Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 83 i Silly Linguistics

Morphology is the study of words, how they are put together and how they relate to other words in a sentence. It looks at parts of a word like stems, suffixes and prefixes. It also looks at how such things such as intonation, stress and context can change a words meaning and pronunciation. Suffixes can change the function of a word in a sentence, such as an added “s” making a word in English plural. Other languages might rely on extra words rather than suffixes to change the function of a word. The “s” in “dogs”, “cats”, the “es” in “boxes” and the “less” in “useless” are examples of bound morphemes. They are elements of a language that have either provide a grammatical function such as marking a plural, or…

In English, it takes three words to say I love you, in Dutch, four (ik hou van jou), and in Arabic, just one (What .)أﻚﺒﺣ This language requires at least two ?about Indonesian .such as aku mencintaimu or kucinta padamu ,words In I love you, each word represents the subject, predicate, and object. But how does it work in aku mencintaimu? Here, aku serves as the subject, mencintai as the predicate, and the suffix -mu as the object. The -mu, derived from kamu (you), merges with the verb. It looks like a suffix, but it isn’t actually one; rather, it is an enclitic, a type of clitic. A clitic is a bound form that functions at the phrase or clause level. Unlike independent words, clitics cannot stand alone. However, they…

We’re all guilty of digital gluttony, that much is a fact. We spend sometimes hours on our phones or tablets just staring at mindless posts on social media. Admittedly, that’s bad for us, but so is smoking and drinking. Unlike the latter, however, every now and then the digital deities bless us with some obscure and highly interesting information about our very niche and admittedly odd interests. Case in point – linguistics. And don’t judge, you yourself, dear reader, wouldn’t be reading this magazine if you weren’t guilty of the same! But I digress. Here I am scrolling through my lunch break at work when suddenly a post about something called “The Voynich Manuscript” comes before me on my feed. An undeciphered medieval manuscript supposedly filled with secrets and illustrations…

Have you ever felt the urgent need to insult someone but without causing a kerfuffle or getting fired? If only there was a subtle way to insult someone, some way to manipulate the language so they wouldn’t know they were insulted but you would still feel a modicum of satisfaction. I had to tread carefully. I once told one of my students that his grandmother was “salt of the earth.” (an incredibly special compliment). When he told her and asked her what it what it meant, she said she thought I meant she was “old as dirt.” (definitely not a compliment). So, I set off in search of the perfect insult. First, I looked to the Germans. I could call them a Jeans Ironer (Jeansbügler) which simply refers to an…