im angry and im devastated and im so so sorry for all scottish people and scots speakers. what that teenager did is inexcusable and, by the looks of it, irreparable. i don’t think people realise how much power wikipedia can hold and how much it can affect people, especially native/heritage speakers of a minority or endangered language. for a lot of those communities, wikipedia is the only freely accessible online source in their native language. not only that, people who do not speak those languages/dialects will look to the same sources for information on that language/dialect, and in this case, when they find out that scots is supposedly just badly spelled english, attitudes shift. all the work that has been done around legitimising the existence of scots as a language is now for nothing. no revitalisation project can have the outreach and participation comparable to wikipedia. the fact that many wikipedias in minority languages or languages without a big internet presence (lilke the cebuano wikipedia) is created by non-native speakers or bots is a really widespread problem and i don’t think those people necessarily realise the implications of that. i don’t doubt that a lot of them have the best intentions, but i really do hope this is going to be a lesson for all of them.
Everyone has that one friend who punctuates every sentence with that one phrase, be it “you know,” “okay,” or “totally.” “Like,” one of the most common American filler words, is another symptom of our apology epidemic (What, did we all become Canadian or something? At least we haven’t adopted ‘eh’ yet) Why do us young folk, girls especially, adopt the filler word that makes us sound so, like, dumb?
A lot of attention has surfaced recently on female’s overuse of the word ‘sorry.’ It signifies our tendency, as a females in the workplace and in relationships, to apologize and blame ourselves for simple miscommunications or mistakes. Allegedly, men in similar situations blame coincidence, other people, or their surroundings for problems that women would assume blame for. 'Like’ has a similar use.
I can distinctly remember when I picked up the word, because it was on purpose. I was sort of the Hermione Granger of my elementary school, and my unabashed know-it-allness lasted through third or fourth grade. It was somewhere in those two years, though, that I realized raising my hand for every question wasn’t the easiest or quickest way to make friends or impress people, and I started dumbing myself down.
A teacher called on me, and I started to answer, but realized midway that I sounded like the obnoxious nerd that I was/am. “…like, 92?” I finished, with the upward, questioning swing at the end of a statement I knew was correct. And there it all began: my plunge into what quickly became one of my biggest vices.
Sweeping, dramatic statements about my childhood identity crises aside, the ‘like’ epidemic is another example of girls increasingly afraid to overstep, speak too loudly, or demand too much attention. Even now, as a teenager with strong opinions and a blog to match, even, I find myself tripping over words like ‘like’ or ‘you know’ for fear of coming off too bullheaded in discussions. As someone who puts a lot of effort into both becoming smarter and (to be frank) coming across as smarter than I actually am, why have I, along with millions of others, chosen to sound like such a valley girl?
Europe’s defining trait is its diversity. Europeans don’t have to travel far to immerse themselves in a different culture. And if each only spoke their own language, they wouldn’t even be able to make heads or tails of it.
Or would they?
Finnish people probably won’t make a lot out of Spanish, and if you’re from Spain, Finnish might as well be Chinese. But not all languages are as far apart as those two. A Frenchman could understand a bit of Spanish, just because it resembles his own language. And an Estonian can pick up a some Finnish, for the same reason.
But the Estonian will have a slightly harder time of it than the Frenchman, and this map shows why.
This linguistic map paints an alternative map of Europe, displaying the language families that populate the continent, and the lexical distance between the languages. The closer that distance, the more words they have in common. The further the distance, the harder the mutual comprehension.
The map shows the language families that cover the continent: large, familiar ones like Germanic, Italic-Romance and Slavic; smaller ones like Celtic, Baltic and Uralic; outliers like Semitic and Turkic; and isolates – orphan languages, without a family: Albanian and Greek.
Obviously, lexical distance is smallest within each language family, and the individual languages are arranged to reflect their relative distance to each other.
Take the Slavics: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are a Siamese quartet of languages, with Slovenian, another of former Yugoslavia’s languages, extremely close. Slovakian is halfway between Czech and Croatian. Macedonian is almost indistinguishable from Bulgarian. Belarusian is pretty near to Ukrainian. Russia standa a bit apart, is closest to Bulgarian, but quite far from Polish.
