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Halfway through that paragraph I'm thinking more common in Mexico? It doesn't look like a Nahua word. Maybe it's some fossilized Iberian word that lost popularity in—"free of lice."

oh.

🇲🇽 Spanish Word Wheel - El Firulais 🐶

El Firulais - Dog

• Where is the dog?

• Dónde está el firulais?

Explanation: Of course, the standard spanish word for dog is “el perro”. But in Mexican Spanish it is common to use “el firulais” to refer to a dog. During World War 2, many Mexican farm workers would cross into the United States to work and the American inspectors would ask them if their dogs were “free of lice”. “Free of lice” later turned into “firulais”.

[Gif not mine]

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you shouldn't be given a therapist who is younger than you until you're like 45. i feel like i need to have my shit together compared to this young wippersnapper (who is 3-4 years younger than me).

this isn't fair.

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I really appreciate the context, glad you knew so much about the study! Interesting that there are so many inconsistencies from the beginning. I wonder if Borodistky was just too attached to the idea he was testing?

Actually—her actions kind of give me an idea of why linguists are so prickly about the hypothesis in general. Linguistic determinism is a neat idea, and it gave us Arrival/The Story of Your Life. But at the same time, there's some issues that are baked into the concept, at least historically.

I think it's sort of like prescriptivism (which of course, we all have to sign an oath to destroy in Linguistics 101): they both

depends on a rigid, uncritical view of both language and others and

casts a dark shadow on the history of linguist research

In prescriptivism, you start from ideas like "they are bad at grammar" and ask questions like, "is it because they aren't educated properly?" Linguists are all trying live better than their racist dad, the English linguist from My Fair Lady who fixed Eliza by curing her brutish Cockney accent. (And other, much more racist real-world examples.)

In linguistic determinism (or the thinking that led up to it), you start from ideas like "Germans are really strict" and ask questions like, "is it because their language is aglutinating?" Maybe I'm overthinking this, but there's a way that linguistic determinism looks a bit like phrenology.

I've written myself into a corner here. I don't think having Sapir-Whorf ideas makes you racist, or that research into it is trivial—I'm just talking about the other person's question about consensus on Sapir-Whorf in the field. I wonder if the shadow of prescriptivism and other issues with pre-modern linguistics play into why a lot of us are the way we are about Sapir-Whorf.

TLDR some people have been weird about language, historically

Types of linguistics posts you see online:

Linguistics content

Blatantly false etymologies

"What's the reason for German being the ugliest language alive?"

College freshman who just reinvented the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from scratch

"I just learned my sixth language. What language should I learn next?"

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here is the quoted tweet:

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Progressive policies did this.

Progressive voters did this.

Ranked choice did this, too.

But let's not forget what else did this: the time Cuomo said his favorite bagel order was an "bacon cheese egg English muffin."

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jjust in case you didn't know, scientists have recently discovered the reason you never see beast ghosts around for the most part and its this: it's always a human ghost coming out. rat dies? human ghost comes out. ox dies? human ghost comes out. louse dies? human ghost comes out. goose dies? human ghost. so you get the picture.

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Orphan's Lament (gouache) It rained on our little smoke tree. I named this painting for the Robbie Basho song!

This will be my postcard print for June. Join my postcard club on Patreon if you'd like this mini print in the mail - link in my pinned post!!

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linguists and historians presenting their findings on Proto-Indo-Europeans

historical linguistics is so cool/sad. there's just so much we can never know.

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I listened to hours of Good Charlotte and SUm 41 today to see what 11-year-old me had to say. My main takeaway is that that boy needed HELP.

Am I to understand that my family saw this strange child whose favorite songs were about death and loneliness and they just let him be??

sometimes sad pop punk songs from my tweens pop into my head and I instantly wonder if I'm Going Through Something

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okay I love this and it made me want to write something sci-fi for the first time in like a year

historical linguistics is so cool/sad. there's just so much we can never know.

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Man I was going to answer this more clearly, but apparently some of the points I remembered don't hold up due to replicability and heavy debate. But you're on the right track: there is support for various weak version phenomena, but generally the strong version doesn't have any backing.

I wanted to mention color, but after peeking at the Wikipedia page, "Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate," I'm not gonna touch that lol. Just as a taster, there's some evidence that Russian speakers (who linguistically categorize/distinguish "light blue" from "dark blue") are a little faster in processing/identifying those colors.

