Looking for literature on German in the Netherlands for a sociolinguistics class next semester!
I'm especially interested the German-speaking communities abroad (who is part of it, what languages do they speak) & language ideologies around German in the Dutch context. Thanks! ☺️
Atlas Obscura's Dan Nosowitz set out to determine what the fastest language in the world is, and immediately encountered a problem: What does that mean? Number of syllables spoken in a set amount of time? Amount of information conveyed? Language that can be understood when cranked up to the highest speed? He spoke to quantitative linguist Francois Pellegrino about how experts measure all this, and together, they came up with an answer.
The U.S. Thinks It’s Harder to Learn Polish or Greek Than Swahili or Malay
Here are the difficulty levels of most European languages for Americans. by Frank Jacobs, Big Think March 29, 2024
"...Another reason is that being English-only speakers may be a disadvantage even if everybody else speaks English. According to a BBC article, native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators. Being monolingual means they are less proficient in detecting the subtleties of language variation than non-native speakers of English.
Those non-native speakers will be less proficient in slang, word-play, and cultural-specific references, and will avoid them more than monolingual Anglophones. In fact, they are better at using English as a lingua franca than native English speakers.
Also, learning another language exercises the brain & provides insight into another culture... “As many languages you speak, so many times are you human.”
“Learning a different way to speak, read & write helps people discover new ways to see the world [...],” Matsakis writes. “No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.”
https://rootlgame.net/ continues to be good fun. Just remembered it today after discovering it (on here, natch. forget who offhand, a mutual probably?) and added it to my first-thing morning tab set.
Also! You can play the entire historical run of the game, so I'm probably going to have /a/ Rootl tab open like, near permanently, until I finish the backlog 😂
How a Portuguese-to-English Phrasebook Became a Cult Comedy Sensation
Meet 1883’s most absurd language guide.
by Tucker Leighty-Phillips June 29, 2016
"...It quickly gained notoriety among English speakers, including author Mark Twain, who wrote the introduction for the first English edition, published in 1883. Twain endorsed the book, saying “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.”
"...The book itself is a guessing game of intention and phrases contorted in the unorthodox translation process. If English as She Is Spoke is to be believed, trade occupations might include Coffeeman, Porkshop-Keeper, and Chinaman. The list of aquatic life noted under the heading “Fishes and Shell-Fishes” features well-known sea creatures like the Wolf, the Hedge-hog, and a Sorte of Fish..."
Hello, dusty Mastodon account! I have a new newsletter out today! I talk about the difference between an accent and a dialect, and you can learn why ordering a pancake in some parts of #Germany will get you a jelly donut.
A friend invited a bunch people to join his dorm's shared sauna, some more joined by chance. One was a visiting PhD student who speaks 14 languages. The shower turned into a comparative #linguistics seminar, in Italian. I got to learn something about the syntax of Balkan languages.
Excellent piece from Grégory Miras on why new tools that change #accents in real time are harmful and problematic - they erase diversity - and make us less able to appreciate and listen to that diversity.
I’m currently reading the 2024 edition of the Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics and I loved every chapter I’ve read so far! This is a must read for anyone interested in the latest research in the field of Forensic Linguistics.
There's one notation that used to puzzle me until I got into historical linguistics: words with stars like *kladiwos (the reconstructed Proto-Celtic word for a sword).
For those are just starting out as historical linguistics nerds: that star means that the word form is unattested.
Sometimes I wonder if people should mark reconstructions with different number of stars depending on its certainty. One star — nearly certain, three stars — mostly speculative.
For example, *ekwos is a very solid reconstruction — we know that the Latin word for a horse is "equus", that the Old Irish word is "ech", and that all cognates lost their -us/-os endings in the Archaic Irish period (the "ch" is from the general pattern of lenition that turns terminal plosives into fricatives).
The Proto-Celtic definite article, though... The most plausible theory for the nominative case is *sindos (masculine) and *sinda (feminine).
It's certain that the feminine article ended with a vowel because the Old Irish article ("in(d)") lenites feminine nouns — that mutation could only arise if initial consonants in feminine nouns with the article were once intervocalic.
It's certain that there was an S in it because some historical "article + preposition" forms like "isind" ("in the" — "i + s + ind") have an S.
But was it exactly "sinda"? Only a time machine trip can tell.
This originates as a condensed version of the short panel talk I gave at ICHL in Heidelberg. I'm grateful to Claire Bowern for organizing the series, and to Nigel Vincent in particular for convening the panel ... (1/2)
In #Polish the word for Germany is Niemcy which is etymologically opposite to #Slavic. ‘[Slavic] … originally denoted "people who speak (the same language)", i.e. people who understand each other, in contrast to the Slavic word denoting "foreign people", namely němci, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic *němъ "mumbling, mute").’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)#german#etymology#linguistics#language