Italian is the vibrant centre of the Italic-Romance family, as close to Portuguese as it is to French. Spanish is a bit further. Romania is an outlier, in lexical as well as geographic distance. Catalan is the missing link between Italian and Spanish. The map also shows a number of fascinating minor Romance languages: Galician, Sardinian, Walloon, Occitan, Friulian, Picard, Franco-Provencal, Aromanian, Asturian and Romansh. Latin, mentioned in the legend but not on the map, although no longer a living language, is an important point of reference, as it is the progenitor of all the Romance languages.
Lots of coldness in the Germanic family. The bigger members English and German, each keep to themselves. Dutch leans towards the German side, Frisian to the English side. Up north, the smaller Nordic languages cluster in close proximity; Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (both the Bokmal and Nynorsk versions). And look at the tiny Icelandic, Faroer and Luxembourgish languages. Aren’t they cute?
The Celtic family portrait is a grim picture: small language dots, separated by a lot of mutual incomprehension: the distance is quite far between Breton and Welsh, a bit closer between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and further still between the first and second pair.
The Baltics constitute the smallest family, but a fatter pair. Still, Latvians and Lithuanians don’t seem to be on very good speaking terms with each other.
All the aforementioned language families are part of the wider Indo-Germanic language tribe. Meaning that there are some points of convergence, even if the lexical distance is great. But it’s nice to recognise an English fish in the Irish iasc, and to realise that the German Vater and the Greek pateras share an Indo-European root.
Even beyond the wider bonds of the Indo-European language family, some lexical links exist. Between Finnish and Swedish, for example. Not because of linguistics, but because of history and geography, having shared so much of both.
Which explains why even Basque, Europe’s most isolated, most mysterious and probably oldest language, shares some distant traits with Spanish and Breton.
The Uralic group consists of two subgroups, one sort of uniting Estonian and Finnish, the other consisting of Hungarian all by itself. Answering the age-old linguistic conundra of whether Finnish and Hungarian are really related (yes) and if so, do they understand each other (somewhat worse than an Albanian and a Frenchman).
No person is an island, nor is any of the languages we speak. But it can be a pretty long swim between all those palavering peninsulas.
Spock’s service record, from Geoffrey Mandel’s USS Enterprise Officer’s Manual (1980). Check out that first name.
Xtmprszntwlfd’s Brain
Xtmprszntwlfd’s helmet
Xtmpirk
Okay so I found the origin of Spock’s last name. DOROTHY FONTANA herself!! From Spockanalia #2(1968):
Awesomeness
Reblogging again to celebrate S'chn T'gai becoming canon in SNW.
I do love seeing what people thought the Vulcan language was like before it actually appeared, some of the theories are so wild!
Also I’ve seen this post before but I hadn’t truly paid attention to the last sentence of Dorothy Fontana’s thing until now and I’m screaming. “The phonetic rendering according to pronunciation has nothing to do with the written language” in languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet. You know. Because our letters aren’t arbitrary and also English pronunciation makes perfect sense all the time. /s
Venda (or Tshivenḓa) is a Southern Bantu language with about 1.3 million native speakers (2011 census) in the north of South Africa’s Limpopo province, as well as some speakers across in the border in Zimbabwe. Tshivenḓa is an official language in South Africa, but could be considered a minority language as it’s only spoken by around 2.2% of the population. it is also more distantly related to the other Bantu languages of South Africa, as such, there’s a perception that it’s a “very difficult language to learn.”
in terms of grammar, Tshivenḓa is a lot like the other Bantu languages of South Africa : it’s agglutinative, and has an extensive noun class system and set of prefixes, for example : muVenḓa(a Venḓa person), vhaVenḓa (the Venḓa People), tshiVenḓa (the Venḓa language). or tshimange(cat),zwimange(cats),ḽimange (big cat), kumange(kitten).
Tshivenḓa has a rather excitingphonology
Tshivenḓa’s five-vowel system is pretty standard in the region: /ä/, /i/, /ɛ/ [ɛ~e], /ɔ/ [ɔ~o], /u/, but as for consonants…
here are the highlights :
a three-way distinction in plosives and affricates : ejective, aspirated, and voiced, eg. [p’], [pʰ], [b]
<f> [f] is pronounced as in English, and is a completely separate sound to <fh> [ɸ], that f-like sound in Japanese
<v> [v] is as in English, while <vh> [β] is that Spanish sound in-between B and V.
