Linguistic Discovery @lingdiscovery Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Linguistic Discovery

@lingdiscovery

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Exploring the science and diversity of language! 🗣️ Follow for language and linguistics! Run by Danny Hieber, Ph.D. ( @dwhieb , /ˈdæn.jəl ˈhi.bɚ/)

Chicago

https://t.co/vohAxAE87I

Joined December 2020

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

Archaeologists discover new Indo-European language #Hittites #history #archaeology #language #linguistics #languages #IndoEuropean

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Last fluent speaker of Wenatchee-Columbian Salish (n̓xaʔm̓xčín̓) dies at 96 #Salish #language #endangered #Native #NativeAmerican

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Last fluent speaker of n̓xaʔm̓xčín̓ language dies at 96

Pauline Stensgar, of Keller Washington, worked for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation for 48 years. For the last 24 years, she worked with the tribe’s Language Program as the senior...

www.spokesman.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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.”

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

All languages transmit information at roughly the same rate, even though they are spoken at widely differing speeds Original Research Article: #linguistics #language #information #InformationTheory #science #languages

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Writing is not language. Writing is a technology that we use to represent language.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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_

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

@Dictionarycom

Dictionary.com

1 year

What is a redundant word or phrase that you wish would be removed and eliminated forever?

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Latin has been influencing English since before English existed! Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways that English got vocabulary from Latin:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

Here are 3 reasons why I hate conlangs: (conlang = “constructed language”, an invented language like Dothraki or Klingon or Na’vi or Esperanto) 1/14

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Morpheme map of Heptapod B, the alien language in the movie Arrival (credit: @LanguageCrawler ) #Heptapod #Arrival #linguistics #language #conlang #aliens #xenolinguistics #SciFi #ScienceFiction #fiction #movies

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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”.

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Linguistics researchers identify primary consonants

Two professors of Linguistics have identified the "primal consonants" of human languages ̶ a small set of five consonant types that most likely were the original consonant sounds in early, even...

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

5 months

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:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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.

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"Monolingual Fieldwork" Demonstration - Daniel Everett

2013 LSA Summer Institute demonstration by Daniel Everett.

www.youtube.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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."

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

ooo here’s some fun etymology: Babylonian-Assyrian “qanu” ‘tube, reed’ > Greek “kanna” ‘reed, cane’ > Latin “canna” > Old French “cane” > English “cane” 1/3

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

2 years

🧵 Some awesome linguistics accounts and projects I've discovered (or rediscovered) at #LingComm23 @LingComm : A thread

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

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

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A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut

Math is called the “universal language,” but a unique dialect is being reborn

www.scientificamerican.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

2 years

#linguistics

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

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

New Indo-European Language Discovered

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discov...

www.uni-wuerzburg.de

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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,

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

No one: Me, a linguist:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

“peninsula” comes from the Latin “paene īnsula”, literally ‘almost an island’. How cute is that? #etymology #Latin #linguistics #language

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

He’s a 10 but he thinks he doesn’t have an accent

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Is language learned or innate? This is what’s often called the Innateness Debate in linguistics. 1/5

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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What is ‘algospeak’? Inside the newest version of linguistic subterfuge

The aggressive efforts of social media platforms to police language have spawned a new lexicon meant to evade censors.

theconversation.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

2 years

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

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Linguistic Discovery's Amazon Page - Linguistics Starter Pack

Shop recommended products from Linguistic Discovery on www.amazon.com. Learn more about Linguistic Discovery's favorite products.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

Map of the languages of Southeast Asia Map Source:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

Languages are louder in the tropics, new research claims

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Linguistics study claims that languages are louder in the tropics

Languages are a key factor in human societies. They connect people, serve as a vehicle to pass on knowledge and ideas, but they also distinguish between different groups of people. Languages can...

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

What is linguistics? Here's a quick introduction! #linguistics #language #languages #science #STEM #dialect #phonetics #syntax #history #sociology #psychology #neurology #ComputerScience #CompSci

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

'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

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‘If I Was You’: The Decline of the English Subjunctive

So even on the lips of a well-educated speaker, the English subjunctive is a shadow of its former self.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

9 months

"[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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

9 months

Where do Spanish pronouns come from? “nosotros” was originally “nōs” ‘us’ + “otros” ‘others’ (from Latin “alter” ‘other’) Similarly, “vosotros” was “vōs” ‘us’ + “otros” ‘others’

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

These are distinct language *families*, each consisting of multiple languages. #linguistics #language #NativeAmerican #Native #Indigenous

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

#etymology #linguistics #language

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

"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?

