TIL that a Petard is a small bomb, and that you get hoisted and NOT foisted in the saying
"Hoist with his own petard" is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown ("hoist") off the ground by his own bomb (a "petard" is a small explosive device), and indicates an ironic reversal, or poetic justice.
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"The Hardest Natural Languages"
The linked paper is an academic paper from 1979 and is written with a definite tongue-in-cheek tone.
This was found via Hacker News. There was a fun comment at the top of the conversation when I checked it that referenced this blog post about the difficulties of learning Chinese, which is obviously a related topic to the linked paper:
Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.
And lastly, here is the US State department's ranking of languages by difficulty.
(And for the record, I'm not seeking out these linguistic posts. It's by chance I've had a number of topics for linguistics and conlangs based on my feeds recently.)
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"What Happens When You Offer Grammar Advice to Complete Strangers in the Middle of Manhattan"
She set up a table in New York City to answer grammar questions for passerby. She encourages people to vent to her about their grammatical frustrations, and sometimes she settles debates for people, but she also found that people who were learning English would come and ask questions to help their understanding. A nice and entertaining read!
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Chinuk Wawa - A PNW trade pidgin language
I fell down a Wikipedia hole for a bit this afternoon between calls and while resting my brain from Excel work. I had gone looking for some history about Seattle which led me to began to wonder where the local area "Alki Beach" got its name. As it turns out "alki" is from this Chinuk Wawa pidgin. As with pidgins and creoles, definitions are loose and contextual - here are the definitions for 'alki':
- eventually
- someday
- in the future
- times to come
- presently
- directly
- later
- in a little while
- after a while
- shortly
- will
- shall
Now, before I dive further into the topic, I was stop and acknowledge that this creole language is closely intertwined with the settlement and imperialism in the PNW region. I do not want to gloss over that that imperialism and cultural erasure is a big reason why this pidgin language both came to exist but also eventually died out. The video I embedded below does a good job discussing this and highlighting it.
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The deeper meaning of the Hawaiian 'Ohana'
A friend's use of the term on Facebook caused me to go looking up the connotations of the word. I was familiar with it from Disney's Lilo and Stitch, but I had a suspicion it might mean more than a simple translation for 'family.'
The concept of 'ohana involves creating loving relationships with more than just blood relatives. Embracing 'ohana means developing a sense of familial care and devotion to all members of the human family.
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Nepal's Kusunda has one speaker left, linguists are fighting to change that
Kusunda is an interesting language. It has no known ancestor language and one of its unique features is it appears to lack the words for 'yes' and 'no.'
Hima is one of the last remaining Kusunda, a tiny indigenous group now scattered across central western Nepal. Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction.
According to the latest Nepali census data from 2011, there are 273 Kusunda remaining. But only one woman, 48-year-old Kamala Khatri, is known to be fluent.
[...]
Madhav Pokharel, emeritus professor of linguistics at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, has been overseeing the documentation of the Kusunda language over the last 15 years. He explains that several studies have attempted to link it with other language isolates, such as Burushaski from north Pakistan and Nihali from India. But all have failed to find any robust conclusions.Madhav Pokharel, emeritus professor of linguistics at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, has been overseeing the documentation of the Kusunda language over the last 15 years. He explains that several studies have attempted to link it with other language isolates, such as Burushaski from north Pakistan and Nihali from India. But all have failed to find any robust conclusions.
[...]
Alongside its mysterious beginnings, linguists have noted Kusunda's many rare elements. Bhojraj Gautam, a linguist with in-depth knowledge of Kusunda, describes one of the most peculiar: there is no standard way of negating a sentence. Indeed, the language has few words implying anything negative. Instead, context is used to convey the exact meaning. If you want to say "I don't want tea", for example, you might use the verb to drink, but in an adjusted form which indicates a very low probability – synonymous with the speaker's desire – of the drinking of tea.
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"‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds"
[R]esearchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
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A historic look at Esperanto
I've known about Esperanto for years, though I've never given it any serious investigation or study. This post was a nice primer on its history, its creator and his vision for it.