<t, d, n> [t’ d n] are alveolar sounds, pronounced like T, D and N in English*. and <ṱ, ḓ, ṋ> [t̪’ d̪ n̪] are dental sounds, pronounced like T, D and N in some dialects of Spanish*, and Dothraki. and yes, those are phonemically distinct in Tshivenḓa !! (*the Ts are ejectives ofc)
<l>and<ḽ> are different, but what the precise difference in depends on dialect. either retroflex/alveodental or alveodental/lateral-fricative
<sh, zh> are pronounced as in “shoe” and “pleasure” in English, whereas <sw, zw> are like SZ and RZ in Polish
oh, and Tshivenḓa is also a tonal language. like most Bantu languages, it’s a fairly regular two-tone system (high and low tones). there are minimal pairs like ṱhóhó(head) and ṱhoho(monkey). tones are notwritten in the orthography though !
Ziervogel, D. and Dau, R.Sh. “Die spraakklanke van Venda” in Ziervogel, D. (ed.). 1967. Handboek vir die spraakklanke en klankveranderinge in die Bantoetale van Suid-Afrika. Pretoria: Unisa. 108-116.
Holy shit @culmaer this is utter perfection. And the distribution of Southern Bantu languages map? I’m just, I’m stealing that. This by far is the best one of seen.
This is amazing. I didn’t know any language phonemically distinguished bilabial and labiodental fricatives.
Oh yes! Southern Bantu languages, like their non-Bantu predecessors, have a litany of rather interesting phonological traits—to my knowledge, Xhosa actually lacks plain labial stops, but has phonemic [pʼ pʰ b̥ʱ ɓ]. Likewise with palatal stops, doesn’t have [c ɟ] but instead has [c̟ʱ c̟ʼ ɟ̟̊ʱ]. It’s absolutely amazing how complex the phonology of just Xhosa is alone but the entirety of Southern Bantu is just a phonologist’s paradise.
That’s so cool! I recently started reading more about the Bantu languages, and things like this have me like
If you like this—let me introduce you to Dahalo.It’s perhaps my favorite Cushitic language because it has a substratum from an unrecorded language that had click consonants and a fairly complex phonological system like those of Southern Africa; which is reflected heavily in Dahalo. The best description of the language is Tosco (1991). Some neighboring languages in Tanzania like Hadzabe and Sandawe are awesome too, hugely complex phonological inventories. I actually did visual Swadesh lists for those.
On a sidenote, Dahalo actually has phonemic [c͡ʎ̥̝] and the only language in the region with this sound as well is interestingly enough Hadzabe. It’s awesome.
A small announcement that I have a single commission slot for a custom painting available for the end of this month and beginning of next month. Ever wanted a unique sigil painting filled with Sul’voth runes? Now’s your chance. Shoot me a DM for more information. Sizes start at 24″ x 24″ at $500 CAD, so serious inquiries only. Larger sizes can certainly be discussed. I work closely with my clients throughout this process to make some very unique pieces to bless their spaces. Cheers!
“Mun zol Raksit Nu’vul Siv’kor“ - 2022 “Sigil of the Void Spider” - Acrylic on Canvas. 24″ x 24″ - A recently commissioned painting focusing on the energies of the Void, as well as the client’s spirit guide, the spider. It’s rare that a commission lines up so well with my own practice, and that aspect made it all the more enjoyable.
I have a brand new video up today on YouTube. Check it out for some insight into the sacred representational symbol of Sul'voth, as well as some info on working with Sul'voth!
There’s a very distinct pattern in what one might, if one were being… incautious, name “Internet horror-speak,” a particular patois that’s arisen in the latest years of this very era, a peculiar dialect lashed together from the flesh of Lovecraft and the sinew of internet culture and the bones of… something bony. Okay so I’m probably not going to be able to keep that gag up. It’s the language of Dread Singles
HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, TRAVELING THE SUNKEN WAYS, DRINKING FROM THE LIPS OF THE LOW ONES, WISHING THEY’D WORN MORE SENSIBLE SHOES
andWelcome to Night Vale
Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have. A heart not having what it needs to throb. The fences in the caves. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. The fences in the caves. The fences in the caves.
to which I refer.
