#linguistics stuff

[wisteria-lodge]

In defense of T'Pau and her unusual grammar:

So in "Amok Time," (right before Spock goes into heat) we meet T'Pau, this grand high elder of Vulcan who is officiating Spock's wedding/fight to the death.

She has a very specific way of talking. Some examples:

"Thee names these outworlders friends. How does thee pledge their behavior?" "If thee wishes to depart, thee may leave now." "Are thee Vulcan or are thee human? "I grieve with thee."

If this is supposed to sound archaic and Shakespearean... then it's just completely wrong. "Thee" is not even slightly conjugated. If you're using thee/thou/thy correctly, that first sentence should be:

"Thou name'st these outworlders friends. How dost thou pledge?"

BUT my point is, I don't think this is supposed to read as "archaic" (also, if that were the case, wouldn't the universal translator just kinda auto-update the vocab?)

What is actually going on is Quaker Plain Speech.

Thee/Thou/Thy used to be English's set of informal pronouns, which you used for close friends and social inferiors. The Quakers came over to America in the 1600s, and were very into the idea of simplicity and equality for religious reasons. No titles, "Friend" as the default address, etc. They also artificially got rid of You/Your/Yours, English's *formal* pronouns, because they were what you used for talking to a social superior, and they were trying to get away from that sort of thing.

Skip forward like a hundred years. Language changes. Standard English drops Thee/Thou/Thy completely. The Quakers KEEP the pronouns, but the usage simplifies. Now they basically just have "Thee," and use it for everything, and don't conjugate the verbs around it in any special way. "In the eighteenth century, "thou hast" disappeared, along with the associated second-person verb forms, and the otherwise strange "thee is" became normal "plain speech."

Which is EXACTLY how T'Pau talks.

(I found this scene from The Philadelphia Story (1940) where Jimmy Stewart walks into a Quaker library, and the joke is that the librarian talks to him in Plain Speech - "What is thee wish?" and he (confused) responds in Shakespearean English - "Dost thou have a washroom?")

So I think that when Theodore Sturgeon wrote "Amok Time" in 1967, T'Pau's style of speaking was meant to communicate not necessarily "old-fashioned" but more "religious/ceremonial" and maybe "isolated." Especially since he's from New England, the right spot to run into Plain Speech in the wild.

In-universe, I think that (because it's a very important occasion) T'Pau is speaking a hyper-simplified, hyper-logical ceremonial Vulcan dialect, which the universal translator is rendering as the most stripped-down and "plain" English style of speaking possible.

[mellxncollie]

someone stop me before i spend weeks too much time transcribing every episode to then do corpus analysis on charles' and edwin's speech patterns

[sillysanddweller]

theres this linguistic thing i cant stop thinking abou t where like. IDRK WHERE I HEARD ABT IT FROM it might be korean but i swear theres some language that like. has two of the same phoneme in a row . but not geminated its like distinctly two phonemes. specifically in the word. susujeo /sʊ.sʊ.d͡ʒo/ ?. okay so like this but the first two vowels get elided so its like /s.s.d͡ʒo/ but the /s/ dont sound like a geminate

it might be a stress thing? like /ˈs.s./

or maybe its a tone within the consonant? if thats a thing? /s˥.s˩/

its really inchresting to me . if anybody could educate me abt it or smth i would greatly appreciate

[boyslit-moving]

i started hiding 'y'all' in my speech when i was a kid bc the private school kids were so like, vicious? about like farming and shit being some kind of undesirable fate. even though a good quarter of the kids were actually farm kids

now that there's a bigger need for gender neutral address i pulled it back out a handful of years ago and it's just really a comfortable word. we don't have a single word for plural 'you' anymore in english aside from 'youse' or 'yall' which aren't considered 'proper'. you know what i hate the term proper let's call it basegame english. regional dialects are expansion packs

anyway. i like y'all. :) good word

[inthemosss]

@official-linguistics-post, got one for ya

tumblr: on languages

[wisteria-lodge]

In Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them, Tina uses "Mercy Lewis" as a grammatical intensifier/swear word a la "merlin" (1)

Mercy Lewis was one of the main witch-accusers during the Salem witch trials. Which makes her a really, really weird choice for Tina to evoke.

and I'm literally trying to figure out the thought process here.

