Hi! 👋 Linguistic Discovery is all about the science and diversity of language! 🗣️🧏🏼
I (Danny Hieber, Ph.D. in linguistics) post daily about the latest science news in linguistics, how language works, why it changes, and the diverse ways that different languages do things!
This
The word third used to be pronounced thrid.
Lots of words switched the vowel + /r/ sound whenever they occurred between consonants:
bird < bridd
horse < hros
bright < beorht
wrought / work < wyrcan
You can still see the older form in the word three. The sounds didn’t switch
The unequal proportion between the number of languages and how many speakers those languages have.
The median number of speakers for a human language is only about 5,000 people.
#languages
#linguistics
#diversity
#endangered
African American English (AAE) has a cool expression that linguists call the “ass camouflage construction” 1/
“They done arrested her stupid ass.”
“I’m gonna sue her ass.”
“Get your triflin’ ass out of here.”
“I saw his ass yesterday.”
“His ass is gonna get fried.”
This is a map of indigenous languages north of Mexico at the time of European contact.
There were originally ~300 languages as best we know. Today ~120 are still spoken.
These 300 languages comprise about 50 distinct families + 27 isolates.
In ancient Rome, a trivium was an intersection of three roads (tri 'three' + via 'road').
According to the Romans, when people met at a trivium, they would discuss trivialis ('inconsequential things') - which eventually helped give trivia its modern meaning.
(credit:
The reason ‘night’ and ‘eight’ look so similar in many European languages is because they happen to come from very similar Proto-Indo-European roots: 1/4
eight: “akhto-”
night: “nekwt-”
#linguistics
#language
#etymology
@language_nerds_
Latin is a language, not a logic puzzle.
Analytically-minded people like learning Latin because (at first) it seems well-structured and logical, not at all like English with its vagaries and imprecisions. Each word has a limited number of possible translations, and you try
Map of the varieties of Arabic
Some of the varieties of Arabic are not intelligible with each other, and could really be considered distinct languages. There is also Modern Standard Arabic, which is mostly a literary language today (nobody really speaks it), a holdover from a
Language is FILLED with redundancy, because languages have evolved to be expressive, not logical. It's a design feature, not a flaw!
Saying something more than once amplifies its meaning. Everywhere you look in language you find redundancy!
1/3
A group of Inuit middle schoolers invented a new number system that better fits their language (Iñupiaq), and now Unicode has adopted these symbols, meaning they can be used for typing, in apps, and on the web
#Inuit
#math
#language
#Indigenous
#Native
Languages are constantly changing, so no language is the same as it was even 500 years ago. Here is what the Lord’s Prayer looked like in English 1,000 years ago:
Linguistics researchers have identified the "primal consonants" of human language
This is “a small set of five consonant types that most likely were the original consonant sounds in early, even pre-human, communication”.
There are 293 different writing systems in the world, according to the World’s Writing Systems project.
According to Britannica, the most widely used writing systems are, in order:
1. Latin
2. Chinese
3. Arabic
4. Devanagari
5. Bengali
Linguistic typology is the study of the grammatical diversity in the world’s languages, the recurring patterns we see amongst that diversity, and why those patterns exist.
Want to learn more? I’ve put together a list of resources to get you started:
How to study a language using total immersion, with no translation, and no common language.
This is how linguists conduct fieldwork on underdocumented languages when the linguist and the speaker don’t have a language in common.
When your seatmate on the plane asks what you do and you get ready to explain that linguistics isn’t about learning lots of languages and yes people pronounce that word different ways even though you hate it
#linguist
#linguistics
Map of British English dialects, by
@Starkey_Comics
"I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and [getting] peer feedback. […] The end result is an image which is […] the most detailed map of British dialects ever made."
ooo here’s some fun etymology:
Babylonian-Assyrian “qanu” ‘tube, reed’ > Greek “kanna” ‘reed, cane’ > Latin “canna” > Old French “cane” > English “cane” 1/3
Hear me out: This isn’t a grammar rule. It’s a writing convention.
A grammar rule is something like “past participles end in -ed” or “you pronounce the plural suffix -s as /z/ after voiced consonants”. These rules are part of what you learn when you learn a language in infancy.
