This DIY wug pattern was very kindly sent into me by Maida Percival, a linguistics grad student at University of Toronto. See the whole pattern as a pdf here.
If expression ‘cognitive studies’ means anything to you, this could be your opportunity to participate in a real associative experiment, the results of which will be later used for creation of a scientific research.
If not, this could be an opportunity to entertain yourself with a couple of weird questions :D
Anyway, any contribution would be of great - no, enormous - help. So any activity (participation, reblogs, etc.) is very much appreciated. Thank you!
So a few years back, I wrote my Master’s thesis while an Erasmus student in England and I thought I would share an abridged version with you. I wrote my thesis about the Northern Vowel Shift, under the title : The Old Scandinavian element and its impact in the actuation and development of the Northern Vowel Shift.
But first of all, what is the Great Vowel Shift ?
It’s an event described as a chain-shift where the lower vowels, in a push-change movement, forced the higher vowels to raise and the highest ones to diphthongise, as such:
[ɔː] → [oː] → [uː] → [aʊ]
[ɛː] → [eː] → [iː] → [aɪ]
This partly explains the discrepancy between sounds and orthography in English. For instance, <ee> in “meet” now pronounced /iː/ used to be pronounced /eː/and <oo> in “goose” now pronounced /uː/used to be /oː/. This large-scale shake-up took place between the mid-14th and the 18th century.
Why is the Northern Vowel Shift important?
Because, generally, when dealing with the Great Vowel Shift, it is often assumed that it affected the whole of England. However, the upward movement of vowels was not a unified motion as some British English varieties retain pronunciations that were left unmodified by the Shift and thus retain certain pronunciations similar to those of the period before the Shift intervened. The study of the phonological history of the English language, more often than not, tends to describe the evolution of the vowel set of English by the representation of its southern version.
It matters because this focus on the southern version is probably due to a form of social bias; the most prestigious variety in the United Kingdom in present days is RP (Received Pronunciation) / SBE (Southern British English).
The bulk of the literature published to this day on this matter does not really concern northern England. This fact is quite a shame for there are many differences between the Northern Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift that seem to indicate that the two phenomena are not likely to be connected and merely share a common vocalic shift.
How did the Great Vowel Shift/Southern Vowel Shift happen ?
In a nutshell, this Shift took place because of dialect contacts in the south of England. Smith (2007) mentions that early Tudor London offered economic opportunities to the people of the surrounding countryside, attracting large number of people with different dialectal traditions to the same place.
Smith (2007:130) argues that the socially salient pronunciation of [e̝ː ; o̝ː] inherited from French was used by a category of the population; System I speakers, and System II speakers from outside London, would perceive these raised [e̝ː ; o̝ː] as /i:/ and /uː/. A third group of speakers from System III, would come to London during the 18th century from East Anglia and bring more chaos to the situation. Smith believes that the diphthongisation of the long close vowels comes from System III speakers.
How did the Northern Vowel Shift happen and how is different ?
In my thesis I concluded that the NVS and the SVS were triggered by very different factors; while the SVS took place because of dialect contacts, it would seem that the NVS happened because of instability in Northern English vowels after the introduction of long /ɛː/ in the phonology following Open Vowel Lengthening, which took place between the Old and Middle English period. Open Vowel Lengthening happened as follows: CVCV structures became CVːCafter final vowels like -ewere dropped.
Examples:
Old English “nama” => Middle English “nām”(“name”)
Old English “faran” => Middle English “fār” (“go”)
However, as you can see, there is a blatant lack of symmetry in the upward movement of Northern English long vowels compared to that of the SVS. Basically, when looking at this graph, the NVS only concerns the front vowels, and not the back ones. I’ll add there is a level of detail missing in the graph depicting the rise of /ɔː/ to /oː/. However, contrary to what occurred in the SVS, the raising of Vowel 5, as Aitkens (2002) calls it, had no impact because once /ɔː/ rose to /oː/, there was nothing to move upward and force /uː/ to change quality in turn. This is why in Northern English and Scottish dialect, you can hear speakers pronounce the word “house” as /hu:s/ with a long monophthong instead of the usual diphthong /aʊ/.
The reason for that is relatively simple: the absence of /oː/ in the pre-NVS phonology. This vowel had seemingly fronted to /ø:/ in earlier stages, leaving the mid-high back vowel slot open. Thus when /ɔː/ rose, there was nothing to push towards /uː/.
