Tag: language update
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Primly and properly
Speaking of subjunctives… There are lots of old jokes about proper prim Bostonians. Maybe they’re right. Motor Age in 1909 has some pretty pictures of the motoring conditions around President Taft’s “summer capital” in Beverly. Nice Stickley typography. I’d say the summer capital is almost large enough to hold Taft. Alongside this picture: the article […]
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Hardwired doesn’t need marks
This is intriguing but dubious. Researchers looking closely at some cave paintings of elk and antelope have been puzzled by periodic markings around the animals. These researchers see a correlation between the 13 months of the lunar calendar and the mating cycles of the animals. First: When people are intensely interested in a set of […]
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More on Stalin and language
Continuing from here with Stalin’s remarkable essay on language. The PDF includes several letters written to various academicians after the ‘Ask Me Anything’ session at Pravda. In one of those letters he deals with the silly gesture-first idea, which was apparently popular among Soviet academicians at that time. = = = = = START STALIN: […]
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Good knockdown of a silly idea!
This article on the origin of language is sensible but sort of surprising. Apparently the idea that language started from gestures is becoming more common, and might even be the consensus assumption now. The first paragraph is eloquent: Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest […]
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From an extremely same/different era
After finding the origin of ringers in this 1927 volume of Vanity Fair I started reading the rest of the magazine. 1927 was the peak of a Share Value boom, so it was like 2017 as measured by aristocrats. The two booms are drastically different as measured by peasants. 1927 was overgrown from a REAL […]
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Ringers
I shouldn’t even try to think about politics. My record of mistakes is unbroken. Nevertheless, here’s one random thought after dipping a toe into media for a moment. It’s clear that both parties want to prevent DeSantis from rising to the top. He’s the only major politician who SOLVES PROBLEMS. All other politicians MANUFACTURE PROBLEMS […]
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Missing a difference
Via MindMatters as usual, a new study on the linguistics of cussing. The authors find that most cuss words lack ‘soft’ consonants and emphasize plosives. In a following study, the authors also looked at minced oaths – which are variations of swear words deemed less offensive, for example “darn” instead of “damn”. The authors found […]
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Eirx
We often signal our orthodoxy by using the “native” spelling of a country or tribe we’re supposedly defending. The signalers don’t worry about actual “nativity” when they invent lunacies like Latinx or Womxn. They’re trying a bit harder with Ukraine, but the result is still absurd because the Ukrainian “language” is a dialect of Russian. […]
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More Kirn Kibble
Since I’m quibbling with Kirn today, here’s another. You went to college and want to learn to write well? Here’s a tip. Vanquish from your mind the entire slate of terms you heard only in classes & used only in papers. Ditch “hegemony.” Forget “problematic.” Scuttle “instantiate.” Excellent and very old advice. Most of the […]
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Language doesn’t create culture, as usual.
On a random impulse I got curious about the grammar of Polynesian languages like Hawaiian. Their phonology is extremely simple. Is their grammar equally simple, or bizarrely complex? I expected the latter, but the answer is in between. Hawaiian grammar is in the median range of complexity. It has NGDA for nouns, singular/dual/plural for pronouns, […]
Polistra's Mill 