#linguistic nerdery

[prokopetz]

Wait a second: cuckoos are nest parasites. Do "cuckoo" and "cuckold" share a common root?

Huh. Apparently the etymology of "cuckold" is literally something along the lines of "cuckoo-lord".

[goingsparebutwithprecision]

ok so I'm trying some of the suggested Duolingo replacements and so far I've got to say Busuu is a Vast improvement on The Owl - actual explanations of grammar, idioms and manners/set phrases, videos of people saying the phrases so it feels like real people, a wide mix of testing exercises including true or false, translation mix-and-match, filling in gaps in conversations you've listened to etc. It also has short courses specifically tailored to what you're learning for, so for a holiday or business or living in the country etc. Plus there's a feature where you can help out people learning your native language by suggesting corrections to their exercises, which I haven't used yet but seems like a great idea.

[nocompromise-noregrets]

it is DONE (and so am I)

Just finished and submitted my final assignment for my final module in my OU course. As long as I haven't totally sodded it up, I should in a few weeks officially be the King's favourite band (the Three Degrees, badum-tsh!) and in possession of a BA in Language Studies with English and German. Now...on to the MA in Translation Studies (my original intention)? Spend a year brushing up my German and then do the translation MA? Or...indulge my inner Systemic Functional Linguistics nerd and do the MA in Applied Linguistics first? Decisions, decisions. Eternal studenthood appears to beckon at last, regardless. I am DELIGHTED. :D

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

So I’m interested in the thing you taught about Anglo-Saxons pushing the celts out of land- do you know how far north they pushed?

I’m Scots, and I have an interest in our history, but to be honest almost all of my knowledge of it comes from post-1000, with the exception of a few local myths about Viking raiders being scared off by a mother wolf.

So I’d love to ask what you know- and I’ll just say that, because you talk about the welsh language a lot, I would be interested in what you think of the work to revive Gaelic as a primary language of this country- my Nans all for it, but most other people think it’s not working the way it has in wales because Gaelic was never spoken across the country Welsh was- my mums family is from old Norse speaking ancestry/cities and the local area was more likely to speak French than Gaelic (my dads English with a clan surname so some Highland Clearance stuff definitely happened and also for about 50 years round about bonnie prince Charlie that name was banned/got you shot so some *shit* presumably happened)

In terms of how far they pushed, this is the map of the Heptarchy, i.e. their furthest extent:

So a bit of the Scottish south east. You see Strathclyde on there? That was the Brythonic part! This is why Glasgow is a Welsh name in origin. Cousins!

In terms of Gàidhlig revival (I'm not correcting you with the spelling, I just have friends who speak it and that's their preference lol), it's certainly a lot more complicated than it is in Wales, for numerous reasons. One is admittedly that Scotland has always been inherently multicultural - even before the Anglo-Saxons, the north was Pictish, the west was Goidelic (Dal Riada spanned west Scotland and modern northern Ireland), the south was Brythonic, and the islands have long been a spirited mix of Norse and Other. Each of those spoke their own language. Then came the Heptarchy, which birthed Scots, and then the Vikings in earnest... By contrast, Wales just spoke Welsh. Different dialects, sure, and infusions from elsewhere, but country-wide, we just had the one thing.

And then there's the sheer weight of numbers. The current percentage of the population that speaks Gàidhlig is, to my knowledge, less than two percent, which is an incredibly challenging position to be in. By contrast, the lowest Welsh ever slid to was seventeen percent, back in the Eighties, and today it's about thirty. That's much easier to pull off.

I should clarify here, of course, that I am not about to speak on behalf of Scottish people. Whether Gàidhlig is representative, whether it SHOULD be revived, those are ultimately debates for Scots to have, I'm nobody. But since you asked directly I can share my very Welsh-influenced perspective.

Firstly, any country-wide bilingualism is unilaterally a good thing. Without exception. Every country in the world should be aiming for it with *something*, regardless of what it is. There is no harm from raising a bilingual child. It's literally good for the brain.

Secondly, any language at all is a beautiful, unique thing that acts as a memory crystal for the culture and philosophy attached to it. If you lose one, you lose something important that can't be replaced. Here's an example! Translating between Korean and English pronouns is often a challenge, because Korean doesn't have the gender markers that English needs, but English doesn't have the age/social status markers that Korean needs. That tells you something fascinating about both of those cultures, and the philosophy and worldview they hold. Gàidhlig is not yet dead. There is time to save it. It is unique; it's a repository for so much of an older Scottish culture that otherwise might be lost. Why not save it?

