Innehållsförteckning för Issue 79 från Silly Linguistics

“To be a scientist is to be naive.” HBO’s award winning series, Chernobyl, had Valery Legasov state this iconic quote when it came to science. And despite the countless efforts of nuclear physicists and Soviet engineers, the highlight of the show was the efforts and in depth explanation of Valery, a Soviet inorganic chemist. But why did his explanation resonate with people more than that of a physicist or engineer? I asked myself this question upon watching the series a few years ago and the answer was quite simple. Where other’s explained the events of Chernobyl in a manner in which other scientists would understand, Valery took an entirely different approach. One that allowed people who didn’t have any scientific knowledge to grasp the basic concepts he provided. And so,…

Although a sense of belonging is a pretty good sign that we've found love, a sense of possession usually leads to losing it. In language, the constructions that we call possessive could also convey various additional meanings, like care and connection with the person that you're asserting to... possess. But it isn't as toxic as it sounds, I promise. The structural type of possessive constructions that we will be talking about here are the pronominal ones. In English, as in many other languages, there are possessive forms of personal pronouns, like mine or yours. In Serbian, it is the same: we have possessive pronouns like moj/a/e (which would be mine in masculine, feminine and neutral gender), and that is the most common way of denoting me as the possessor. However,…

This article includes the subsections (each full of much detailed and varied info): Introduction to Doric, and examples and explanations; More comments on my own visit to Aberdeenshire and ancient languages, and polyandrous attacotti; References as well as five main ”notes” (each one covering a range of subjects and info), and two photos and their associated descriptions, the first of which is below. Introduction to Doric, and examples and explanations Previously in Silly Linguistics I discussed something on the Gaelic in Perthshire (Eastern Scotland), and discussed the Shetlandic language in the Shetland Islands. Scotland is essentially, rather linguistically diverse, and was even more so in the past. Some people believe that Goidelic or Celtic languages were once the native languages of all parts of Scotland, but personally I do not…