Since the NVS didn’t happen for the same reasons as the SVS, and it looks like the culprit is the fronting of /oː/ to /ø:/ : whence does this fronting come? My hypothesis was that it was under the influence of Nordic languages that /ø:/ arose or was maintained longer in the northern dialects of English than in the southern, which had lost its front rounded vowels by the 11th century (an example of what I called south-eastern distaste for front rounded vowels).
In a nutshell, what I argued is that northern varieties of English may have started losing their front rounded vowels, like down south, but contact with Old Norse speakers ranging as far back as the late 8th century in Northern England may have played a role in re-introducing a decaying phoneme in northern dialects of English. Furthermore, Scandinavians tended to remain in their own little closed communities, exchanging little with the outside world for a few decades after the end of the Danelaw. Their contact with neighbouring population must have played a role in the upholding of /ø:/.
Basically,tl;dr,English underwent massive phonetic change because of the Great Vowel Shift. However, it would me more accurate to refer to it as the Southern Vowel since its effects did not affect northern regions of England, which had experienced its own shift; the Northern Vowel Shift. It arose because of phonetic evolution between Old and Middle English. A back vowel was absent from Old Northern English, rendering a SVS chain-shift-like motion impossible in northern dialects. This back vowel may have fronted because of Old Norse influence in the region, which lasted longer in the north of England than in the south.
i get a lot of asks about the etymology and evolution of the word ‘dyke’!
here is a history essay by JR Roberts, published in sinister wisdom no. 9, 1979, that posits a few theories and provides some explanations. note that this does contain some offensive historical language and slurs. it is about six pages long, so i’m going to place it under the cut!
I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.
I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.
As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!
An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:
close latching – how much time should I give between when you stop talking and when I start? Very close latching can feature a lot of overlaps.
participatory listening – how do I signal to you that I’m engaged with what you’re saying and paying attention? Do I make any noise at all, or do I limit myself to minimal “backchannel” noises (mm-hmm, ah, yeah), or do I fully verbalize my reactions as you’re going? Maybe even chime in along with you, if I anticipate what you’re about to say, to show how well we’re vibing?
support request – this can shade into interruption as a form of sealioning, but if someone interjects a request like “I didn’t catch that” or “What’s that mean?” it’s not really an interruption, because they’re not trying to end/take my turn away, they’re inviting me to keep going with clarification/adaptation.
asides – if there’s more than two people involved in a conversation, a certain amount of cross-talk is probably inevitable.
The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary – by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:
norms about turn latching: someone who’s not used to close-latching conversation might feel interrupted or stepped on when talking to someone who is. The converse is that someone who’s expecting close-latching might feel the absence of it as awkward silence, withdrawal, coldness, etc.
norms about backchannel: if you’re not expecting me to provide running commentary on your story or finish your sentences (or if I’m doing it wrong) then you might feel interrupted. But if you’re expecting that level of feedback you might feel ignored.
neurodivergence: If I have auditory processing problems, I might take longer to respond to you than you’re expecting. If I have impulse control problems, I might blurt something out as soon as I think of it, but I don’t necessarily want you to stop. If I have trouble with nonverbal or paralinguistic cues, I might not latch my turns the way you expect, or my backchannel might be timed in a way you don’t expect.
Non-native speakers of a language may need more time to process speech; may speak more slowly and with pauses in different places than native speakers; may not pick up the same cues about turn-latching and backchannel, resulting in a timing difference; may need to make more requests for support.
Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology – I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.
And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feelinterrupted doesn’t mean I aminterrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.
I don’t … have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.
I love WORDS the best shit inherited words cognates loanwords culturally specific words old forms still in use all of it slaps and words are just so good
(I cross mine from R to L, but Jake does his straight through)
I was watching a kdrama and they were tallying a vote and I was just like:
Cus I’d never considered the cultural implications of tally marks. Lol, I just thought lines to five are lines to 5, ya know? Then I read the whole wiki page and now I want to learn more!
Are there other ways? How do you make tallies? Tell me moooooooore lol ^-^
For everyone interested in languages. I just discovered a YouTube channel that gives some basic vocabulary and info (in the description) about a lot of languages. It also includes a lot of dialects and indigenous languages. So it’s a cool way to discover and learn more about less common languages.
Do kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts?
Well, you see, kids, almost twenty years ago Apple produced a portable audio player called – wait, I need to go back further.
