Amaze your friends with tidbits from my interview with Paul Anthony Jones as we talk about his new book "Why Is This a Question?"
If you think it's hard learning the gender of nouns when you're studying Spanish, German, or French, consider the language with more than 300 genders that Paul describes in this clip.
Check out the whole interview for more fun language facts!
I’m thrilled to announce that I will be moving to #Philadelphia for a fellowship at the American Philosophical Society, where I will continue working on locating, building, and analyzing a corpus of #Tunica language documentation, as well as gathering all information I can on the history and culture of the Tunica-Biloxi people.
Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time - by Eric Grundhauser December 7, 2016
"...Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures & histories to speak them... In the case of the ever-present Elvish in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men & hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm & Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.”...As radio & film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent..."
Yeah, I know. My father's family was Scottish (Clan Crawford) and the men were not very tall, low to average height. My husband is 6'4" and his family was Welsh, and the Elves were supposed to be tall, so I thought that was interesting.
When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊
As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.
Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.
If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.
And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉
At the same time, maybe if we could get the little things right, maybe it would help folks get used to the idea of inclusivity and build a better foundation to tackle the bigger stuff?
@JoeGrowling I don't know. Just a thought. I personally don't care enough when people say "Mastodon" when they actually mean "fediverse", certainly not enough to "correct" people.
But sometimes I do wonder about folks who use other platforms, often pre-dating Mastodon itself. I can see how that might get a bit annoying, I guess.
YouTube music often shows song titles for songs using non-Latin writing systems transliterated into the Latin alphabet, which makes the titles easier to read but hard to verify that the song is in a language that I'm seeking. I wish they would show the title both ways.
If lyrics are available, then I can use the lyrics to verify. But often they're not.
An interesting article about “linguistic personas”
University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray, and former hockey player, studied the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master's thesis.