Hi, it’s been a long time since I posted here and decided to be active again. As of the moment, I can’t think of any korean related lesson to post. Any suggestions? :)
The following words are words that are commonly used in a daily conversation. These are helpful and good to know especially to those who are still in a beginner level and to those who are still building up their vocabulary in Korean.
uhhh is it just me or did the guy who wrote this textbook definitely throw a burlap sack of potatoes with mealy skins at a professor of linguistics from the twelfth story of the Douglass Building last Friday because he hates his taste in t-shirts or,,,,,
Did I ever mention how I have a bit of an obsession with Original Pronunciation Shakespeare and how a year ago I memorized several monologues in semi-accurate original pronunciation? My roommates made fun of me but also found it interesting when I explained the jokes and rhymes that don’t make sense anymore in modern rp english..
If you’re Canadian, there really is a specific moment in your life where you consciously decided to rebel against the US and say “zed” instead of “zee”
i do understand the experience of yr native language feeling too intimate and close to talk about certain topics, and preferring english instead. it happens to people growing up in non-anglo countries too, like me and most people in my social circles. i experienced that a lot as a mentally ill gay teenager alienated from most of my peers and environment. (i still do to an extent, even though nowadays it’s really a symptom of denial or avoidance for me, if i can’t discuss something in my native language i know it’s because i’m avoiding the topic in my mind in general. it almost serves as an indicator.)
but like it definitely gets better the more you do it.. when i noticed this in myself, i put in effort to read and write in turkish both casually and with purpose, and i started expressing things to myself in turkish and it’s been really valuable to build that connection to myself, my sexuality and my body. it’s also made me a better writer and poet in both turkish and english, and like just overall has been good for my mental wellbeing..
like what im saying is that, it’s possible to overcome that, and for me personally it was necessary for some healing processes to happen. it therefore seems really alarming and concerning to see everyone talk about this and accept it as a fact that just Happens and almost as fate. like you can go and read, write, watch, listen in your language and work thru the uncomfortableness, awkwardness, the crying and weeping and whatever and build that relationship. it’s an uncomfortable but simultaneously very rewarding, exciting and once again, healing process. like i recommend that instead of taking that as an inevitable tbh. like it’s at least partially a choice you (we) made for many valid reasons as a kid / early teen and you (we) can make the other choice to heal those wounds imo, not to be sappy but it is what i think
and personal stuff aside, there is value in building and normalizing the vocabulary and discourse in non-english languages. it helps the people trying to find that vocabulary to talk about themselves right now. i find it to be also politically, just a generally good thing to do..
i’m curious how jokes revolving around someone’s intonation translate across languages…
like i was rewatching that clip from catfish and i was dying laughing at how the guy said “you got me there”, and i’m just wondering if a non-native english speaker would find it as funny as i did or not
so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…
Let’s use it in a sentence: mar sin leibh, a’sheanair
Translation: goodbye grandad!
Note: mar sin leibh is used when saying goodbye to more than one person, older people and people of authority e.g teachers, police. To say goodbye to one person we say “Mar Sin Leat”
“To me, religions are like languages: no language is true or false; all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say as well in another; and the more languages you learn, the more nuanced your understanding of life. Judaism is my mother tongue yet in matters of the spirit I strive to be multilingual. In the end, however, the deepest language of the soul is silence.”
I know a whole lot of finns have already made posts about this (and with my notoriously shit memory, I may have already written one too), but too late, I can’t be stopped: Finnish pronouns. I can’t recall where I got any of this info, and if someone who knows better can verify whether I’m right or wrong, I welcome it.
The finnish language has the pronouns hän, which is she/he, and se, which is “it”. In official written finnish, hänis the pronoun used of people and people alone, and seis of animals and inanimate objects. But this is where it gets funny. Written finnish is different from all dialects of spoken finnish - no spoken form of finnish naturally uses the pronoun hänin normal conversation. The entire human pronoun was introduced to the finnish language artificially, as the men who translated the bible to it felt it was ungodly to not at least have a distinct pronoun for beings with an immortal soul.
However, the attempts to introduce the new pronoun soon ended up somewhere along the lines of “ok fine, you can call each other whatever, but the king and God are Hän(and please show up to church sober)”, so the whole pronoun more or less ended up as a linguistic equivalent of those fancy plates your grandparents have in a glass cabinet for Extremely Special Guests, and nobody is actuallyfancy enough to require such formality.
Regardless, this has stuck to spoken finnish, but mainly as a stylistic choice of sardonic people, sarcastically using “hän” of people they do not actually respect, heavily implying that this person has far too high opinion of themselves and their own importance.
Hänfunnily enough also emerges when some people talk about their pets, though the sarcastic implication of “this person considers themselves more important than they truly are” is there - a bossy, spoiled tiny dog is hänthe same way your snobbish and difficult great-aunt is.
There is probably a number of languages that have one or several pronouns that are defined by a person’s status instead of gender, but finnish is the one language that has a formally neutral but informally reverential pronoun, that in spoken use is almost exclusively used sarcastically to communicate that this person actually is not respected.
My friend and I are discussing various English/UK accents and I just fucking blurted “Australian accents are like if Britain had a Texas” and guys I feel like I’ve cracked the goddamn code
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
ACTUALLY
This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.
Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:
ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff
Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.
In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style.
Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.
A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin.
Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.
i love this post
This is super cool!
Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection
^this.
The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just
pause in the middle of a sentence…
and let your voice
trail away
look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg
language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it
because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this dailywithout any sort of breathing space because there’s millionsof us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it
we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system
and that’s fucking awesomeokay
awesome
I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language
