matt 🍉 @matt_boot_ Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

matt 🍉

8 months

hey all, just as an update, i will return to tweeting about linguistics and language once some kind of ceasefire is reached in Gaza and permanent aid starts coming to the people there. there's lots i want to talk about but i don't think now is the time.

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@littlejaeyi

@tradersubstack

matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

when i'm in Sweden and i offer my guests some food

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

do we have a deal

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

i don't mean to be rude but while you guys are arguing over what college students mean by "from the river to the sea", this is actually still going on

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

9 months

"chief foreign correspondent of NBC News" seems like a pretty easy job

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 month

the alien having 10 fingers is a really nice touch

EvilMog

@Evil_Mog

1 month

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

you will not believe the first sentence of this article

The Economist

@TheEconomist

2 years

Switzerland has four official languages. How can a country so linguistically diverse work?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

8 months

i don't know what to say. Doaa was an Arabic and English teacher. she and i followed each other though i didn't know her well. i am reading that she and her daughter Sham were killed in an airstrike yesterday. day 27. i'm so sorry we failed you. الله يرحمكم

doaa

@freelancerdoaa

8 months

Finally managed to do a “birthday party” for my daughter despite everything. Her happiness was worth the world.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 month

honestly this gives me goosebumps. we don't have to respect institutions that hate us (while deriving much of their power and value from us). if there are enough of us, we should have our own institutions, fuck the old ones

Steven Donziger

@SDonziger

1 month

Remember the president of ⁦ @Columbia ⁩ canceled graduation after arresting 200 of her own students? Today those same students stood strong by holding a beautiful alternative graduation ceremony at St. John the Divine near campus. Major display of student power.👊⤵️

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

6 months

there is an Arabic expression يقتل القتيل و يمشي في جنازته yiʔtil il-ʔatīl wi yimši f ganazt-u "he kills the victim & then walks in his funeral"

Secretary Antony Blinken

@SecBlinken

6 months

This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around the world. Many killed, many more wounded, hundreds detained, attacked, threatened, injured – simply for doing their jobs. I am profoundly grateful to the press for getting accurate, timely information to people.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@lblestes etymological redundancy aside, i fear that this is the logical conclusion:

Trey Ferguson

@PastorTrey05

3 years

…I beg your pardon???

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

10 months

the sweet ambiguity of phrasal verbs

Rick Lee James

@RickLeeJames

10 months

AI created image from the phrase, “Jesus flipping over the tables in the temple.”

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

6 months

it was nice while it lasted

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

6 years

sp: lana del rey fr: laine du roi port: lâ do rei cat: llana del rei it: lana del re rom: lâna regelui vulgar latin: *lana dẹ (ẹllọ) rẹgʲe classical latin: lāna rēgis proto-italic: *wlānā rēges proto-indo-european: *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂ h₃réǵs

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 months

this slogan is both (1) chiastic wordplay with Latin prefixes and (2) a complete line of iambic pentameter. i can't get it out of my head

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

still thinking about how children learning to write in English intuitively spell unaspirated /p t k/ as <b d g>

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

23 days

TrustLion

@Trust_Lion_

24 days

"Racism" is the societal Defining Issue in 2024 and it was invented less than a century ago. It's meaningless conjecture. Why do people fight over the application of this all-important-concept? Because it's imaginary. Fluid. Indefinable. (Fake!)

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

Levantine Arabic sounds exhausting. 3am ne7ke, 3am nakol, 3am ned7ak ... why does everything have to happen at 3am?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 month

i've read lots of Arabic translations of this poem, & i don't know who translated it here, but there's something beautifully fitting about إن كُتِبَ عليّ الموت lit. "if death has been written for me" in the context of the rest of the line

Anna🍉🗝️

@anna_lippman

1 month

“If I must die, you must live to tell my story” spotted in Cork, Ireland #FreePalestine

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

linguists will say "lexical unit" they hate the word "word" so much

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

@toutovlepo blissfully unitless "scientific advancement"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

at risk of putting too fine a point on it, a white lady yelling "Israelis rule" and "go back to Palestine" at a random Muslim woman (who is not Palestinian) tells you all you need to know about many Americans' support for Israel.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

none of this is a gotcha. the few traces of this "fun fact" that have a basis in reality have nothing to do with what is happening in Gaza. you can't hurt a colonial regime by attacking its language. degrading Hebrew and/or Jewish culture does nothing for Palestinians.

