin and Danian). There were generally more changes in Quenya (abbreviated Q).

✣ What was originally Noldorin (abbreviated N) in the 1916 and 1937 versions is now Sindarin (abbreviated S). After 1948, Noldorin became a dialect of its own, and its place in the language tree shifted. The terms and grammar remained rather consistent from one version to the next. -> example: 1916: N Balrog 'fire demon' (bal- 'anguish' + -róg 'strong') 1937: N Balrog 'fire demon' (bal- 'torment' + rhaug 'demon') 1948: S Balrog 'demon of might' (bal- 'might' + raug 'demon')

✣ Such modifications reflected the major changes brought to the stories (especially to what we now know as The Silmarillion), but they also mirror the natural linguistics evolution of real-life languages. This causes a problem, namely in the emergence of 'linguistic orphans', or words whose etymology was no longer valid because the linguistic or sound laws that birthed them in the first place were removed. -> example: Eärendil (Q 'lover of the sea', ayar- 'sea' + -ndil 'lover') 1916: eären was the genitive form (or possessive form) of eär, so the compound made sense. 1937: eäron replaced eären, but Tolkien remained particularly attached to the previous version because of the Old English éarendel -> this created a disruption in etymology, so he declared that eär/eären meant 'sea'

✣ Major sound changes introduced with The Lord of the Rings

✣ Tolkien introduced lenition in some grammatical cases. In Celtic languages, it is a rather common occurrence. It consists in the softening of a consonant at the start of a word according to certain rules. For example, the sound [p] is softened into a [b]. My knowledge of Irish is non-existent, but it is something which happens in Middle Welsh (c.1100-c.1400) and Modern Welsh. -> example: before 1972, Tolkien suggested that the name Gil-Galad ('star of brilliance', 'brilliant star') was lenited, which means that the second component of the name stems from the word calad (lenition causes the c to soften into a g). -> However, he stated in a letter in 1972 that lenition no longer occurred if 'the second noun functions as an uninflected genitive' (in other words, that the possessive is not marked with an apostrophe, 'of the', or any other marker that applied in Sindarin). This explains the merging of ost 'start' + giliath 'fortress' into Osgiliath 'fortress of the start'. If giliath was lenited, the name would instead be Osiliath or Ostiliath (when lenited, g disappears at the head of the noun). -> There is one noted inconsistency regarding the 'rule' above, and it is the case of Eryn Vorn 'Dark Forest'/'Forest of Darkness'. Eryn is a plural form of oron 'tree' and morn acts as a noun (but it is usually the adjective for 'black, dark' and morne is the noun referring to 'darkness, blackness'). Due to Welsh vowel change rules in certain plural forms, morn becomes myrn, and this very same plural form should accompany eryn (both adjective and noun adopt a plural form). Instead, we find a singular form of morn which is lenited (m becomes v). This is possibly an error accidentally left in by Tolkien.

✣ The nature of Noldorin/Sindarin makes Elvish languages rather realistic in their evolution compared to real-life languages, because irregularities occur. Dr. Griffith argues that languages naturally show irregularity because of gradual changes and borrowed words, but he acknowledges that accidents are sometimes just that. Accidents.

✽ Notes on the lecture by Dr. Aaron Griffith

✣ A general interest in creating new languages emerged in the 19th century. It was believed to be a tool which could help resolve political conflicts by creating a sense of cohesion and avoiding miscommunication. This is evident in the creation of Esperanto.

✣ In most cases of invented languages, the language was invented first, and the world or context they belonged to was formed from there. Tolkien worked exactly the other way around.

✣ Tolkien aimed to create an English myth, because he considered that England lacked its own mythology. King Arthur is generally considered Celtic in essence (possibly Welsh) and therefore could not apply as an English myth. This could explain why he retained the Gregorian calendar throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It served as a familiar bridge between Middle Earth and England/the real world.

✣ In original maps of Beleriand, there used to be land west of Ered Luin (the Blue Mountains northwest of the Shire). This was changed in later maps, which Tolkien designed and drew himself. Often, Arda was depicted as a globe with several continents. Afterwards, Tolkien decided that Arda was, in fact, flat.

✣ Backstory of the Elves (I have no knowledge of The Silmarillion, so if I did not use the right terms or names, please feel free to correct me!): - Elves first came into existence in Cuiviénen and were invited by the Valar to join them in Valinor, meaning that they had to cross the continent and the ocean - Not all Elves made it to Valinor, however. Some decided to separate from the main group and settled in different areas of Middle Earth, like in Greenwood (later known as Mirkwood). This caused the language they spoke to evolve into different dialects and, sometimes, completely separate languages - Elves returned to Middle Earth after the war against Morgoth (S; Q Melkor), aided by Númenorians - The West was physically separated from the rest of Arda by a 'cut' through the ocean. The gods then shaped Arda into a globe, but once past the portal to the Undying Lands, it was flat again.