Having grown up in the multicultural but distrusting environment of Bia?ystok, Zamenhof dedicated his life to constructing a language that he hoped could help foster harmony between groups. The goal wasn’t to replace anyone’s first language. Rather, Esperanto would serve as a universal second language that would help promote international understanding – and hopefully peace.
Esperanto is easy to learn. Nouns do not have grammatical gender, so you never have to wonder whether a table is masculine or feminine. There are no irregular verbs, so you don’t have to memorize complex conjugation tables. Also, the spelling is entirely phonetic, so you’ll never be confused by silent letters or letters that make different sounds in different contexts.
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Explaining the Zulu click sounds
To quote a redditor, "this is an insane amount of linguistics condensed into 3 minutes"
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Natalie Diaz on the Mojave Language and Where English Fails Us
[Auto Generated Summary]:
While sharing meals throughout our residency discussing literature, politics, and love, Natalie's precision and passion around language was immediately apparent. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University and writing poetry, Natalie actively works to preserve the Mojave language with its last remaining speakers. "My body is its own lexicon and I also fight for a language, in Mojave and English, that helps me to hold it in the space of love." It's an out of time place. Natalie went on to say that this is one of the ways she "Refuses to be prophesied" by the English language and works hard to be capacious in English.
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What Is ‘Cheugy’? You Know It When You See It. (Published 2021)
I'm leaving the auto generated summary as a bit of blog history, being the first link post to be automatically published from my Wallabag utilizing new code for identifying keywords and writing a summary. It is a good proof that this system is imperfect but, I think, still useful. We will see how this functionality grows.
[Auto Generated Summary]:
“It’s really easy to identify cheugy things on TikTok because TikTok is so fast paced and there’s so many trends that come and go,” said Ms. Siegel. “I see stuff and I’m like, this is so overdone so I think it’s cheugy. Whereas if I didn’t see it on my ‘For You’ page, I wouldn’t think it was cheugy,” she said, referring to what is essentially the TikTok home page. And for any millennials worried about being behind the trends, Ms.
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What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing
Thanks to my friend Shivam for sharing this on Twitter!
This is very cool and gives an interesting look at the evolution of a natural writing system for an African language.
In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. "Look!" said the spectral visitor. "These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language."
Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing.
This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone.
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How similar are the Russian and Ukrainian languages?
One frequently cited figure is that Ukrainian and Russian share about 62% of their vocabulary. This is about the same amount of shared vocabulary that English has with Dutch, according to the same calculations. If you expand your sample by scraping internet data to compare a broader range of words than just those 200 ancient "core" words, the proportion of shared words declines. One computational model suggests that Russian and Ukrainian share about 55% of their vocabulary.
Russian and Ukrainian emerged from the same ancestor language, and, in the grand scheme of things, not very long ago. It is easier for a Russian to learn Ukrainian (or vice versa) than it is for an English speaker trying to master either of those languages. Their shared vocabulary and the fact that even words that have different meanings may look familiar makes it easier for Russian or Ukrainian speakers to "tune into" the other.
The long history of Russia as the dominant political and cultural language of the Soviet Union means that many of Ukraine's citizens -– around 30% by the last census –- are native speakers of Russian, and many more studied Russian to a high level. The reverse has not been true historically, though that is now changing. The languages are close enough and have coexisted long enough that they even have a hybrid called Surzhyk, which is in common use in many parts of Ukraine.
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Would an Arabic speaker from today be able to at least somewhat communicate with an Arabic speaker from around 1200 AD?
I really enjoyed learning more about the Arabic language and reading the answers from the folks on Reddit's AskHistorians.
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Georgian Language and History with Thomas Wier and Dr Timothy Blauvelt
An absolutely wonderful look at the Georgian culture. Other than knowing that Tblisi is the capital of Georgia, I know nothing else about the country and culture, and so this article was fascinating to read.
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