Tabla de contenidos para Issue 72 en Silly Linguistics

The story of “boat”

The word boat has an interesting history. Words can either be inherited from an older form, like Latin words slowly changing as the language developed into French and other Romance languages, or they can be borrowed. But knowing whether a word is borrowed is not always straight forward because people might not realise a word is borrowed and older documents would not mention a word being borrowed, and if they do not all words would be covered. So how do we work out if a word is borrowed? Well, we can use some linguistic sleuthing. In related languages words often follow patterns. Not always because languages are messy but we can make some deductions. All Germanic languages are descended from a language spoken in the Bronze Age that linguists call…

3 min.

Silly Linguistics|Issue 72

Phonology fun

/ f ɘ ʊ ˈ n ɒ l ɘ d ʒ i f ʌ n / When you‘re at the library late at night and you see someone sitting in a corner with a safe distance from everyone else, making the weirdest sounds with lips and tongue as quiet as possible – that is probably a linguist! When I attended university for the first time, I found this discipline so weird and interesting, I wanted to be a part of it, and within only a few weeks, I had joint the nerdy group of people that played around with their mouths, temporarily forgot what words actually were, and spent nights over a set of data to unriddle before the next lesson to pass the test. In fact, most of my…

3 min.

Silly Linguistics|Issue 72

Text from the West OR HOW THE CHINESE USE A KEYBOARD

It’s rare for our parts of the world for people to know Chinese, so when someone learns it, there’s always a million questions to them. I have a friend who studied Chinese philology in university, went to Beijing to specialize and is actively working in his field. For those that have never had any touch to the Chinese language, it’s important to understand first and foremost that their whole language system is completely different from the western language systems that we know and love. Over here we have an alphabet, which you make words out of, you pronounce them, et voila – you’re speaking! With Chinese, it’s a lot more complicated, to say the least. They don’t have an “alphabet” so to speak, albeit having an analogous sound system that…

3 min.

Silly Linguistics|Issue 72

WHAT DOES ENDANGERED MEAN? INTERPRETING UNESCO’S WORLD ATLAS OF LANGUAGES CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Linguists often draw an analogy between languages and biological species: both can be grouped into subfamilies within larger families based on common features, both have historical geographical bounds that have changed due to modernization - and in both of their cases, over 90% of them are endangered or threatened with extinction due to modernization. To further drive home the point on the similarities between languages and biological species, we can see that Wikipedia’s classification systems for languages and species are not too different from one another – particularly their endangerment classification scales. For example, compare the Wikipedia pages for the African Penguin and the Mohawk language: So, according to Wikipedia, both the African Penguin and the Mohawk language are considered Endangered by their respective organizations of experts. In the case…

2 min.

Silly Linguistics|Issue 72

ACRONYMS Not always the answer

This is the last in a series of four articles, where author MJ Buckman explores language used about and within the LGBT+ community. The series is based on extracts from her book, "Bent is not broken.” For the book, MJ (Em) interviewed 24 LGBT+ adults of all ages and combines their stories with her own memoir and an in-depth exploration of LGBT+ culture. She looks at how society has represented LGBT+ people throughout history, in particular focussing on the language that has been used, and how this changes depending on society's attitudes. Em's book is available in eBook and paperback: www.books2read.com/BentIsNotBroken This article is based on an extract from MJ’s book, Bent Is Not Broken, available now in eBook and paperback. To find out more about the book, including purchase…

4 min.

Silly Linguistics|Issue 72

SMÅLÄNDSKA AND LANGUAGE IN RELATION TO SMÅLAND

Småländska is a rather generic name for the Nordic dialects spoken within Småland, a region of southeastern Sweden, with a coastline on the Baltic in the east, part of which faces the island of Öland. I have written about several of Sweden’s traditional languages before, which include North-Germanic, Sámi and Finnic languages, but the background of this rather complex picture is beyond the scope of this article. But I will briefly introduce this topic. Sweden is linguistically diverse, and many of the “dialects of Swedish” can more accurately be described as “traditional Nordic languages” which became defined as “Swedish” in more recent history, often alongside a general watering down of these older language features into more standard forms of Swedish, which has created a gradient between traditional languages and regional…

12 min.