شمس

@qamarrz

7 months

fun fact: hebrew is a language that was extinct for 2000 years but was revived when the fake state was made, originally the hebrew language only had 7000 words and now it has 33,000 words- 26,000 words were taken from the arabic language

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@bgsprung this is not quite accurate. this "the" comes from þȳ, the old *instrumental case* of the definite article. so it's like "whereby X, thereby Y" or "by how much X, that's how much Y"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 months

what is the point of anything if we can't divest from this

Muhammad Smiry 🇵🇸

@MuhammadSmiry

2 months

ISRAEL IS KILLING OUR CHILDREN IN RAFAH | GAZA

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

Egyptian Arabic وحشتني waḥaštini = "i miss you" literally means "you have made me desolate". the root w-ḥ-š means desolation, desertion; but also wild, brutish (wiḥiš "evil, bad"; waḥš "wild animal")

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

more kids killed in Gaza in 3 weeks than all global conflict 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 since 2019

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

7 months

U.S. officials: Israel is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties. The world: Israel is setting records at killing civilians.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@bgsprung þā ... þā does indeed mean "when ... then" in Old English, but this temporal correlative is not where we get the "the more the merrier" construction. i'm afraid somebody took an OE class and mixed a few things up

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

10 days

as someone whose day job involves llms: i need you guys to understand that chatgpt does not know information, it is not a database, it just spits out likely words. llms model language not truth. manipulating language is useful for some things but being correct isn't one of them

Sid

@darthsidius1985

12 days

@yvanspijk Hmmm. Here's something from chatgpt though. There's a possibility it may have PIE root.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

Jon

@BiggestttHater

1 year

what is y’all most liked tweet?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

still thinking about how children learning to write in English intuitively spell unaspirated /p t k/ as <b d g>

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

don't mix these up

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

the name "instagram" comes from Arabic استغرام istaġrām, the form X masdar (verbal noun) of the root ġ-r-m "love, infatuation". it literally means "making people infatuated with you," which is what the app does. #etymology

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 months

in Iliad 9.457, Hades is called Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος "Underground Zeus"

Jennifer Lee Rossman #SaveLowerDecks

@JenLRossman

2 months

Is important for you to know that I briefly forgot the name Poseidon so the instant I saw this guy, my brain went "wet Zeus"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

syntax tree of the century

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

listen, kissinger will not see you celebrating his death, but other war criminals will. is that really what you want?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@bgsprung so it doesn't originally mean "if more, then merrier" as suggested in the comment. it has always meant "by how much more, that's how much merrier", i.e. double or triple the quantity leads to double or triple the merriment.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

it's fascinating that, after losing so much morphology over the centuries, English can still mark the 3rd-person singular *subjunctive*. (the indicative here would be "keeps".) in fact, the story of this "s"-less conjugation goes waaay back to Proto-Indo-European. 1/13

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

in Egyptian Arabic they don't say "it's hot out" they say "the world is heat" and i think that's beautiful

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

one of the most important decisions you have to make in TOTK is whether Link is capable of producing a labiodental fricative

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

TIL this poem's title is in quotes bc it's a paraphrase of something Hitler said in 1939: "wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?" [who today still talks of the extermination of the Armenians?] referring to their genocide by the Ottomans two decades before.

nour

@nh0er

2 years

poem by palestinian poet najwan darwish

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

8 months

oh my god

j

@jrc1921

8 months

The Israeli president holds up a copy of Mein Kampf containing post-it notes, claiming it was found on a body 'in a children's living room' in northern Gaza.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

"but some Ukrainians speak Russian!" yeah this is exactly why we don't use national flags to represent languages

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

10 months

i'll raise you CNN Arabic ..

rami 🇵🇸

@renolunio

10 months

whoever designed the arabic 7 up logo is the smartest person alive. the red circle is just the english word for seven spelled phonetically and the 7 is the word up ( اپ )they managed to keep the logo’s silhouette while making it read right to left

