Linguistics

The Great Vowel Shift still impacts our experience of English dramatically. In this video I use animation to illustrate the GVS and its continuing developments to the present day.

See also

• Category:English cognate expressions
• Category:English reduplicated coordinated pairs

I never talked much to people that use a lot of expressions, and the usage of Spanish terms, like "nada" or "amigo", as I could observe from the outside, felt inconsistent. And upon thinking on that, it got me curious, is it common to use such expressions or not?

In a re-evaluation of Hockett's foundational features that have long dominated linguistic theory—concepts like "arbitrariness," "duality of patterning," and "displacement"—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists shows that modern science demands a radical shift in how we understand language and how it evolved.

The conclusion? Language is not a spoken code. It's a dynamic, multimodal, socially embedded system that evolves through interaction, culture, and meaning-making.

For example, Latin language and Roman numerals. Are people likely to mistake numbers like ID (499) or VIM (994) for words, or is it always clear enough what's what from context? I think Hebrew, Braille, and maybe Greek also do this, though i'm not as familiar with those scripts as with Latin.

I ask because i'm making a conlang and having a little trouble coming up with enough letters, let alone numerals too. Reusing letters would be helpful and probably not confusing if i make sure that numbers are never pronouncable as letters, but making this easy to read is important to me.

Don't get me wrong, i think linguistics is a lot of fun and i get that it's an interesting field. I just don't understand what practical applications it has beyond understanding languages better. What do we do with that understanding of languages? Is it purely about seeking knowledge?

As an avid (ab)user of phrases-as-lemmata, I found this interesting.

Discovered through YouTube: Linguists just made a breakthrough in defining a 'word. ' No, really

Today, dinner almost universally refers to the evening meal. But it has had a long etymological history to get to that point.

Those with older relatives might have noticed them say "dinner" to refer to the midday meal—what we would usually call "lunch" today. It's rather archaic today, but it used to be the dominant usage.

It comes to modern English from Old French disner (via Middle English dyner), which originally meant "breakfast", but later meant "lunch". Disner is evolved into modern French dîner, suggesting the same more recent history has taken place in that language as in English.

Disner comes, ultimately, from Latin *disiūnō, meaning "to break the fast".

So, depending on when you are, "dinner", and its etymological ancestors, could have meant breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

My apologies, since this post actually contains a swear word, id...t, which I'm going to censor. But this came up with a test reader of a text I'm working on:

You id...t actually find her fascinating, don’t you?

A test reader thought this sounded weird and unusual. So I went to research uses by others, and indeed, almost nobody says this!

This confuses me, since I find tons of uses of:

• This id...t actually is...

• These id...ts actually are...

• You id...ts actually are....

...but not for this singular form as a direct address.

Is there something grammatically wrong with it? Is it valid, but for some reason people prefer You id...t, you actually are... anyway?

Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into words. All three authors were fortunate enough to have had Bill as our PhD supervisor (Laurel: 2012, Meredith: 2014, Betsy: 2018). We feel that the many hours we spent in his presence and with his work have given us a good insight into who and how he was. We also feel deep love and gratitude for him and for his imprint on the field and on us. As such, this piece is our reflection on Bill as a person, an advisor, and a scholar, from our perspective as three of his students from his later years.

Interesting short text about the history of Finnish, focusing mostly on its interaction with nearby Germanic languages.

Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

Interesting excerpt:

De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we're likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That's because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. "It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together."

Ah, here's a link to the paper!

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/133291

I share some of my research about the reasons why English spelling is so inconsistent

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/33025461

I'm doing some conlanging for a book and I'm having trouble finding the word for how we can take a verb, add -er at the end, and get a word for a person who does that thing. For example, a driver is someone who drives, a commander is someone who commands, a lawyer is someone who laws, and a finger is someone who fings. I am having trouble finding out how other languages noun their verbs in this way since I don't know what this thing is called. Pls halp.

A curated list of open-access descriptive grammars.