✣ Most often, Tolkien did not provide translations of the phrases he peppered into his works, mostly because he believed that nobody would be interested in them. Once he received enthusiastic letters from readers, he decided to attach them to later versions. He did regret publishing the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, however, because the changes felt too 'final' and he felt as though he took away his own liberty to make further revisions to the material (once it's published, you cannot go back).

✣ Tolkien created quite a lot of poetry to match the phonological aesthetics of Sindarin and Quenya.

✣ Outside The Lord of the Rings, the longest source we have in Sindarin is The King's Letter, which was originally supposed to be part of the epilogue in The Return of the King but was not in the final version because he wrote it in the 1970s. In this letter written entirely in Sindarin, Aragorn (then King Elessar) invites Sam, Rosie, and their children to visit him and Arwen in Minas Tirith.

✣ Sindarin grammar is tricky to reconstruct because of the lack of sources on the matter and the complicated grammar revisions that Tolkien brought. However, we do know that it is loosely based on Welsh, which he confirmed in 'English and Welsh' in The Monsters and the Critics (published posthumously in 1983). He aimed to recreate the same 'pleasant' sounds that he found in Welsh for Sindarin. If the reader knows how to pronounce the Welsh alphabet, then they can easily pronounce Sindarin.

✣ Secondary sources on Sindarin: - A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. Salo worked as a language consultant on the films, but his book has been criticised by Tolkien scholars because it tends to ignore the changes between 1937 and 1948 and it treats Noldorin as a dialect of Sindarin, which is no longer the case from 1948 onwards. - The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth by Ruth S. Noel

✣ Primary sources are very incomplete, but the main ones we can use to observe the language are the following publications: - The Lord of the Rings - The Lost Road and Other Writings - The War of the Jewels - The Peoples of Middle-Earth

✣ As established in the previous section, Sindarin follows some of the grammatical rules present in Welsh and pre-modern Welsh. We encounter mutations, especially lenition (also called 'soft mutation' because of the sounds becoming softer, e.g. p becoming b), and they play a crucial role in the structure of Sindarin. Below is a comparison of soft mutation/lenition in the context of Welsh and then in Sindarin. -> Welsh: dyn 'man' + teg 'attractive' = dyn teg 'attractive man' merch 'girl' + teg 'attractive' = merch deg 'attractive girl' -> soft mutation after a feminine noun, t is softened into a d -> Sindarin: Perhael 'Samwise' (literally 'half-wise') Berhael 'Samwise' -> lenition when used as a direct object in a clause, p softened into a b Carm Dum 'Red Valley' (capital of Angmar) -> uses tum 'valley', but it is lenited when acting as an adjective or an adverb, t softened into a d

✣ Other forms of mutations exist in Sindarin, but this part of the lecture is quite technical and does require a basic knowledge of Welsh or Middle Welsh to be comprehensible. Feel free to message me if you wish to know more about them.

✣ Mutations arose from sound changes that affected phrases (intonational units). In other words, they are groups of words that have a single principal accent (or stress) to fluidify the manner of speech and convey a sense of emphasis. For instance, not every word is stressed separately in the sentence 'I am going to the supermarket'. The stress is applied by the speaker to highlight their meaning. Is 'I' emphasised to insist that it is 'I' who is going to the supermarket? Is 'supermarket' stressed to insist that it is the supermarket that I am going to, and not another location?

✣ Mutations are inherited from Welsh and its earlier forms. The same is true between Pre-Sindarin (or what Tolkien then referred to as Noldorin) and Sindarin. -> Welsh: atar evolved into adar 'bird' (lenition of t into a d) -> Sindarin: atar evolved into adar 'father' (same pattern)

✣ No cases in Sindarin verbs, unlike in Quenya. This means that there is no Nominative, Genitive, Dative or Accusative.