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

i don't know what designer came up with this بالعربية ("in Arabic") logo for CNN Arabic, that has the Latin letters "CNN" cleverly worked into it, but they are working on a whole other level. more of this, please

Tolyan Botan 🇺🇦

@TolyanBotan

3 years

@yakabikaj @linguopunk_ru . @cnnarabic

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

wait a second is "buddha" just the Sanskrit for "woke"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

an important announcement: the Navajo term for "France" is Dáághahii Dine'é bikéyah lit. "mustache people's land"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

8 months

@soulkhan @jon_speaks_ this was true before Oct 7 too

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

4 years

gender reveal parties but for 3rd-declension nouns

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

reminiscing about when my French coworker told me he thought Kyoto was just "Tokyo" in verlan

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

brb working on a new conlang 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝟭 we w'all 𝟮 you y'all 𝟯 they th'all

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

11 months

reminder: if the full timeline of human language were represented as a 100-page book, what we would recognize as "Proto-Indo-European" would not enter the story until page 96±1.5

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

Egyptian Arabic imbāriḥ "yesterday" Old Irish i-mbárach "tomorrow" no relation

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

6 months

wtf did i just read

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

8 months

to think that there are already hundreds or maybe thousands of stories just like this, new ones every day. from a human-made catastrophe that a handful of people could stop at any moment. it is hard to accept that the world can possibly be so unjust

هدى نعيم Huda Naim

@HuDa_NaIm92

8 months

Journalist Rushdie's wife writes to her husband: Habibi Roshdi Sarraj, Exactly one year ago today, you were holding my hand, comforting me during labor. Having you by my side made it so much easier. We chose the name Dania for our daughter, which means "close" in Arabic, so she

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@matt_boot_

1 year

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@matt_boot_

3 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

saying you don't have an accent is a little like saying you don't have a skin color. you definitely have one, but your environment has made it so that you can get by without noticing it.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 months

nobody: Vulgar Latin speakers:

seraphine ★🍉 STRIKE WEEK

@yrinsanelove

2 months

do u guys pronounce "cis" as "kis" or "sis" cus i say sis cut some other people say kis 😭

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

linguists and language enjoyers, it's honesty time: what's a prescriptive "grammar rule" that you were taught (such as: don't split an infinitive, don't start a sentence with "and") that you know is fake but nonetheless hold yourself to?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

29 days

calamari meaning "qalam holder" has altered my brain chemistry

Philip Boyes

@PhilipJBoyes

30 days

Just found out that 'calamari' for squid comes from 'calamus', meaning pen. Via the word for pencil-case. Because they're full of ink. So obvious and so dumb.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

just heard an Egyptian speaker say بونجت كلنا بنونجت bawingit, kullina binwingit = "i'm winging it, we're all winging it" needed to tell someone

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@Dervine7 well my objection is more that any perceived right to self-determination of a people has historically been applied extremely haphazardly, within europe itself but especially in europe's many colonies

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

if you are learning Arabic (MSA, Levantine, Egyptian, or North African), you should really check out the readers they have at Lingualism. these include an annotated English translation & audio! it's very hard to find materials like this for such a wide range of Arabic dialects.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

23 days

it's getting worse, i took this just now

Dr Naomi Wolf

@naomirwolf

25 days

Normal!

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

TIL the Hittites had a drink they basically called "7-Up" and the only reason we know what their word for 7 was is they occasionally spelled out in the name of the drink.🍹

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

how great is it that "galactic" is just the ancient Greek word for "milky" 🥛🐮✨

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

UrbanDictionary, for linguists, is basically that scene in Men In Black where Will Smith is like "i can't believe you're looking for reliable alien tips in the tabloids??" and the tabloids turn out to be a hugely valuable and up-to-date source of information

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

today i am awestruck and slightly overwhelmed by the unpredictability of Urdu numbers 1–100

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

on the other hand you could write a dissertation about <chRiego>

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

what is an "Indoeuropean"? someone who happens to speak an Indo-European language? difficult to see how this is anything but white supremacist garbage

Alexander Stoyanov

@Al_Stoyanov

2 years

Indoeuropeans were probably the greatest conquerors in human history and that had a lot to do with their social structure and their approach to war as a founding element for their states and societies.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