What interests me though is that’s there’s a very distinct pattern and sort of grammar to how this Internet Horror-Speak (hereafter IHS) works, one I’ve been trying to work out for a while now. There are some very obvious patterns, as well as some subtle ones I’m not sure how to put into words. These are the rules I’ve sussed out, though:
One of the most important rules, and I think the one that might be the most surprising to a lot of people, is to use simple, mundane language. Empurpling the narrative with gratuitous polysyllabisms and grandiose prose is actually wholly deleterious to the desired effect. This actually makes a lot of sense. Purple prose has a serious abstracting effect, in that it draws the audience away from the action and makes it sound more like they’re listening to a story. So using purple prose to describe your indescribable horrors can make them feel less real, where using everyday language helps connect the audience and make them feel more like there’s some grotesque violation of normalcy going on
Use fewer ‘s-constructions. Say “the blood of the fallen,” not “the fallen’s blood;” “the intestines of dawn” not “dawn’s intestines.” This is a less solid rule, and it’s still possible to have a powerfully creepy effect with the ‘s-construction, particularly if the construction comes sentence-finally: “They beat them with sticks around which were wrapped dawn’s intestines,” but “They wrapped the intestines of dawn around thick oaken sticks.”
Use older words. “For” instead of “because,” “kin” for “family,” etc. If this makes them shorter than their modern counterparts, all the more effective.
Don’t use commas with conjunctions, just string conjunctions together. So “They laughed and writhed and screamed and died in the gaze of a smiling god,” but not *”They laughed, writhed, screamed, and died in the gaze of a smiling god.” This one’s variable, but I see the former more than the latter and to me it feels like it has more impact and is more visceral. The latter sounds more planned out, more official, more normal.
Use old-fashioned constructions. “The”+[adjective] constructions are a favorite, as are “the [adjective] one(s).” “The laughing ones steal away the dreams of the hopeful and feast on the teeth of the indolent,” “There are no innocent in this place, for to gaze on the Ancient Ones is to know that innocence is a lie, that blood and fear and corruption are the engines of all that breathes.”
Break word associations. If I start a sentence with “The toaster,” you’re probably going to expect something like, “the toasted fell off the counter,” or “the toasted exploded,” not “the toasted laughed” or “the toaster bled.” There are words we associate with animate things and words we associate with inanimate things, and mixing them up can lead to weird mental reactions. It’s why things like “SPANK HAIR — LICK EYES — WHISPER INTO ASS” are so funny. They make us build associations that we didn’t have previously. A toaster isn’t a thing that bleeds, and hair isn’t something you spank, so putting those words together tends to slightly mess with people and throw off our reading. Welcome to Night Vale does this SO MUCH.
Cecil Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error
Cecil Here’s something odd: there is a cat hovering in the men’s bathroom at the radio station here
Cecil Alert! The sheriff’s secret police are searching for a fugitive named Hiram McDaniels, who escaped custody last night following a 9 PM arrest. McDaniels is described as a five-headed dragon
Last but not least, be vague. Let your words imply terrible and alien machinations at play, let them hint at vast supernatural tableaux of incomprehensible splendor and horror hanging just out of sight waiting to be glimpsed, but don’t ever explicitly tell anybody what’s going on. I put this one last because even though it’s the most important, it’s the most obvious, and I think everybody already knows this about horror. But it’s worth noting that IHS generally dials this up way higher, to the point where it’s hard or impossible to tell what parts are literal or metaphorical. Take this sub-par example:
Moving through the ashen ways of eons past, realms of fire and smoke and emptiness rising up and twisting around its path the beast walked on, burning all it perceived.
One on level, it’s possible that we’re talking about a minotaur arsonist who’s taking to the backroads during a forest fire to avoid the cops. On the other, we could be talking about some incomprehensible eldritch abomination warping its way through infernal dimensions outside space and time, ravaging worlds at its passing. Or anything between. I think this is probably the single most salient feature of IHS: its utter vagueness, and lack of proper context to distinguish the metaphorical from the literal.
But anyway. This is a fascinating memetic phenomenon and one I’d love to see some proper research done on this, beyond the idle musings of a lazy linguist with too much on her hands to spend time analyzing hard data.