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Linguistic Discovery

5 months

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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)

@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

How to tell a Muscogee story in 5 past tenses:

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

“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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

Swearing is becoming more widely acceptable, linguistics experts claim Swearwords increasingly used for emphasis and to build social bonds, rather than to insult, say academics #swearing #linguistics #language @Guardian @MishalHusain

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Swearing is becoming more widely acceptable, linguistics experts claim

Swearwords increasingly used for emphasis and to build social bonds, rather than to insult, say academics

www.theguardian.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

🌞 Good morning to everybody except ppl who think they don’t speak with an accent 🗣️

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

A map of the indigenous language families of South America (except Quechua, Aymaran, and Mapuche). South America is home to over 600 languages, comprising 55 distinct families + 55 isolates. #SouthAmerica #language #linguistics #Indigenous #Native

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

Do you listen to podcasts and love language and linguistics? Check out the Big List of Linguistics Podcasts! #linguistics #podcast #language #science #SciComm #LingComm

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Linguistic Discovery | Podcasts

The big list of podcasts about language and linguistics!

resources.linguisticdiscovery.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

This map of the indigenous languages of North America at the time of European contact has a giant hole in the southeast. #Mississippi #history #Native #Indigenous #NativeAmerican #language #linguistics

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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/

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

Japan’s most endangered languages face extinction The Ryukyuan languages are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands (the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago). @TheEconomist #language #languages #linguistics #Japan #RyukyuIslands

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Japan’s most endangered languages face extinction

Ryukyuan tongues are as distinct from Japanese as English is from German

www.economist.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

The long read: People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?

www.theguardian.com

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Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

Map of the languages and dialects of Italy According to the Ethnologue, Italy is home to 27 living languages. Source for Map: Ethnologue Entry for Italy: #Italian #Italy #Europe #languages #dialects

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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/

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

The Republic of Vanuatu has the world’s highest linguistic density per capita. The archipelago has a population of 336,000, but 138 indigenous languages! At least 46 of these languages are endangered. #Vanuatu #language #languages #linguistics #indigenous #endangered

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

11 months

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’

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

5 months

A linguistic map of Germany: According to the Ethnologue, Germany is home to 19 distinct languages. Map from SB Languages: #Germany #language #languages #linguistics

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

Map of the language varieties of Italy. According to the Ethnologue, Italy is home to 27 living languages. #Italy #Europe #languages #dialects #Arpitan #Sardinian #Cimbrian #Corsican #Emilian #Friulian #Italian Ladin #Ligurian #Lombard #Mocheno #Napoletano #Occitan #Piedmontese

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Parts of speech don’t exist

@DrBrianKeating

Prof. Brian Keating

@DrBrianKeating

1 year

Your PhD thesis in five words. Go!

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Linguists and archaeologists have just discovered a previously-unknown Indo-European language! #linguistics #language #archaeology #history

New Indo-European Language Discovered

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discov...

www.uni-wuerzburg.de

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

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.

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

10 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

7 months

☀️ Good morning to everyone except people who think etymologies are definitions

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

A really cool article about the history of punctuation! (Spoiler Alert: Writing originally didn’t have any punctuation at all! Not even spaces between words!) by @FlorenceHazrat #punctuation #writing #history #grammar #language #linguistics

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The Politics of Punctuation: Changing History One Mark at a Time

FLORENCE HAZRAT Who decides how a sentence flows?

antigonejournal.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

6 months

Whenever someone asks me how many languages I speak I’m going to show them this graph #linguistics #language #languages #bilingual #multilingual #LanguageLearning #grammar

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

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

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

8 months

The Native American Languages & Linguistics master’s degree program at the University of Arizona is looking to put more emphasis on Native American language revitalization @UArizona #Native #NativeAmerican #Indigenous #linguistics #language

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

1 year

Language is a complex-adaptive system, which means that sometimes the changes in language are the result of random drift rather than any particular influence. #linguistics #language #science #SpontaneousOrder #ComplexAdaptiveSystem #emergence

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The Randomness of Language Evolution

English is shaped by more than natural selection.

www.theatlantic.com

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@lingdiscovery

Linguistic Discovery

4 months

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/

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