✣ Like in Welsh, again, some plural forms of nouns involve what we call a vowel change. This means that according to a regular pattern, the vowels contained within a noun are not the same between their singular and their plural forms. In Sindarin, the vowel change and suffixes help to mark plurals. As far as I'm aware, the changes are identical in Welsh, so if you wish to use Sindarin in your own work, have a look at the vowel changes rules and you should be able to form your own plurals. Please note that it occurs with both non-final and final syllables. -> examples: - adan 'man' -> edain 'men' - certh 'rune' -> cirth 'runes' - annon 'gate' -> ennyn 'gates' - amon 'hill' -> emyn 'hills' - mellon 'friend' -> mellyn 'friends' - Dúnadan 'Man of the West' -> Dúnedain (u is not affected)

✣ Suffixes are another way to mark plurals. -> examples: - harad 'south' + rim 'multitude' = Haradrim 'Southrons, Men of the South' - hadhod 'dwarf' + rim 'multitude' = Hadhodrim 'Dwarves (as a race)'

✣ Compounds are common as well. -> example: - morne 'darkness, blackness'/morn 'dark, black' + ia 'pit, gulf' = Moria

✽ Questions I asked Dr. Griffith directly and his answers

✣ Q: In your article and in the PowerPoint presentation, you sometimes mark terms with an asterisk first (e.g. *rokko-khēru-rimbe when you discuss the origin of the term 'Rohirrim'). What does this notation refer to? ✣ A: An asterisk before a form means that it is not actually found anywhere, but we assume it must have existed. In this case, *rokko-khēru-rimbe is the form of Rohirrim as it would have been pronounced in Old Sindarin, but we don't actually have the word anywhere in a written text

✣ Q: For Rohirric/Rohanese, we know that the language that Tolkien based it on was Old English and that terms were directly borrowed from it (e.g. grīma 'mask' or þeoden 'lord, prince, king'), or that names and phrases from Beowulf have been peppered in the lore of Rohan (e.g. Éomer is a character mentioned once, and the first line sung by Miranda Otto in the 'Lament for Théodred' is a line from Beowulf as well). Unfortunately, it seems that the sources on the languages are few, but do we know his reasoning or process in tweaking and applying Old English to create Rohirric/Rohanese? Do we know, perhaps, how the grammar differed from Old English? ✣ A: We don't really know anything about the language of the Rohirrim. Tolkien chose Old English as a sort of cipher. What I mean is: the language of Middle Earth is called Westron, and the Rohirrim spoke a very archaic dialect of it. Tolkien represented this by having them use Old English/archaic forms. He talks about this in one of the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, though I don't remember which one.

✣ Q: In your opinion, is it realistic to compose texts in Quenya or Sindarin, considering that we do not really have a cultural context behind them that is fully explicit? By this, I mean that since idioms and certain concepts are intrinsically tied to their cultural context, is it possible to actually use the Elvish languages to compose new texts altogether? ✣ A: It is possible to compose texts in Quenya and Sindarin. People do it. Obviously, some things are simply impossible to know: how would you say 'computer' or 'shopping mall'? And for other things, we cannot really know since only Tolkien really had the 'true understanding' of Elvish languages and cultures necessary for some text production. That said, people do do it. I don't know much about it, though, I'm afraid.

For those who are interested, I have Dr. Griffith's article, the PowerPoint presentation with sources and vocabulary on it, as well as a handout with Noldorin and Old Noldorin. Dr. Griffith also sent me some extra sources, let me know if you want me to send them to you! If you have questions, I can always try to contact Dr. Griffith again, he is the coordinator of my Middle Welsh course, so I'm bound to bump into him again, and he is genuinely excited to discuss all things Tolkien :) @konartiste @from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras @lucifers-legions @emmanuellececchi @hippodameia

[sovietpostcards]

Hey! Are you from Russia? If you are - how was your process with learning English? I've been learning Russian for a few years now and cases are kicking my ass to this day

I am Russian and I live in Russia. My process was quite long and not always effective. I started getting English lessons at grade 2 at school (I was 7 then). We had English all throughout school until the last, 11th grade. Although it was so many years, it didn't give me much in terms of actually knowing the language. We had a different teacher every year, we had no motivation and we weren't really required to speak in order to pass, you'd be OK if you learnt the words. I did learn all irregular verbs by heart at school, which eventually proved very handy.

By year 11 I decided I quite liked English and wanted to get into Linguistics in uni. (Spoiler: didn't happen.) My parents hired a private teacher for me and I spent a whole year taking lessons. She was a very methodical woman and gave me what I needed—a system. By the end of school I had a clear understanding of tenses, sentence structure, articles etc.

After that I was on my own. I always had a lot of interests and I put them to use for learning English. Like, in the year 1999 I would be on the dial-up internet looking for the Backstreet Boys lyrics and then translating them using a pen, a paper notebook and a heavy dictionary.

In 2000 I got my first pen pals from outside of Russia and started writing letters in English—a great way to put your language skills to work.

I've always read a lot—articles, forums, letters, books. A lot of my language comes from there. I will often use a tense or choose an article based on "it feels good, familiar" rather than because I know a rule.

