A random study of predictability of non-linear, randomized, non-deterministric and chaotic systems under consideration of external influencing factors.
I'm at the #PolyglotGathering in Prague, for the first time since right before the pandemic (2019).
One highlight so far: "If you think Indonesian and Malay are easy, you haven't met the rest of the family" - Brian Loo, in his talk on comparative phonology and grammar of Austronesian languages. This also holds if your primary exposure to Austronesian languages was Polynesian (Hawai'ian, Māori, etc).
Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person trying to wear a mask in indoor spaces, even at an event with over 800 people. I haven't gotten any pushback on this, but the combination of mask + queer hair + bad at pretending to be neurotypical does occasionally draw looks.
Overall, the feel of the event is definitely different from when it was 200-some people jammed into a youth hostel in Berlin, but similar to the Bratislava years (I never got to the Polish instances).
Where you live/grew up, what is the word for the natural path between two points that often goes near a more formal walkway/sidewalk?
The formal English word is “desire path” which always gave me the ick. In german it was technically “Trampelpfad” (trampel path) but colloquially in the areas I grew up it was usually Gänsenpfad (goose path) or “Ziegenpfad” (goat path), usually dependent on which small livestock was more common to the region. #linguistics
My morning radio feed has a new fill-in traffic reporter with that current language trend of not pronouncing terminating Ts and it's distracting. I wonder where it came from and why it's so rampant recently?
"There's an acciden aa the stree where ih crosses the river in the wess end."
Funny how speech trends come and go, and sometimes stay. I suspect Tiktok is amplifying it. Modern accents are becoming disconnected from geography and more about subculture/demographics.
It seems contradictory to me that at many schools, you can get a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science in the same field. Which is it? Is the field an art or science? #RandomThoughts#Linguistics#Academia
@JeremyMallin You can take different approaches to the same subject area. Speaking for my own area of Computer Science, a Bachelor of Arts would probably mean the student's learning was focused more on the practice of programming, using the word "Art" broadly to mean anything created. If they get a Bachelor of Science, it indicates a more theoretical approach. In general, practitioner vs. researcher.
I was very briefly in a discord group for writers that I’d been invited to join. Someone posted something which included the word “bullshit,” and the discord host said there was no room for such language as it was a “family-friendly” forum, something that was definitely not mentioned before I joined up. I quickly left the server, as I use words much more salty than that, and do not write “family-friendly” fiction. #WarningContainsLanguage#language#bullshit#WritingCommunity
Diseases are used for swearing in Dutch – but how does that work? @sesquiotic analyses the idiom "sjouw me de tering" in a new post on the Strong Language blog:
this is an important article for his focus on the cognitive #linguistics of protests:
«"I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech”...»
It's fascinating to me that giving someone a "beat down" is the same thing as "beating them up". It implies that beating exists in some sort of non Euclidean space that folds in on itself.
What's the most obscure hyper-local word or phrase you know?
For example, where & when I grew up, woodlice were knows as "cheeselogs". As far as I know, that's specific to one town in the UK. I don't know how long it was in general use, or even if it continues to this day.