Tabla de contenidos para Issue 88 en Silly Linguistics

Language is what we as a species have chosen as a primary means of communication, almost incomparable to any other means. We don't know exact details about the origins of linguistic communication. The choice of language being our most important way of expressing ourselves and reaching out to others definitely wasn't a conscious and rational one: for one reason or another, it was the most natural and most suitable way of communicating that we, as a human species, could have come up with. As difficult as it is to imagine, it didn't have to be this way. It is questionable whether we could ever imagine it being any other way, or are we too conditioned by our concept of language to think of an alternative. Language, as a general communicative…

It is well-known that English is a sort of amalgamation of many different languages and language roots. While there isn’t space here to discuss the different reasons for this throughout its history, I would like to talk about an interesting effect this has on many native speakers of English. The effect is that English gives many native speakers the psychological impression of having many unknown layers. This is because English has more words than anyone’s everyday vernacular, no matter how big. Two common reactions to this is that “big” (read: unknown) words are unnecessary and pedantic. Others, like English teachers, think it’s fun to plumb the depths of English’s stockpile of words. Let’s look at a few examples. Consider your high school biology class and the word biology itself. For…

If you’re borderline ancient like myself, you’re going to remember these nifty little websites from the early days of the internet that let you send an e-mail to your future self. Usually they’d let you set the date and point to an e-mail that you’d like the message to be received, you’d be able to send a mail to yourself as near as a few hours from now or as far as years. It was fun to schedule an e-mail 10 years in the future and imagine what the modern “slang” would look like, would the word “cool” would still be cool? Or would our warnings for our present fears even be relevant? As an amateur linguist, the development of language is truly fascinating, no matter how it develops or…

English never seems to run out of new words. Before it was google, then selfie, and now people are calling their favorite athlete goated. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs all take these newcomers in stride. Linguists group these categories together and call them open class, because they can easily expand with freshly coined words. Other categories, however, are not so welcoming. Pronouns (I, you, she), prepositions (in, on, under), determiners (the, this, those), and conjunctions (and, but, or) belong to the closed class. These are the workhorse function words that hold sentences together, and English almost never invents new ones. And yet, in the wilds of modern speech, something curious has happened. A new conjunction has slipped into the English language: “Slash.” Not the punctuation mark on your keyboard, but…

I have never yet been to Mongolia - it is quite some distance from England. Of course, we hear a bit about Mongolia over here, mainly dominated by talk of Genghis Khan and his many sexual exploits (more on this later), and with lads in England sometimes talking about, or being aware of, Mongolian throat singing. But that’s generally as far as it gets. And to be honest, it low-key annoys me that people seem to only associate Mongolia with Genghis-Khan and throat-singing, whilst being unaware of the large number of other cultures in the Northern Hemisphere which also practice forms of throat-singing. From a linguistic perspective, I am sure throat-singing is fascinating too, but I won’t have time to look into that more here. Of course, a few among…

La juerye de Engleterre (The Jewry of England) Between 1070 and 1290 CE, a small Jewish diaspora community existed in England. They were called any of several variations of the English word Jewry: that is, a Jewish community’s location or population.1 Their use of language was unusual not only in comparison to the rest of England’s population, but also in comparison to the rest of the Jewish diaspora at the time. The Norman Conquest in 1066 had installed a new French ruling class over England; for the next several hundred years, the language of power and aristocracy was a type of medieval French that is now called Anglo-Norman. The Jewry had been imported from France by this new Norman aristocracy as an economic commodity. In fact, it was later established…