Thirdly, why place the pressure on it to be a language spoken by all of Scotland? Does it need to be? Because there wasn't a pan-Scottish language, not until English, and that one was spread through imperialism. You won't find an alternative that was spoken by everyone. Does that mean you shouldn't bother with any of them? Well; see point one. But also...

If the issue is a lack of 'identity' - this was not spoken in my area, so I don't identify with it - it was still nonetheless a Scottish language. It's still unique and endemic to the country you now identify with. It's therefore still yours. And what's preventing someone learning something appropriately local as well? Fuck it, if you're from the south, learn Welsh. Pictish was lost - it can't be saved anymore. But it looks like it was Brythonic, so again, there's always Welsh as the closest analogue. But Gàidhlig is still Scottish, unique to the country, whereas Welsh is more pan-British.

So yeah, those are my very rambly thoughts that I have not actually pondered deeply at all. I shall now bow out of that particular conversation and leave it to the Scots

[qwertystop]

Independent deciphering of Tunic

So, as @lazodiac continues to play Tunic, I continue to take notes alongside her and try to figure out the language. Yes, I know other people have figured this out by now – no spoilers, I want to do it myself.

With a great deal of her additional help in transcribing my handwritten notes to text files, I now have those attempts digitized, and I've written some code to try to parse it all.

So far:

I'm confident that the marks noted as "E" and "C", the verticals along the right edge of a hex glyph, are only meaningful as the "Q" and "Z" from the left edge of the following glyph; there are no cases of these marks being present in the last hex of a word (i.e. before whitespace).

Despite this, though, there are still 274 distinct hex glyphs present in my notes (just observations from gameplay; I have not transcribed the manual at all). This conflicts with our previous phonetic-English understanding, derived from commonalities between words currently understood as "you", "use", "guards", "guardhouse", "gun", and most recently the "zzzz" onomatopoeia.

I have one potential solution to this in mind, that being that glyphs should be split along the horizontal centerline into two consecutive phonemes. I have not yet adjusted the code to test this theory.

Code, scanned notes, and transcripts can all be found below on GitHub:

[dramatic-dolphin]

you can take the girl out of the linguistics class but you can't take the linguistics nerdery out of the girl. or whatever.

[nazmazh]

Etymological Weirdness I learned today

FULL Spoilers relating to today's Semantle Puzzle (#669) below the fold. Go do the puzzle yourself before reading, if you're so-inclined.

As part of my participation on the r/semantlegameplayers subreddit, I like to include some hints for the words, including basic facts, like word length, part of speech, and first letter.

And one not-so basic fact I've become fond of - Word Origins:

Okay, so today's answer was: remain

And you might expect it's a weird orphan of sorts.

"Main" as a verb these days is more of a modern back-formation after all. One context is a re-shortening of the compound word "mainline", used in the context of drugs, but then expanded out to any addiction (ie: you might mainline TV all day in the same way that an addict mains heroin all day). The other context that I see main as a verb in is pretty much a game thing - When a game has multiple classes/playstyles/modes/etc., you can *main* a specific one of those - A strong preference over all others, but not necessarily 100% exclusive. "I main Reaper in Overwatch"; "I main Tank for group stuff in MMOs", for example.

So maybe the original use of "main" as an English verb that the re- prefix was applied to was lost to time?

Well, here's the thing. It never existed in the first place.

Main and remain are completely etymologically unrelated.

Even going back to Proto-Indo-European, it appears as though they stem from entirely separate roots.

They're the result of a bit of meaning-divergence and then spelling/pronunciation-convergence

Main, in the English sense is a adjective and noun (with occasional/specific context usage as an adverb, and the later back-formation of the verb) derived from a Germanic (most likely Old Norse) source, related to strength, power, and eventually stemming from those, prominence. It is an old word that existed (in some form) in Old English prior to 900 CE.

There was no verb form to prefix.

Remain, in the English sense, didn't appear until sometime between 1375-1425, and was a verb (and noun, though generally with some modification in English, ie: remains/remainder/remnant) adapted from French. It has Latin roots, which are believed to go further back to Persian, with a Greek intermediary.

