Innehållsförteckning för Issue 75 från Silly Linguistics

We are going to start in Ancient Greece with a person known as Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was a poet. There is a story where Simonides was at a feast. Whilst at the feast Simonides was called outside to meet some guests. As he is called outside, the building he was in collapses killing everyone inside. Because of the severity of the disaster the bodies of those killed are unrecognisable. Being the only survivor of the disaster Simonides is asked if he can recall who was at the feast and where they were sat. Using his memory skills Simonides is said to have recalled who the guests were and where they were sat at the feast. His memory skills helped identify the victims of the tragedy and bring closure to…

The empirical sciences tend to ground themselves in cycles, whether of life, water, or rock. Languages have their cycles as well, simply in a different way. Just as the mainstream discourse in the empirical science world is climate change, linguistic change and death are hot topics within the social science communities. We use a lot of vocabulary associated with humans with language, as they are inherently connected. But unlike humans, it’s more challenging to ascribe categories of life or death towards a language, especially as a language begins to decline and reach a ‘critical condition.’ Scholars like Michael Agar have attributed language to culture in their works, which makes native speakers critical to the vitality of a language’s vital systems. In Chile, indigenous languages have seen their decline since the…

As we first learn about sentences, while studying the grammar of our own language, or every time we start learning a new language (which is probably often – I know it, you know it), we encounter negative sentence forms. They usually aren't too complicated when it comes to form, and neither are they when it comes to meaning. They just negate the meaning of their affirmative counterpart, don't they? Well, yeah. But not always. Here's an example from the Serbian language: Example (1) For an English speaker, it may be surprising that negation in a sentence doesn't have to convey the negation of the meaning at all, because the expletive (redundant, pleonastic, paratactic) negation (EN) isn't that common in this language, or at least in its formal variant. To be…

Flowers are still something that we use to communicate with in contemporary society but the Victorians shared an entire language of messages that could be told simply through plants. We might give red roses to a lover or share our condolences for someone’s loss with white lilies, we may lay a bouquet of a loved one’s favourite flowers on their grave, and we often give flowers for a whole variety of different occasions from birthdays to Mother’s Day but the language of flowers for the Victorians played an even larger role. During the 1800s, learning the special symbolism behind different flowers was a popular pastime and in many Victorian homes you could find a guidebook deciphering the ‘language of flowers’. While different sources might have given slightly different definitions, much…