This is the Algonquian language family. Some of its more well-known languages are: Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree, Ojibwe, Massachusett, Miami-Illinois, Mohican, and Powhatan (the language spoken by Pocahontas). 1/9
The languages of Europe
Europe is home to about 100 languages, comprising several families (Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian) plus Basque (isolates) and … 1/3
The Germanic and Romance language families switched words for ‘pride’ with each other! 🏳️🌈
The Germanic languages borrowed the word pride from Latin prode ‘advantageous, useful’, but the Romance languages borrowed the word for ‘pride’ from Old English orgol, yielding French
The word for ‘mother’ is similar in languages all over the world! But why? 1/6
English: mother, ma
Basque: ama
Spanish: madre
Maltese: omm
Mandarin: ma
Vietnamese: me
Hebrew: ima
Swahili: mama
#MothersDay
#mother
#linguistics
#language
#science
A group of Inuit middle schoolers invented a new number system that better fits their language (Iñupiaq), and now Unicode has adopted these symbols, meaning they can be used for typing, in apps, and on the web!
#math
#counting
#numbers
#Inuit
#Alaska
Proto-Indo-European (the ancestor of languages like English, Spanish, German, Hindi, Irish, etc.) didn’t have a word for 1,000.
That’s not too surprising though—most small nomadic communities in history didn’t have to count very high.
So how did early Germanic speakers talk
Linguists and archaeologists have just discovered a previously-unknown Indo-European language!
Prof. Daniel Schwemer (Julius-Maximilians-Universität) discovered texts written in a language known as Kalasma.
#linguistics
#language
#archaeology
#history
Every time the ancient Polynesians hopped in a boat and sailed to a new set of islands they tossed another phoneme overboard:
(arranged roughly in order of dispersion from Proto-Polynesian)
Gorontalo: 20 consonants, 5 vowels
Sam: 17 consonants, 5 vowels
Siar-Lak: 15 consonants,
In the 1800s archaeologists discovered cuneiform tablets written in an unknown language which they named Hittite.
In the language, Hittite is called 𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷 nišili ‘the language of the city of Neša’.
In 1902 and 1915, Hittite was shown to be a previously-unknown member of the
Algospeak is the use of coded expressions to avoid detection by a computer algorithm, and examples of it abound on social media—unalive for kill, corn for porn, leg booty for LGBTQ, and many more.
#algospeak
#linguistics
#language
#SocialMedia
Curious about linguistics but don’t know where to start? I put together the Linguistics Starter Pack, a curated list of general audience books introducing you to the field of linguistics!
#linguistics
#languages
Curious about linguistics but don't want to read a textbook? I present ✨The Linguistics Starter Pack✨—my top recommendations for books to get started in linguistics!
You can view the whole list here:
#linguistics
#language
#BookRecs
'If I was you': The decline of the English subjunctive
English used to have three grammatical “moods”: indicative (statements), imperative (commands), and subjunctive (hypotheticals, wishes, etc.). But the subjunctive is on its way out!
#mood
"[L]inguistics as a discipline is often misunderstood[.] This is not really surprising, for a number of reasons. First of all, language is seen, rightly, as something that belongs to all of us. Most people can speak and/or write and/or sign, and so it is no surprise that most
Languages and dialects of Spain
According to the Ethnologue, Spain is home to 15 languages
Aragonese
Asturian
Basque
Caló
Catalan
Catalan Sign Language
Extremaduran
Fala
Galician
Guanche
Mercheros
Portuguese
Spanish
Spanish Sign Language
Valencian Sign Language
aranés
Map
Where do Spanish pronouns come from?
“nosotros” was originally “nōs” ‘us’ + “otros” ‘others’ (from Latin “alter” ‘other’)
Similarly, “vosotros” was “vōs” ‘us’ + “otros” ‘others’
"Language changes because people speak lazily and certain sounds are easier to pronounce."
If this were true, why would more difficult sounds ever occur at all? Why hasn’t selective pressure gotten rid of them?
The language that's dying out due to marriages
The Ongota language, an Afroasiatic language spoken in Ethiopia, has only 12 speakers remaining, all elderly. This is largely because Ongota men began marrying women from the neighboring Tsamakko tribe in the 1990s, so the children
The Muscogee language has FIVE past tenses and I need you to be excited about it bc it’s freakin cool
Recent Past (just now)
Hodiernal (earlier today)
Prehodiernal (before today)
Annual (earlier this year)
Distant Past (several years ago)
Mythic Past (legendary past)
“host” and “guest” both derive from the same Indo-European root *ghosti- ‘stranger, guest, host’, one through Latin and one through Germanic.
This is an example of a *doublet*—a set of words in a language that have the same etymological root. 1/4
The first known use of “irregardless” was in 1795, but people didn’t start griping about it until 1927 when some pedant decided they didn’t like it anymore.