It actually came about as a bit of a pronunciation/stress change on the French word remanoir, with the emphasis being moved to the prefix.

Now, the re- prefix means "back", which makes it a little redundant with manoir and the Latin root manere, which also mean "to stay/ to remain" - We do have "stay back" in English, so that's kind of the same idea - The repetition of ideas for emphasis in-context.

But, that meant that manoir as an independent word was easy enough to discard for English.

Except, you might notice a similarity to another English word there. And you'd be right. The noun meaning of manoir, as "a dwelling / a place for remaining/staying" did carry on into English as "manor" and other related words like "mansion" and "manse".

In a weird bit of re-convergence, you could describe a manor house on an estate as the main house, taking the Norse-derived adjective and turning the likewise-Germanically-derived "house" and arriving at a more similar-sounding / meaning as the French-derived manor/mansion by sheer coincidence as the two sources of the "main"/"man-" sound are completely etymologically unrelated.

I honestly never would have thought that "remain" was more closely related to "manor" than "main" was to either of them.

[redpensandplaywriting]

I absolutely love investigating the history of words (I keep the Online Etymology Dictionary handy in my bookmarks), and I also love to share my weird facts with y'all, so have a look at some of my favourite etymologies! They're FASCINATING.

[fictionadventurer]

Rejoice with me, for I have finished reading all the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings! With this, my trilogy reread is complete, and I am ever-more-firmly convinced that Johnny Tolkien was a massive nerd.

[rionsanura]

small spelling PSA

language changes and that’s natural and good.

however, sometimes echoes of the past reverberate through the current changes in ways writers might not intend.

for example: every time someone starts a resigned/frustrated exclamation with

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whelp,

i picture either

a small puppy or bear or seal or something, or

an unsympathetic Olde Timey fantasy noble calling young people sons of bitches as an insult

because “whelp” already meant a baby carnivore (or giving birth to baby carnivores).

when people spell it “welp,” it has only the connotation of saying “well” resignedly and immediately shutting your mouth on the end of the word.

[centwithlove]

You know how on the internet, capitalization had expanded to things that are Important? This gives me the idea of someone who actively uncapitalizes the words for things they dislike or despise.

"Oh, look, its Jeff, joe, and Eileen."

"I live in the united states of america."

"i'm sorry."

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of linguistic trivia is that in Ancient Greek, the word ἰχώρ (cognate to the modern English "ichor") is attested in extant literature to mean both "the bodily fluid which gods possess instead of blood", and also "gravy", which implies several things about Ancient Greek culinary culture's attitude toward gravy.

[mikansei]

the frustrating part of writing a canonical genius is that i myself am not a genius, and to make some of kisuke's science-speak believable i find myself stumbling thru wikipedia articles on particle physics like a bull in a china shop

the fun part of writing a canonical genius is that technically i can make kisuke say little bastard words like "dark matter and dark energy are just reishi and reiryoku" anyway, b/c bleach worldbuilding is like 'whose line': the magic's made up so the physics don't matter

[lindwurmkai]

i have a "language" tag and a "languages" tag but hell if i can remember what exactly the difference between them was supposed to be most days

[falderaletcetera]

'"...this noble background would certainly make Duchess Calpurnia Higginsworth-Cobb a valuable third to such a ragtag would-be emreh, and the Duchess's smolderingly protective behavior towards Krejjh and Translator Jeeter certainly would support such," uh… "fish…bullying"? Krejjh?' 'Gossip.' 'Doesn’t "jorssjay" refer to waterlife?' 'Yeah, it's an expression.' 'Okay, I'm sorry, but I need to know how they got from A to B on that one. Need it like air.'

— The Strange Case Of Starship Iris season 2 episode 5.5: Interlude

[cleverthylacine]

I don't think "the both of ___" is a Midwestern thing? It's more common in the US than UK but I can't find anything online suggesting that it's a Midwesternism specifically?

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/08/bigger-than-the-both-of-us.html

(Hope this isn't pedantic, I just went looking because as a midwesterner I wouldn't know if it's just us or not, and found this interesting!)

Oh, that's very interesting. I love stuff like this!

I grew up in West Virginia and I don't recall ever hearing it before I lived in Ohio, but it's possible that I never noticed it before I met either of the two people (both from Wisconsin, weirdly) who said it so much it annoyed me.

But apparently it's common enough in Ireland!