Tabla de contenidos para Issue 90 en Silly Linguistics

Something I take great pride in as a Bulgarian and always have been, is that all it takes is a single note of a folklore song to get all the Bulgarians dancing horo. No matter where we go or how far we travel with my husband, there’s always this trait of us Bulgarians – we hear a horo, we dance the horo. No questions asked, no need for introduction to the ones dancing together. It’s equal parts national pride, love for our folklore, and one third Balkan desire for togetherness. For nearly five centuries, Bulgaria endured Ottoman slavery. During this long period of foreign rule, the Bulgarian people lived without a state of their own, often deprived of formal education, written records, or institutions to preserve their culture. And yet,…

When counting in Japanese, a specific suffix known as a "counter" must come after the numeral. Unlike in English, where they are only required when counting uncountable nouns (eg. one glass of water; "one water" just makes no sense), these counters are required for even countable objects in Japanese (eg. ビール ⼀本: one cylindrical object of beer). But not every noun gets an exclusive counter just for themselves: here, "beer" uses the counter for all smallish, cylindrical objects "hon", meaning "book". Traditionally used to count books as they were distributed at the time (as scrolls) this counter now has a much wider use case of anything sharing that initial silhouette. Funnily enough, nowadays, books aren't counted with "hon" at all (on account of being flat rectangular objects) and use "冊",…

Supposed you are in a chat room and one of the speakers makes the comment UG2BK. What language is it? Is it a secret code needing to be deciphered? What could it mean? You’ve got to be kidding, right? Seriously though, that is literally what it means. Teachers have spent countless hours in the past grading and correcting essays, circling in red that “wanna” and “gonna” are not correct words, when suddenly, voila! they are now in the dictionary, howbeit listed as informal language, but nevertheless, recognized contractions. Many of us have heard of the lady who texted the news of her aunt’s funeral, signing off with LOL, which she thought meant “Lots of Love” instead of the current meaning of “Laugh Out Loud.” Jeopardy even had its own category…

If you’ve ever seen Star Wars, you already know one of the rarest sentence types in the world: “The dark side I sense in you” That’s object–subject–verb order, or OSV, and while it sounds like ancient wisdom from a green puppet, it’s almost nonexistent in real human languages. In fact, if you arranged the world’s languages by their basic sentence order, Yoda would be standing pretty much alone. Most languages use one of three basic patterns for simple sentences: SVO (subject-verb–object) like English, SOV like Japanese, or VSO like many Austronesian languages. Together, those three account for almost every language on Earth. The other three logical possibilities—VOS, OSV, and OVS—do exist, but barely. You can count confirmed cases on a few hands. So who actually talks like Yoda? A few…

You’re in northern Borneo, in the Malaysian state of Sabah. You planning to go see some orangutans and perhaps stop for some locally grown coffee with a side of durian or mango cake. Your friendly Sabahan guide has even promised you a glimpse of the world’s largest stinky flower, the rafflesia! The only problem is that you’re not sure when you’re leaving. So you as (in proper Bahasa Malay, of course) because it’s a fairly straightforward language and you like how it sounds. Your guide’s answer? “Sekarang”. According to the dictionary, this means “now”. Great! Right then, time to put your shoes on. But your guide must have other ideas because they are settling down to a curry puff and a cup of tea. “Aren’t we going now?” you ask.…

I was a strange teenager. When I was 19 I was listening to Norwegian folk rock and was only vaguely aware of the popular songs in my own country. I mean gosh, it was only at 19 when I fully made the recognition of who Robbie Williams was. I came to I love his music though. Mostly however, I listened to Norwegian and Finnish music. And I listened a lot to the music of a Norwegian folk rock band known as Plumbo. They sing in a very southeastern form of Norwegian, which is unlike the Norwegian in most of the places I have spent time in Norway – apart from, that is, one time in Drammen and Kongsberg. Kongsberg is a really strange place. I can’t quite place what it…