Tabla de contenidos para Issue 87 en Silly Linguistics

Ah, yes, nothing quite says “medieval Europe” like some good old crusades. Rugged, religious men trekking thousands of kilometers to the Kingdom of Jerusalem to fight the holy war against the Muslims for the freedom of the holy city. If you’ve missed a big chunk of high school history lessons, here’s a little reminder of what the crusades were – once upon a time in the 11th century, a bunch of European nobles got really bored (and super pious) and decided it would be a great idea to take a very, very long field trip to the Holy Land. Why? Because Pope Urban II basically said, “Sin? Never heard of her. Go fight in Jerusalem and your slate gets wiped clean!” And the knights were like, “Free forgiveness and travel?…

...the melody a man trembles before tells him the mother he's a son to. (Momčilo Nastasijević, For the Native Melody, essay) orig.: ...на коју мелодију човек непосредно уздрхти, те је мајке син. (Момчило Настасијевић, За матерњу мелодију, есеј) This quote, from an essay by a poet, Momčilo Nastasijević, is a fairly well-known one, at least in the circles interested in Serbian modernistic poetry. To a reader not familiar with these topics, at a first glance, it would probably seem like it is a quote from an essay about musical theory, but it is not: it is about poetry. While we usually think of poetry as a way of linguistic expression, in this essay it is held to be a medium in between language and music. In addition to that, it…

Open up a work of Shakespeare or a King James Bible, and you will likely encounter the oldtimey English pronouns thou, thee, thy and thine. Most of us who grew up with an education in English literature or Bible studies are familiar with these almost romantic, ceremonial second person pronouns. However, contrary to our modern ideas about them, “thou” may may have actually lost the popularity contest with “you” due to being too vulgar! To understand how this happened, let’s take it back to the beginning. In Old English (that is the English of Beowulf written sometime around 800 AD) there were two main ways to say “you”: the singular þū and the plural ġē, which eventually evolved into the words we now know as thou and you, respectively. Thanks…

From all outward appearances, this short three-letter word “out” seems too tiny and insignificant to be very outspoken in the English language, (and ordinarily the word “out” is considered an adverb), but Merriam-Webster also lists it as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and also a preposition. It can even be a prefix. It is outlandish when considering the flexibility this word has to offer the world of language. It is often defined as being an outlier, out and away from the center. Dating from before the 17th Century, some definitions are more easily applied than others. Have you ever considered the versatility of the simple yet complex word “out”? During a blackout, or a power outage, you are outside or away from the power source. Likewise, you are standing…

In colloquial usage, pragmatic means to be practical, to deal with things sensibly and realistically with all practical concerns taken into consideration. While I rather love this form of pragmatics, another pragmatics was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret… linguistic pragmatics is something somewhat but not altogether different. In fact, in linguistics, pragmatics refers to the practical usage of language, in the sense of how people actually use language – conveying meaning based on personal ideology and belief, local or personal frames of reference, implication, and even non-verbal communication. This is so much true that you can use pragmatics to say something altogether different than what someone else may interpret and you can use something extremely vague…