11 months

the Luwian Iliad and it's not even close

James Kierstead

@Kleisthenes2

11 months

If you could magically recover a complete manuscript of one lost work from antiquity, which would it be?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

Ibn Faḍlān on the Rūs how it started how it's going

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

it's throwing me that "ketchup" comes from the Indonesian/Malay كيچڤ kecap "(sweet) soy sauce" 🤯 this apparently comes from Hokkien 膎汁 kê-chiap, which means fish sauce #etymology

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

11 months

language learning goals

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

3 years

today's #etymology : the word _lens_ is a direct borrowing from Latin lēns (genitive: lentis) "lentil", because convex lenses are shaped like lentils! _lentil_ itself comes (thru French) from Latin lenticula "little lentil"!

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

5 years

this is just to say i have umlauted the vowels that were in stressed syllables preceding *i(ː) and *j and which you were probably saving from proto-germanic forgive me they were susceptible to frontness harmony so back and so rounded

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

the problem with "the problem is, is" is "is is" is redundant

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

this tiktok is as wrong as you can be about like 20 different things

herbal left enjoyer 🇺🇳

@SlurricaneH

1 year

Sorry you have a bad relationship with your girlfriend but I don’t think that’s the English language’s problem

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

i love standard arabic because you can study it for 10 years & then one day encounter an apparently quite basic preposition that you have just never seen before in your life

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

you laugh but this is actually what happened to "pea" 🫛 (from earlier "pease") and "cherry" 🍒 (from earlier "cherise")

Tina Straighter 🇻🇦🇨🇦

@t_straighter

1 year

The baby has started asking for “a chee”, because she logically assumes “cheese” is plural. 3yo also keeps calling our friend Ita because she thinks the “An-” is an article.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

do you ever think about how humans had been speaking & signing language for 150k-200k years before writing was first invented a mere 5k years ago?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

lol

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

@DannyBate4 @bgsprung if twitter went under today, i couldn't live the rest of my life knowing this was never addressed

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

today's #etymology : the Arabic word for "penguin", بطريق biṭrīq, also means "patrician, Roman nobleman". it's ultimately a borrowing (thru Aramaic & Greek) from Latin pātricius. this is (i can only assume) because penguins look like little noble guys.

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

one fun thing about Egyptian Arabic is that the typical formula for a negative command, ما ma + imperfect verb, implies a gentle command or invitation. so ما تدخل ma-tudxul means "don't come in!" in other dialects. but in Egypt it's "why don't you come on in"

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

5 years

found on reddit

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

the baby still hasn't said mama or dada but that's ok, i'm optimistic dada will be first, because i am gonna count any phoneme within the dad zone (papa, baba, tata, dada) as a win. so the odds are 4 to 1 for me, it's simple math

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

even numbers are bouba & odd numbers are kiki, right?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

sober realization: there are just too many languages, you've got to pick and chose in this life. i respect the people who are learning like 30 languages but if depth of learning means anything to you then you have to make tough choices. there's just not enough time for everything

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

why does it seem like all demons speak Latin? is it their first language or have they just had a lot of exposure to it so it's a convenient lingua franca?

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

the phonetic difference between "50 minutes" [ˈfɪftiˈmɪnɪts] & "15 minutes" [ˈfɪfˌtiːmˈmɪnɪts] is way too subtle. ridiculous language

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

not sure who needs to hear this but "cistern" is etymologically related to neither "cis" (as in cisgender or Cisalpine) nor "tern" (the bird) it comes from Greek κίστη kístē "box" 📦

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

1 year

@Racha_R_G

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

Germany can't exist because German doesn't have the /dʒ/ sound

Bad Arabic and Hebrew Takes

@arabic_bad

2 years

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

2 years

English has a really nice way to make resultative constructions, like "the baby farted herself awake." how would you express that in other languages? (example is based on real events)

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matt 🍉

@matt_boot_

7 months

this is your brain on anglocentrism

Dr. Eli David

@DrEliDavid

7 months

“Palestine” 🇵🇸 is the only country in the world that has a name with a letter that doesn't exist in its alphabet. There is no “P” in Arabic. The name “Palestine” comes from Philistines and Roman province of Judea-Palestina, nothing to do with today's “Palestinians”.

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