Innehållsförteckning för Issue 71 från Silly Linguistics

My name is Forest, and I’m a trivia writer and host of FWD Trivia and KLCC’s weekly radio show The Conundrum on the West Coast of the USA. Here I’ll be doing a regular quiz for all of you with the goal of sharing my love for both puzzles and language. This month's quiz has a food theme. Feel free to let me know how you did and if you have any thoughts about this or for future quizzes. Email me at fwdtrivia@gmail.com 1. North Americans and Australians use a word for the aubergine or brinjal which derives from the fact that the earliest varieties Europeans were exposed to were rounder, smaller, and whiter than the ones we’re familiar with today. What is that term 2. Speaking of which, there…

Social prohibitions of words work their way into our lives daily. Today, these language taboos often involve the avoidance of a word due to its connotations: cleanliness, morality, political correctness. Some topics we like to avoid in daily speech in this way might be death, menstruation, and blasphemy. Now, while ancient Germanic tribes may not have worried about the manner in which they spoke about death, they did worry about bears. Now, if we go back to the proto-indoeuropean (PIE) word for “bear,” it is reconstructed as *rkso- or *rtko-. We see this continued into Latin in their word “ursa,” and French “ours,” but what about English “bear/bruin,” German “baer,” and Dutch “beer”? These all seem to be derived from the PIE *bher-, meaning “brown.” This is rather strange, even…

To know the birds darting about, singing, perching, and snapping up seeds and insects outside your window, or in the leaves above your head, is to have a uniquely intimate relationship with your surroundings. Indeed, there are thought to be about ten thousand species of birds in the world, each with unique distributions, habitat preferences, appearances, vocabularies of sound, and other behaviors. This ignores the fact that individual bird species have different names, depending on language, region, social stratum, and whoever happens to be paying attention to them. Birds are familiar to us for good reason. They are often quite abundant and stunning, and their gift of flight, combined with beautiful sights and sounds seems to draw us out of our bodies. We thus very likely know several words for…

It’s no secret that every language in the world works according to a set of rules. Many of which use past, present and future tenses in linear orthography. The general consensus is that we would refer to the past as ‘behind’ us and the future would be ‘ahead’ of us. But there are some exceptions, such as that of a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, the Yupnas. Time for them is relative to the river, with uphill or ‘upward’ being representative of future events and downhill or ‘below’ them being the past. This is a stark contrast to the standard structure, but is a rather important point to note when it comes to understanding the language of the Heptapods from the film, Arrival. The aliens that arrive on earth…

Two emotions always follow a new technological advancement: amazement and abject horror. We live in an “information age”, but this information is not just digital ideas or photos. Language and writing are forms of technology, just as cellphones or touchscreens are technology. So can we argue that the “new” tech coming out is not really “new”? Inscriptions, or ‘inscripts’, have existed since the beginning of written languages. Think of inscripts in comparison to transcripts; in transcription, the transcriber listens to a recording or a live conversation and writes down everything said for the length of the recording or the duration of the conversation. The written transcription of the conversation is, of course, a transcript. The conversation that is going on around the transcriber is the inscript. The inscript contains all…

Norwegian dialects are to me, a very interesting subject, which I have written about many times before. Whilst a few years ago I would have said that the Nordland dialects of Norwegian (in Northern Norway) are the prettiest, in my opinion; the more that I listen to the Sognefjord and other western Norwegian dialects, the more I think: “hmm, I like these a lot too.” Sognefjord is Norway’s longest fjord, as well as being the deepest fjord in Norway, with a maximum depth of 4,291 feet, or 1,308 metres. The local Norwegian dialects spoken around the fjord are collectively referred to as Sognemål, or Sognemaol in local pronunciation. These Norwegian dialects belong to the larger Vestlandsk or “Westlandic” dialect area of Norwegian, which within it contains many diverse dialects, which…