OPTION ONE

"Mercy Lewis" is supposed to evoke the concept of a betrayer, like "Benedict Arnold" or "Brutus." (Like maybe she was a squib or something?) Idk, even typing that out feels in such bad taste. Merlin wasn't real. Nicholas Flamel was real, but all JKR says about him was "he made the Philosopher's Stone," which - considering that the real guy was indeed working on that... okay? Mercy Lewis was a real girl in real American history who really got people killed.

AND it doesn't even make sense linguistically. I'd sort of understand if Tina called someone "a Mercy Lewis" or "you're such a Mercy Lewis" after they betrayed her. But that's not the context?

OPTION TWO

Mercy Lewis is indeed a muggle, and so that would make this... anti-muggle hate speech? Like, I could KINDA see a world where "Mercy Lewis" was just a kind of stereotypical, mean way to refer to "Any Muggle." When Tina's being dismissive about Jacob she could have said something like "Forget Mercy Lewis over there, follow me." (but that's not the context in which it's used?)

Like we do know that Tina specifically hates Mary-Lou Barebone, who is a muggle that really hates witches and calls her group "Second Salem." Is this line meant to be drawing a parallel between Mercy Lewis and Mary-Lou Barebone. Or are we just looking for ANY way for Tina to KIND of bring up Salem, because it's sort of relevant to her villain?

OPTION THREE

This is some kind of a mistake. JKR wanted to use the name of one of the Salem Witches as an American equivalent for "Merlin" (still in bad taste but... I get it? ) And so she pulled up a list of names, and accidentally got the name of one of the people who were accusing people of being witches, instead of one of the actual 'witches.' She just kind of liked the ring of the name "Mercy Lewis" and went with it.

I can't help but think that this is just a small example of JKR being just... kinda careless, and kinda lazy, and kinda tasteless about non-European history. Like I am positive I just put more thought into this little moment than JKR ever, ever has.

~

(1) It is weird that "Merlin" is used as swear word at all, because in the HP series Merlin seems to be culturally important, but not a religious figure (which is generally how swear words work, the *thing* you're swearing by needs to be sacred, and 'profaning' it just communicates your level of Seriousness).

Of course, the Wizarding World seems to be completely atheist, which is is fine, and if I SQUINT, I can make "merlin" work in an "enlightenment science boner" way, like 'oh the muggles are hyper-religious and backwards, once we split from them we're going in entirely the opposite direction.' The French Revolution was aggressively atheist, and so was the Communist revolution, and you do have cultural important names like "Lenin" "Engles" "Marx" treated in a linguistically semi-religious way, okay. it's a thing.

but in The Cursed Child they start using "Dumbledore" as a swear word and that's so creepy and I hate it.

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

my favorite thing right now is how mad the official french language people are that parts of african languages are getting mixed into french

[bucephaly]

Theres moreeee, this is so so good.. it makes me emotional realizing that these kids are on the path to being fluent cherokee speakers and will be able to keep the language going.

This family is a part of the little cherokee seeds program, creating new first language Cherokee speakers by paying mothers to just bring their babies and craft and cook and speak cherokee with cherokee elders all day. There are only 1500 first language Cherokee speakers, most of them over 65. They also take donations if you want to help keep them going and doing the extremely important work they do!!

[wisteria-lodge]

(it counts because even though old french is of course derived from latin, the medieval latin "scalare" and the old french "escale" were around at the same time, and did mean different things)

in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other

[brazilspill]

Once the friend of a friend of my mom's was visiting Rio and she saw Sugarloaf Mountain and she wanted to impress her taxi driver with her knowledge of Portuguese, so she said in Portuguese "Look, Sugarloaf [Mountain]! It's very big!".

Unfortunately, English native speakers have a hard time making the "ão" sound correctly since the sound doesn't exist in English, so instead of saying "pão de açúcar" (literally, bread of sugar), she said "pau de açúcar." Now, "pau" technically just means "wood," but it's also, unfortunately for her, slang for "penis."

So to the driver what he heard was "Look at the sugar dick! it's so big!" and he almost crashed the car from laughing so hard.

