Tabla de contenidos para Issue 74 en Silly Linguistics

This article is based on a term paper I wrote for a phonology seminar during my Master’s in Language Sciences. Celtic languages are extremely cool: first, they’re Celtic; second, they conjugate - not decline, conjugate! - prepositions (maybe I’ll come back to this point in a further article on day); and third, they admittedly make it sooo much harder for a learner to find a word in the dictionary, because they are among the very few languages in the world that feature initial consonant mutations, that is to say that the initial consonant of a word may vary depending on the context. Well, at least in Irish, although the phoneme (sound) varies orally, in spelling the ‘original’ consonant remains, but is preceded or followed by a mark of that phonetic…

I’m an old fart, I stray away from social media as much as possible nowadays, however my husband, who’s respectively four years older than me, makes sure to keep us in the loop with what’s up with them young guns. By that I mean he has TikTok. And while I can’t receive via inbox all the silly things he scrolls past, he does manage to show me those silly things manually, the old-fashioned way – by shoving the phone screen in my face. It's usually a cat doing something cute, but last week, I was shocked to see a dog using these strange, large button contraptions that make a sound when pushed. The owner would put the buttons in front of the dog and when pressed, would play the sound…

When it comes to a lexical domain of language, and especially when it comes to idioms and sayings, speakers usually have moments of realization that they don’t know what exactly they are saying with a phrase that they use by default, nor why are they saying it. An English language learner would be surprised to hear someone wishing him to break a leg, or scared to death expecting a tornado throwing around cats and dogs when it’s just raining really hard. We’ve probably all seen a famous scene from a TV show, featuring a guy reacting to a girl’s passionate speech with a confused face, saying: “…I understand all those words separately”. We’ve all been there at some point. However, sometimes the same can happen on the level of linguistic…

The photo below on this page, shows the majestic Ural mountains in the Komi republic. In Komi-Zyrian the word керӧс – kerös means ”mountain”. The “sky” is енэж – jenež, and a “forest” is вӧр - vör. In the image there is also a river, known in Komi-Zyrian as ю – ju. The Komi were traditionally an animistic people, and were, like several other indigenous peoples of Eurasia, polytheistic in a sense, but also believed in a primary creative force or original mysterious creator. In Komi-Zyrian, this creator is referred to as Ен, En, and could appear to people in the form of a swan. The Komi-Zyrian word for “swan” is юсь, juś. For me personally, when I look at the photo below, and think on the name Ен, the…