a victory

inbonobo:

CHINESE is ideal for micro-blogs, which typically restrict messages to 140 symbols: most messages do not even reach that limit. Arabic requires a little more space, but written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. (via Daily chart: Lost (or gained) in translation | The Economist)
Brazilians use “abs” for abraços (hugs) and “bjs” for beijos (kisses);
Spanish speakers need never use personal pronouns (“I go” is denoted by the verb alone: voy).

18th Apr 2012✧06:344 notes

Hangman - optimal strategy

Considers individual words as opposed to the English language as a whole. Quite an interesting albeit extremely nerdy read.

linguistics hangman cryptanalysis word analysis dictionary

18th Apr 2012✧04:241 note

csebastian:

Whiskey (with an e) and scotch are the usual styles, but Scotch whisky gets special treatment; yet bourbon is lower-case, even though it springs from Bourbon County, Kentucky. The Reuben sandwich (for which dueling Reubens claim credit) keeps its capital letter, but the bloody mary, named for Mary I (or possibly Mary Pickford), is lower-case. Waldorf salad, after the hotel, is capped; graham cracker, for Sylvester Graham, is not.

Fillet and filet are another traditional bone of contention. Though they’re variant spellings of the same word, some editors have chosen to use fillet for fish and filet for meat. But not the AP: Here it’s fillet (“a boneless cut”) either way, except in filet mignon and, of course, Filet-O-Fish.

Fillet or Filet? - The Boston Globe

linguistics LANGUAGE English

4th Mar 2012✧08:4511 notes

"
I mean, there’s a solid case to be made that language discrimination isn’t generally as dire as other kinds of prejudice, but it worries me just how socially acceptable it is and how little people are aware of the problem. We are far from a postracial society, but most racists have at least realized that they can’t voice their opinions in public without being loudly condemned as intolerant. Homophobia is probably more mainstream today, but even still, anyone who hates gay people in this day and age has to know that there are many people out there who accept homosexuality as a perfectly valid orientation/lifestyle/etc.

With language, though, the most common position to take is that there is only one acceptable possibility, and that all other variants are a case of someone Doing It Wrong. And it’s very easy to dismiss people as irrelevant, or to act on your less acceptable biases against particular groups, if you’ve been able to convince yourself that they don’t have an acceptable language. It’s easily internalized too, to the point where many people believe their own language to be faulty, and therefore that they are less deserving of some things — and that just breaks my heart!
"

~ lesserjoke (via risenapes)

linguistics prescriptivism

22nd Feb 2012✧06:348 notes

"A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right."

~ www.workjoke.com (via maniseonmul)

linguistics english rofl

21st Feb 2012✧13:0639 notes

"We usually use words without thinking. We speak, and, through processes not yet understood, the words we use inspire what we hope are thoughts similar to those we intended in our listeners. We don’t think much about words. We often don’t realize that words have structure. And since we don’t perceive structure, we don’t see the poetry of words."

~ Paul McFetridge, A Linguistic Introduction to the History and Structure of the English Lexicon (via vtvo)

linguistics Paul McFetridge words

21st Feb 2012✧04:2317 notes

18th Feb 2012✧21:5031 notes

linguistics LOL noam chomsky

hipster phonologist

taylorhasa:

My favorite phoneme is the voiceless bidental fricative. There’s only like two languages known to use it. You’ve probably never heard of it; it doesn’t even have a proper IPA symbol.

linguistics phonology phonetics hipster

7th Feb 2012✧21:5015 notes

hateshiploveship:

The concept of metonymy also informs the nature of polysemy, i.e., how the same phonological form (word) has different semantic mappings (meanings). If the two meanings are unrelated, as in the word pen meaning both writing instrument and enclosure, they are considered homonyms.

Within logical polysemies, a large class of mappings may be considered to be a case of metonymic transfer (e.g., chicken for the animal, as well as its meat; crown for the object, as well as the institution). Other cases wherein the meaning is polysemous, however, may turn out to be more metaphorical, e.g., eye as in the eye of the needle.

linguistics metonymy polysemy lit

7th Feb 2012✧15:173 notes

oneofjuly:

Corrected by bethan-h on Flickr.