Then I was going to mention a study I learned about in college, where it was found that people describe inanimate objects differently based on the object's gender in their language. Ex., "key" is masculine in German but feminine in Spanish. Supposedly speakers of those languages would describe them using more masculine or feminine descriptors, respectively. But apparently that study was never published and wasn't replicable.

I know there's a few things about direction and timeline perception: a speaker of a relative direction language (e.g. left and right) will struggle more to identify cardinal directions than a speaker of a cardinal direction language. Not so surprising: if you have to think about cardinal directions all the time because your language lacks "left" and "right," you're going to be better at knowing which way is east. It might even influence how you... place events on a timeline?

My hot (and maybe uninformed) take is that even a lot of the smaller things are still more about culture than language. One huge hurdle for even testing these ideas properly imo is that language will always be secondary to culture and cognition. It just can't exist in a vacuum. How do you test how a speaker of one language thinks in a way that controls for the culture that their language evolved to fill the needs of?

I am past my days of staying up to date in linguistics. I took my linguistics degree and became a speech therapist, where I mostly teach high schoolers to email their teachers. But hopefully someone who sees this can tell you more.

Types of linguistics posts you see online:

Linguistics content

Blatantly false etymologies

"What's the reason for German being the ugliest language alive?"

College freshman who just reinvented the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from scratch

"I just learned my sixth language. What language should I learn next?"

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i wonder how the curse will manifest today

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The holy grail of searching through academic literature is coming across a string of publications that are like:

Here’s An Idea. Smith et al. 2016

Terrible Idea; a comment on Smith et al. 2016. Johnson 2016.

You’re Wrong Too; a response to Johnson 2016. Nelson 2016.

Guys Just Stop Fighting, None Of Us Know What’s Going On; a Review of the Current Literature. McBrien 2017.

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oh right, and racism.

Something about talking about languages gives people some license to just be racist, because no one ever realizes that all their opinions about language are really just about people.

"Russian is such an angry language." You grew up on post-Cold War action flicks.

"Mexican Spanish is so slurred and lazy." Oops your mask is slipping.

Types of linguistics posts you see online:

Linguistics content

Blatantly false etymologies

"What's the reason for German being the ugliest language alive?"

College freshman who just reinvented the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from scratch

"I just learned my sixth language. What language should I learn next?"

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I can't wrap my mind around why certain words were chosen for the Proto-Sinaic script. Why do Greek A and Hebrew א come from the Semitic word for "ox," represented by this symbol?

Keep reading to see me air out my ignorance

I've been delving into Proto-Sinaic, one of the earliest ancestors of scripts including Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, which was itself influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In the script, words were chosen to represent letters based on their initial sound. For example, the letter for /b/, which would evolve into B, ב, and ب, was called bayt (meaning "house"). It was depicted as a floorplan for a house:

Another example is the ancestor of "M," called maym ("water") and represented as ripples or waves:

But why was bayt chosen for /b/? Why not another b- word, like the Semitic word baraḳ ("lightning"), represented by a sick ass lightning bolt? Why maym 𓈖 ("water") for /m/ instead of malk ("king")?

(I'm gonna mix up proto-Semitic and descendent languages. Please excuse me, I can't do any more research.)

The "common theory" is that Proto-Sinaic letters were likely inspired by/borrowed from specific Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some of them seem to specifically glyphs that were used to represent sounds (phonograms) instead of/in addition to other logographic/grammatical functions:

bayt borrowed 𓉐 (likely representing pr)

maym borrowed from 𓈖 (n)

kaph ("palm") from 𓂧 (ḏrt)

(also they're mostly concrete, drawable concepts)

Weirdly to me, they aren't cognates as often as I would assume, and often aren't even words that start with the same initial phone in both languages. So the original question remains: why is /b/ based on the Semitic word bayt "house" instead of some other /b/ word?

If it was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph 𓉐, was it simply a very common, recognizable glyph?

Was it the easiest shape to inscribe based on the developers' abilities and mediums?

The easiest to teach less literate people?

In conclusion, I don't know and my brain hurts. I went down a rabbit hole, thought I found the answer, and now know less than I started with.