Okay, so in the 20th century, the new inventions of radio and television were known as broadcast media – no, wait, that’s not really the start either –
Broadcasting originally refers to throwing, or casting, handfuls of seeds onto prepared ground, typically used with grain crops, which, uh –
– the Agrucultural Revoution, which begain circa 10,000 BC in the Levant, was when humans began preserving seeds for replanting –
Okay so my favorite thing about this that kinda gets lost in translation is that the word ガーリックトースト is read as “gaarikku tousuto” which means the final お is just an extension of the last sound
A quote from Lynn Willmott’s 2012 book, Love and Limerence: Harness the Limbicbrain, describeslimerence as ”an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object (LO) involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov to concisely point to a concept she had discovered during some of her studies in 1960s. She used it first in a book written in 1979 entitled Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love.
Limerence differs from love by being a state of unhealthy obsession, a “compulsory longing for another person,” as put by Albert Wakin at Sacred Heart University.
I was hoping to find some etymology on the word, but it looks like it was arbitrarily created by Tennov. The morphemic ending -encedenotes the word as describing a state of being, although limer-doesn’t have any historical meaning of its own.
I wasn’t quite intending for this post to be so involved, but I happened upon an article which said that in Welsh, you can call ladybugs buwch goch cwta, which translates to English as “little red cow,” which I think is absolutely adorable.
buwch: from the Middle Welsh buchmeaning cow, ultimately a derivative of the Proto-Indo-European root gwou-, meaning cattle
goch: a mutation of the adjective coch,from the Latin coccummeaning “scarlet, berry, dye or dyed red,” from the Ancient Greek term κόκκος kokkos, which is a “grain, seed or the color scarlet”
cwta(I’ve also seen it spelled gota), means “short or little,” and is supposedly borrowed from a Middle English term which meant “to cut down”
It turns out, though, that the name for these beetles is actually quite complicated in a lot of European based languages.
First, to look at the taxonomic family name coccinellidae.This comes from the Latin coccineusmeaning “coloured scarlet,” a term which you can also see in the Welsh, it is the same root from which we get coccumand eventually goch.There are a few other descendants of this term in nearby languages as well, like the French coccinelleand the Italian coccinella.
However, obviously, that’s not where we get the English name ladybug.In Old English, they were called lady cows (again a nod to the Welsh), in which cowwas a comment on it’s spotted wings and ladywas in reference to the Virgin Mary. The seven black dots displayed on its back were believed to have been symbolic of her seven sorrows as are described in Christian scripture.
Although English uses the more ambiguous lady, many languages have retained the Mary portion in the modern name, like Catalan marieta, Danish mariehøne(literally “Mary chicken”) and German Marienkäfer(literally “Mary beetle.”)
I have absolutely no idea what chickens have to do with anything, but good job Danish, I like it.
I’m not quite sure why, but I tend to use this wordquite frequently. I feel as though sadisn’t quite broad enough to encompass the “dispirited depression” I find in melancholy.In Old English, the word more exclusively referred to an illness associated with too much black bile in one’s body, a substance which was believed to have been secreted by the spleen.
The contemporary emotional meaning appeared in the Middle English as melancolie,a direct borrowing from the Old French, which was adopted from the Ancient Greek melankholía.This word is a compound of the two terms μέλας melas “black, dark, murky,”and χολή khole“bile.”
Interestingly, although this literal translation for the Greek is “black bile,” which we can see resurfaces in the English traditions, it was used more closely to the way we use melancholynow, as “atrabilious, gloomy.”
To circle back to a previous note, we can trace back μέλας a little further to the Proto-Indo-European root mel,meaning “to grind, hit,” but also “dark, dirty.” The other half, χολή, can be attributed to ghel, meaning “gold, flourish, pale green, shine.” Although it has this seemingly pleasant definition, it is cited as being the ancestor for many languages’ terms for “bile, gall, fury, rage, disease, etc.”
The Moirai, or Fates, are the three goddesses of the Greek pantheon who determine the path of human destiny. With such a role, they are considered both goddesses of birth and of death, arriving when a person is born to assign them their fate, and again when they die to end it.