Rhythm! The subtle things and the things that you ‘feel’ that you’re having trouble articulating? It’s rhythm. Rhythm is one reason why the last example is ‘sub-par’, and it’s absolutely key to (for instance) Welcome to Night Vale. There’s a pulse going through the prose that organises and structures how it’s read. English tends towards an alternation of strong and weak stresses; if you organise your words so that they start to reinforce that stress pattern, then congratulations, you’ve just invented the basics of English poetry. Part of what makes this particular brand of horror-speak so effective is a heightened control over the stress patterns of the language—not as much as in metrical verse, but still more than is usual for prose. Here’s the Mayor Winchell example from above, but with the stresses marked:
Mayor Pamela Winchell Thefences in the caves. A heartthrobbing for what it cannothave. A heartnothaving what it needstothrob. The fences in the caves.Heat from below and above, but alliscoldbetwixt. The fences in the caves. Thefences in the caves.
It’s not perfect. Sometimes there are two or three syllables between stresses, sometimes only one—that’s normal, for English, because we speed up or slow down our reading depending on the rhythm we are unconsciously picking up from the words. Sometimes the stresses are unvoiced, in the form of pauses like rests in music. But you can see how underlying a lot of what Winchell is saying is a rhythmic pulsing that when read gives the effect of a kind of gnomic chanting that alters the atmosphere of the statement considerably. When you pronounce this aloud, it gives that characteristic Welcome to Night Vale effect; on the page, its power is lessened, but the rhythm is still strong enough that you can detect it, even if you don’t know that you’re doing so.
Most importantly, the presence of exaggerated rhythm is a conventional signal to your brain that it’s now reading poetry, and that puts you into a different mindset—a mindset where you are expecting the ambiguous, the non-literal and the metaphorical. It’s the mindset you get into when reading poetry, where your interpretative mind engages with a text that works on both a metaphorical and a literal level at the same time—exactly the ‘vagueness’ described by velartrill above.
What I’m saying, in essence, is that a (conscious or not) awareness of rhythm is key to being able to write sentences in this style. The choice between ‘s constructions (“dawn’s intestines”) and old-fashioned x of y constructions (“intestines of dawn”) is down to which will best work with the rhythm of your sentence; the effect of the [adjective] ones construction can also be judged based on its rhythmic potential. Almost every effect of IHS, apart from its predisposition towards short, familiar words (which I think is more of a general horror thing; effective horror writers tend to use the vocabulary of their audience), has its roots in its essentially rhythmic nature: its constructions, its rhetorical figures, its ability to waver between metaphorical and literal without committing itself to either.
Tl;dr, IHS is basically prose poetry with a horror angle and a deliberately Anglo-Saxon focus to its words. More of an English literature approach than a purely linguistic one, I suppose, but that is my field, after all.
I had this dream that there was a new grammatical case called the “tangitive” case and you had to use it for things that were real, unfortunately no one could explain to me how to tell whether something was real enough to be tangitive and insisted they could not understand anything I said
Innocent is often speculated as having the same etymology as ignorant: from the Latin for “not knowing.”
This much is true for ignorant(14c), which, via the Old French ignorant, is from the Latin ignorantia/ignorantem, “not to know.” Innocent(14c) also came via Old French (inocent), but from the Latin innocentem. This word, in turn, is from the prefix in- (”not”) and nocere, meaning “to harm.” Innocent, then, doesn’t etymologically mean “knowledgeless,” but rather “harmless.”
Despite similarities in spelling and meaning, islands andisles are only related through folk etymology.
Isle(13c) comes from the Old French ile/isle, originally via the Latin insula. Island (16c) comes from the Middle English yland and Old English igland, from the root ieg(from the same root as aqua-), meaning “island,” and a redundant -land.
The spelling of isle was altered in 16c to reflect its Latin roots, and so the spelling of island was also changed due to the assumption that its etymology was isle+land.
Outragebeen assumed to be an excessive form of rage. However, it’s etymologically not rage at all– it’s just excessive.
Rage (14c) comes via the French rage/raigefrom the Latin rabies– the same source of our modern cognate. Outrage (14c) also comes via French (outrage), but from a different Latin source: ultraticum/ultragium. This sense of outrage is still maintained somewhat in “outrageous” when it is used to mean extravagant, inordinate, and superfluous. However, this usage still often takes the connotation of “so excessive it makes me angry.” Due to folk etymology, outrage escalated from “excess” to “excess anger.”
Hymen, the Greek god of marriage, and hymen, the part of the vulva, are related words– though not for the reason you might think. Both ultimately derive from the Proto-Indo-European syu-, meaning “to sew,” and both come to us via Greek. The god is probably named for this original sense (figuratively sewing two people together), but the general Greek ὑμήν instead means a “thin skin or membrane.”