[wisteria-lodge]

so the thing about the sloppy hp worldbuilding is that it often does something interesting by accident

today's case study: the Malfoy family motto.

(it seems to have been a piece of production design set dressing, but they ran all that kind of stuff by JKR, and I see this frickin motto quoted everywhere.) anyway.

SANCTIMONIA VINCET SEMPER

This is always translated as "Purity Always Conquers." And I'm guessing that the idea is that the "pure" part is supposed to refer to y'know "pure blood." But like - "sanctimonia" just doesn't mean that. The Romans didn't have a concept of blood purity - so long as the family *name* continued, you were good. Adult adoption for political reasons was as common as marriage for political reasons. Adopting slaves was a thing... whatever.

If JKR had actually want to translate the "pure blood" concept into latin, the better choice would have been something like "eugenium vincet semper" or "the well born/good quality always conquers." Also the word makes you think of it's reflex "eugenics," which I guess is supposed to be the point.

What "sanctimonia" actually means is pure in the sense of chaste/virtuous/sacred. So okay. "Chastity always conquers," doesn't make sense as a family motto." "Virtue always conquers" ... I guess that could be meant ironically? And "The sacred always conquers," requires a little bit of thinking about, because the wizards in HP are pretty darn areligious.

So okay. I'll do "sacred" in the latin sense of "set apart, not of the ordinary world." in which case... the better translation would be something like "The Self-Contained Always Conquer" ???

which is honestly a *REALLY* interesting motto, and for the Malfoys specifically.

[kuroashims]

ֆօʍɛ ֆɨʍʟɨֆɦ քɦʀǟֆɛֆ ʏօʊ ʍɨɢɦȶ ʄɨռɖ ʊֆɛʄʊʟ ɨռ ʟɨʄɛ

hello : sul sul! / what's up : bloo bagoo? / how are you : cuh teekaloo? / i'm hungry : oh feebee lay / something in my way : choo waga choo choo! / you've got some nerve : firby nurbs / yes : yeibs / no : neib / oh my god : jamoo / woah this is fun : bum bum! / anyone home : nash na poof? / are you serious right now : ugh...groble! / you! yes you! go away : depwa spanewash depla blah! / excuse-me! get out of the way : blursh! meshaloob blursh! / i don't like you : boobasnot / no bullying : yabihorn! / i'm so bored : uhh shamoo ralla poo / happy birthday : humple borpnah! / this food is delicious : dis wompf es fredesche / thank you : vadish / nothing is impossible if you believe : benzi chibna looble bazebni gweb / cat : minicule / dog : woofum / baby is upset : aw crankus nooboo! / i'm pregnant : baba / i think you're hot : za woka genava / selfie : ongie! / i need a taxi : nicloske ga gloop / see you soon : geelfrob / i love you : por see gab lurv / live laugh love : leeb leefuh lurve / i'm on fire : wabadeebadoo! / goodbye : dag dag

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

hope you feel better soon!

I am riddled with ailments, but I stay silly!

[boyslit-moving]

i went looking for examples of Ohio River valley area accents and found this one which was pretty good and close to how i talk

Cincinnati Accent (video)

But the Hoosier Apex is probably the closest thing since well, that's where I've been trapped all my life lol

rb this and tell me what ur accent is. this has no purpose except the fact i just realized i could have like... mutuals with cockney accents or newfoundland accents or something and thats just wild

[loser-pet]

shoutout to all the neurodivergent folks whose verbal language alternates between:

eloquent and fully articulate speech, filled with emotion and detail. where every word is thoughtful and is strung together perfectly to prevent misunderstanding. at times, even using words that are almost unknown or wildly underused by normal people. where grammar and proper conjugation is ideal, and everything is in there for a reason. communication is fluent and flows smoothly between thoughts, and is not unlike a medieval herald recounting a message to their townsfolk

and:

short sentence. not much word used. broken grammar; no want to be proper. don’t want speak, but must speak, so little speak. sometime not even speak real word, sometimes garbled mismash of words. lots of umm and uhh and stutters. no tone, sound like computer even.

(I am that neurodivergent critter lol)