The oldest stories called them one collective power of Fate, namely Aisa:
Aisa - Αἶσα, the abstract concept of “fate,” related to the verb αἰτέω aitéō, which is “to ask, crave, demand, beg for”
However, in later accounts the three individual deities were separated, each performing a certain function, to form the trio of the Moirai:
Moirai - Μοῖρα, from the Ancient Greek μοῖρα moîra, “part, portion, destiny,” the verb form is μείρομαι meíromai, which means “to receive as your portion, to accept fate,” possibly from the Proto-Indo-European root smer-meaning alternately, “to remember, care for” and “allotment or assignment”
In Theogeny of Hesiod, they’re called both the children of Zeus and Themis, but also daughters of Nyx, the night:
“Also she [Nyx] bare the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty.”
Clotho - Κλωθώ, from the Ancient Greek verb κλώθω klótho,which is literally “to spin (as in wool or cotton), twist by spinning;” the youngest fate and the spinner of the thread of life
Lachesis - Λάχεσις, related to the Ancient Greek verb λαγχάνω lankhánō,which means “I obtain, receive by drawing lots, assigned to a post by lot,” the root for which may be the noun λάχος lákhos,“lot, destiny, fate;” the second fate, measurer of the thread of life
Atropos - Ἄτροπος, literally meaning “unchangeable,” compounds the prefix ἀ- a-(”gives it’s host the opposite of the usual definition, similar to English un-, as in wisetounwise”) and the verb τρέπω trépō,which is “I turn,” likely from the Proto-Indo-European root trep-, “to turn or bow one’s head (possibly out of shame);” the eldest fate, bearing the sharp shears which sever the threads of life, also known as “inevitable”
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I love words ending in -escence. It makes the whole thing feel ethereal and oddly immaterial.
For example, we have the word efflorescence,meaning “blooming, apt to effloresce, being in flower.” It’s borrowed in its entirety from the French, which is itself from the Latin efflorescere, “to bloom, flourish.” The Latin is a compound of the prefix ex- “out of” andflorescere “to blossom,” from the Latin noun flos, “flower.”
The Proto-Indo-European root for flosis apparently *bhel, which means “to thrive or bloom.” Interestingly, it may be a variant of another form with the same spelling meaning “to blow or swell.” Regardless, this seems to be the ancestor whence such words as flora, flourish, bloom etc, as well as Irish bláth “flower,” and Old English blowan “flower.”
Although we have the Englishcaress, I personally like the sound of the Spanishcaricia much better. It feels more intimate somehow?
The romantic root for both of these is the Italiancarezza (interestingly, the English is a layer removed, coming through the Frenchcaresse).Carezza, meaning “caress or pet” is from the Italian nouncaro, which is “dear, beloved, precious, sweetheart” or alternately, “expensive.” The -ezza is a sort of nominalizing suffix. The Latin predecessor iscarus of the same meaning.
Depending on the source, the Proto-Indo-European root is written as either-kehor-ka, “to desire or to wish.”Cherish is another sweet word from the same PIE.
It is listed in A New Universal Technical Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language by John Craig, 1854 as:
AMATORCULIST, a-ma-tor'ku-list, s. (amatorculus, Lat.) A little pitiful insignificant lover; a pretender to affection.
As stated, it’s a close borrowing from the Latindiminutive phrase amatorculus, which means literally “little lover.” A Latin Dictionary by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short adds the note, “a little, sorry lover.” It is a compound of the nounamator “lover, someone who loves,” and the suffix -culus, which creates the diminutive sense, like a familiar or pet name.
Amator is the noun actor of the verbamare, which means “to love.” Interestingly, this is actually also the word we borrowed both the French and English cognatesamateur from. Although we sometimes useamateur in English in a sort of derogatory way, the original meaning is purely taken from the Latin: “a lover of something, someone who does something for the sake of enjoyment.”
What comes first, language or thought? A series of papers published in 1951 grappled with this very question and established itself in linguistic theory. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, proposed by American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf is probably one of the most mainstream linguistic theories out there today, going so far as to set the stage for the 2016 film Arrival.
This linguistic theory has gone on to inspire studies in anthropology, sociology, and other related disciplines.
But as usual, time and the telephone game have largely stretched and changed this theory for the rest of us. It’s common for academic concepts to become simplified and watered-down over time. Because a powerful idea resonates in society, whether that person is a linguist or not. And this idea, the idea of language coloring our fundamental perceptions, is more than powerful.
In addition to nonsense talk, another sort of secret language was used by boys and girls to communicate with each other, preserve shy politeness, and confound the elders. By playing on flutes and mouth harps [ncas], concentrating on melody and tone, they could approximate tonal speech, and if the sentence was very simple, the sense could be apprehended by the listener.
Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women, Nancy D. Donnelly