The prefix “ir-” is functioning to intensify the negative meaning of the word, not negate its meaning. 1/2
The Proto-Indo-European language (the hypothesized original ancestor language of most modern languages in Europe and South Asia, hereafter abbreviated “PIE”) had a root *ǵʰelh₃- ‘yellow, green’. 1/16
Most Australian Aboriginal languages fall into the Pama-Nyungan language family (in yellow). It’s unclear whether the non–Pama-Nyungan languages in the north are all related to each other, or related to Pama-Nyungan, or neither. Many scholars have also tried to relate Australian
Humans spoke language long before we thought (
@KnowKnewz
)
In his upcoming book, The language puzzle: Piecing together the six-million-year story of how worlds evolved, archaeologist Steven Mithen argues that the earliest forms of language emerged between 1.5 and 2 million years
What’s the difference between a writing system and an orthography?
A writing system is a set of symbols (called signs) that are conventionally grouped together into a script and used to represent language.
An orthography is a set of rules/conventions for using a specific
Before the Celtic and Germanic languages, before Latin and Greek, before any Indo-European languages whatsoever, Europe was populated by speakers of dozens if not hundreds of languages, most of which left little or no trace. These are called Paleo-European languages. 1/
Natural languages are messy, inconsistent, illogical, complex-adaptive spontaneous orders riddled with exceptions and layers of culturally-specific history that are shaped by constraints on human cognition. 5/14
When linguists say that any pronunciation of a word is correct, they don’t mean that anything goes and all rules are out the window.
Linguists simply mean that words are pronounced differently in different dialects and by different demographics, and that none of these variations
Here are six pages from the Dresden Codex, one of four surviving Mayan folding books.
Mayans developed paper in the 400s BCE, and recorded history and astronomy for many centuries, using the same logographic script that was used in Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions.
People have been complaining about how the kids are ruining language for as long as there’s been language. Here’s a fun article exploring language complaints through history:
#English
#language
#linguistics
#history
@guardian
Even though English is a Germanic language, it has borrowed so many words that now only 26% of its vocabulary is actually Germanic.
#English
#linguistics
#language
Watching a “language” emerge in real time (
@ArsTechnica
)
This study had children communicate with each other without speaking in order to accomplish a shared game task, and within just a few rounds the children developed a set of gestural conventions that exhibited properties of
In the 2012 movie Prometheus, an android speaks to some aliens in Proto-Indo-European (PIE)!
We know the android is speaking PIE because earlier in the movie we see him on the ship listening to a lecture about it and reciting Schleicher’s Fable.
Schleicher’s Fable is a story
Language evolution is different from language change.
Language evolution refers to how the capacity for language as we know it evolved, such as the development of the vocal tract or theory of mind. 1/4
What’s interesting about this expression is that “ass” stands in for the entire person (which is why it's called a "camouflage" construction)—an example of metonymy (referring to something by something closely associated with it). 2/
I know people who spent *years* creating grammars for conlangs, or entire communities that have come together to produce a dictionary (like for the Na’vi language from Avatar). Imagine this same passion put towards documenting and revitalizing indigenous languages! 10/14
The Navajo language is a tonal language, which means that the pitch with which you pronounce a word changes the meaning of the word.
Examples:
ni ‘you’
ní ‘he/she says’
anii’ ‘face’
aníí’ ‘waist’
The Solomon Islands archipelago is home to 60–70 languages, grouped into 4 distinct language families—all with a population of just 1 million for the entire archipelago!
There was also an indigenous sign language, Rennellese Sign Language, which is sadly no longer in use.
The number of speakers that languages have follows a Zipfian distribution (roughly).
That is: The number of speakers a language has is inversely proportional to its rank in terms of number of speakers.
In other words: The second most widely spoken language has (roughly) half as
Chitimacha is a Native American language of Louisiana that was spoken until the death of its last two native speakers, Ben (1934) & Delphine (1940), pictured here. 1/7
1) Conlangs are boring. They usually only possess features from major languages because their creators don’t realize the vast diversity of different ways that languages work in the real world. 2/14
3) Indigenous languages need the attention more. There are 7,168 natural languages in use in the world today. Of those, at least 3,045 (42%) are endangered, meaning that they losing speakers. Fewer and fewer children learn endangered languages each year. 8/14
A lost Canaanite language called Amorite has been decoded thanks to the discovery of bilingual tablets, similar to the way the Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The tablets were written in Amorite and Akkadian using the cuneiform script. Prior to the
The letter ⟨V⟩ wasn’t pronounced /v/ in Classical Latin. It was used to represent both the /w/ sound and the /u/ sound. 🧵
In this inscription containing the word “novum”, you can see how the letter ⟨V⟩ is used for both the /v/ and the /u/.
1/