I feel truly sorry for everyone who has to battle the Russian grammar, you're a hero for even trying! I'm glad I don't have to learn that if I'm honest. English grammar it so much simpler. But Russian offers a lot of fun ways to play with words and make your own! It's like lego, get some bricks and start building. :D There's also tons of stuff in Russian on the internet, find something that interests you and take a dive.

Good luck! Do come by sometimes to brag of new accomplishments. :)

[pcketdmnsion]

gender & sexuality words:

runa - gender neutral term for human / person.

tinkuy - liminal space of unity, complementary forces, convergence, meeting of elements, roughly translates to nonbinary.

warmi - woman - feminine

qari - man - masculine

tikrachisqa [qari / warmi / runa.] - transgender / transformed people: tikrachisqa qari, tikrachisqa warmi, tikrachisqa runa, so on, so forth.

chakachisqa [qari / warmi / runa.] - transgender / trans meaning extending across, through, or over: crossing people: chakachisqa qari, chakachisqa warmi, chakachisqa runa. (alternative based on cross-linguistic analysis featuring the arabic language term for transgender, old based on transform / change [mutaħawwil] and new based on trans / extending across [ʕābir/ʕābira])

ch’usaq - zero - absent / agender

runapuri - genderfluid

warmiqari - feminine man*

qariqari - masculine man*

qariwarmi - man-woman* / masculine-feminine* / masculine woman* / liminal-gendered / historical transvestite {considered analogous to two-spirit identities in the north.}

warmiwarmi - feminine woman*

chiqan - straight / hetero

chinaku / warminchu - gay (qaripura kuyay - love among men / MLM)

qarinchu / ushuta - lesbian (warmipura kuyay - love among women, basically our way of saying WLW)

q’iwa - translates as necessary or sacred irregularity in life (surprise) or .. as we westerners say… being queer . dotty. pansy-like. a dandy. (also means imperfection, coward, could refer to any number of perceived flaws)

chawpinpashña - demigirl

chawpinmaqta - demiboy

yuquchu - asexual

kuyachu - aromantic

kaqllapura kuyay - homoromantic

chiqanpura kuyay - heteromantic

iskaypura kuyay - biromantic

llapanpura kuyay - panromantic

iskaypura yuquy - bisexual

kaqllapura yuquy - homosexual

chiqanpura yuquy - heterosexual

llapanpura yuquy - pansexual

(*doesnt take sexuality into account fyi)

[ukfrislandembassy]

OK, let me expand a little on my point about conlangs and theory. See, morphology in particular does get the short stick (as I intimated in my previous post), and I think that's a shame (not that I'm biased), but it's partly because it's a shame that the kinds of complexity we see in natural language don't come up anywhere near as often as they should.

See, there's actually very little consensus among linguists about what makes a language 'complex'. I tend to follow the heuristics of Östen Dahl in The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity (2004), where he takes a minimum description length approach; the more rules required to give a complete description of a language, the more complex it is. He then goes on to divide that into 'richness', which in effect refers to the size of the lexicon but also to number of e.g. inflectional categories expressed; and 'structural complexity', which is how many different operations you need to encapsulate the relationship between the forms found (note that this is about description only, not making assumptions as to the mental grammar or anything). As implied by the terminology, the former per the discussion of the book isn't strictly 'complexity' per se, so freeing us to talk about languages being 'rich' in the former and 'complex' in the latter.

Now here's the thing, conlangs in my experience only tend to be rich, not actually complex. You'll have loads of categories, like a long list of TAM forms, but if they're all agglutinative affixes your system isn't really complex per this typology. My (admittedly somewhat anecdotal) impression though is that it's just as common for languages to be complex but not especially rich than vice-versa, if not more so.

That's how you get languages like Nuer, where nouns only have three cases and singular-plural contrast, yet these categories are expressed in a myriad different ways. Neither Skolt Sámi nor Chichimec verbs inflect for all that much either. Jê languages don't inflect their verbs for much, but the category they do express (finiteness) has all kinds of strategies to mark it. Welsh nouns only really inflect for number, but there's oodles of forms (including some singulatives). Heck, all of English's irregular verbs are good example of this kind of thing really, there's really a lot of this kind of thing going on when you actually start looking.

Now I do agree, as people have noted in the comments to that post, this kind of stuff is in some ways a bit less straightforward than regular morphology, but I honestly think it's a lot more rewarding. And this is not to say that there are no conlangs that do this kind of thing (Ronc Tyu and to some extent the Rompian family as a whole are good examples I would say, especially if we can get the Akana Project wiki working again...), I just with there were more I suppose.