Tag: language update
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Mong
Cute note seen on Substack. Five things you can mong: Cheese, war, fish, hate, iron Got me thinking about the root. Previously active suffixes tell a story. How did they lose their activeness? Etymonline says: = = = = = START QUOTE: Old English mangere “merchant, trader, broker,” agent noun from mangian “to traffic, trade,”…
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Gaian grammar
Religion Unplugged, the successor to GetReligion, constantly beats the drum for “climate emergency”. It’s a good reminder that “global warming” was a Christian scam before it was coopted by CIA and turned into a secular religion. One aspect remains constant. Apocalyptic Christians always miss the meaning of prophecy. A prophet is telling us what WILL…
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Empathy for Dixie!
Most articles allegedly about the South only recapitulate the standard Yankee hatreds. This feature about dialect gets everything right, with a rare added dollop of empathy. Best is the definition of Fixin To, often pronounced as fitna. We have to love the laid-back attitude of the Southerners. This phrase pre-empts an intention, so it’s right…
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Geography and language
In language we pin down the consonants, which are really absences of sound. Many writing systems, from Sanskrit to Arabic, write only the consonants. The majority of meaning is carried by the chords of vowel formants, which are shaped by the mostly absent consonants. Consonants are moments when the formant vector changes its direction. In…
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ŋ
Random phonetic musing. Among Euro languages, only the Germanic group treats ŋ as a phoneme. In every language ŋ is a natural allophone of n before k or g within one word. It’s unavoidable. English has three ways of pronouncing the written arrangement of n and g. (The previous sentence includes all three.) Examples after…
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Reprint on grammar and skill
Reprint from 2021, relevant to the Altman AI monstrosity. = = = = = START REPRINT: MindMatters tries to separate out human language from animal communication: Believers in human non-exclusivity do not appear to be especially picky about what counts as evidence for their views. For example, here’s a research finding that is supposed to…
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New ESL Sucker
This is the champion Sucker Filter for stupid click-gathering spam. In recent years the English has improved a bit, but not this one. = = = = = START QUOT-BE: Your Account Prime well-be Remove Today ! Dear Prime Costumer, Your Subscription has expired! Your Subscription for Prime expired on Wed,03 Apr-2024 We tried to…
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New retronym
Headline from the Ankler: My chat with Gabe Spitzer, Netflix’s head of nonfiction sports, at the Netflix Slam tennis event reveals the streamer’s sports ambitions keep growing. Nonfiction sports? I guess fiction sports encompasses “scripted events” like this: One can easily envision this becoming an annual event, one that’s clearly meant to build on the…
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Taibbi is an aspectless idiot
One headline is enough: The Fix is In. Taibbi constantly plays the fake surprise game, pretending that journalism used to be honest and politics used to be honest. Now the Horrible Other Party has turned everything sour, but we can restore the old pristine state of integrity by “electing” My Wonderful Party. 2/3 of the…
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Recycled authentication
1. Every language has ways of marking the end of a sentence or thought. Words are much less definite and more variable. In some languages the elements we’d consider words are integral parts of one ‘word’ that forms a sentence. In every language phonetic coarticulation melds ‘words’ but doesn’t cross a sentence boundary. 2. Written…
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Couldn’t be Spanish.
I heard the Ripley item about the mysterious Mexican president Comonfort again and got puzzled again. The Ripley audio is unclear, and the announcer didn’t always handle foreign words well. Google filled in the proper name after I typed ‘Mexican president Ignacio C’. Comonfort couldn’t be Spanish. Was it from the native tribes, or a…
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Growing and shrinking /r/
BBC has an article on dialect change. Final /r/, which has been absent from The King’s English for many centuries, persisted in isolated areas. Now it’s disappearing in the isolated areas as well. = = = = = START QUOTE: Accent change is often like a puddle: it dries up in most places and leaves…
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Is it prosody or epigenes?
This is interesting. Newborns respond preferentially to stories in the ‘mother tongue’ before they’ve had a chance to hear much talking through air conduction. Were they picking up intonations and prosody through the liquids in the womb? Or is the familiarity imparted through epigenes? The former possibility could be checked by using different languages with…
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Doozy debunk
We always learned that doozy came from Duesenberg, which was an especially impressive car. Halfway recalled reading a debunk of the origin. The Duesenberg brothers started out as engineers at Maytag, which made gas-powered washers before it switched to electric. They departed and created their own car in 1920. It would have taken a few…
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