Tabla de contenidos para Issue 81 en Silly Linguistics

in a previous issue I looked at the prefix peng. This time lets look at meng When you're eager to learn a new language, you'll encounter a set of rules that may initially seem complex. However, these rules are crucial for becoming a proficient and confident speaker of Indonesian. For learners or those planning to learn the language, one particularly important prefix is meng-. This prefix transforms root words into verbs. The Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian Dictionary) explains that this prefix has 10 distinct meanings: 1. ‘To become,’ e.g., menguning (‘to turn yellowish’) from the noun/adjective kuning (‘yellow’). 2. ‘To function as or resemble,’ e.g., menggunung (‘to become mountainous’) from the noun gunung (‘mountain’). 3. ‘To eat or drink,’ e.g., menyatai (‘to make or eat satay’) from the noun…

I’m bilingual and growing up I went to an international school in Bangkok. I spoke both Thai and English since I can remember. Growing up, I realized there are some words in Thai that don’t exist in English at all, and a lot of these words describe behaviour. I’ve picked out ones that I think are most common and interesting! 1. Greng jai - this means to consider other people’s feelings and to be polite. A lot of people describe it as a feeling of not wanting to impose, which I think is an accurate way of describing this word. This word is very big in Thai culture and is a feeling that respects people’s time and energy and in a way doesn’t allow one to take advantage of another’s…

Silly Linguistics is all about the silly side of life and language. Rightly so. In Modern English, silliness connotes fun. Sure, it can be used pejoratively, but only in the mildest sense – to be called sIlly is hardly a cutting insult. Silliness more than that; it is the pleasure we have in learning bits of absurd information that amuse us, the wisdom not to take ourselves too seriously, our ability to do things just for the joy of it. To be silly is to enjoy life. This hasn’t always been the case, however. The history of the word silly is a long and interesting one, mostly because silly has undergone semantic drift. Semantic relates to the meaning of a word, and in the case of semantic drift, this meaning…

Written in and submitted from the UK in mid February 2025. The first photo was taken by my mother, the second, by me, following that, the piece of art was also drawn by me. The topics in this article relate to some of the topics in some of my other publications, and a couple of times, examples of words or points in this article have been discussed differently in my other publications, although this and the other publications also contain a lot of separate material from each other, and are not the same. The description below the first photo, and the description below the art, contain information not in the main text. Two different articles I wrote connected to these subjects are mentioned at the end of this article, with…