Innehållsförteckning för Issue 80 från Silly Linguistics

People play tricks on each other’s minds using language in different ways: by lying, manipulating, twisting the truth. A large part of our perception might as well be an illusion – ’but a dream within a dream’ – who knows? However, when we talk about linguistic illusions, we do not talk about an illusion of a sentence’s truth, but of its grammaticality (or well-formedness). At the first glance, More people have been to Paris than I have! may seem like an understandable observation, and No head injury is too trivial to be ignored may seem like a valuable advice; but if we look at it closely... It seems that we should not blink, so that we do not miss the sentence’s true meaning – or its absence. The audience wants…

January is considered the most depressing month of the year. And who can blame the ones considering it? Holidays are good and done, Christmas decoration is back in the boxes and up the attic… not to mention stinging it till payday with what’s leftover in our bank account from Christmas shopping. Sheesh. Which is why we need to take every chance we can get to brighten up our days until spring knocks on our door and we get to see the sun every so often. So, folks, sit down, relax, take your D3 vitamins and let’s enjoy some fun little tidbits of knowledge that’ll make you go “Wow! That’s amazing! No wonder I’m a language nerd!” 1. Most Spoken Language: Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world,…

Introduction Moksha (Мокшень кяль) is the ethnic language of the Moksha people, who live in the Republic of Mordovia within the Russian Federation and in areas surrounding it. It has official status in Mordovia alongside Erzya and Russian. Estimates on the number of speakers vary from 100,000 to 250,000. Family Moksha is a member of the Uralic language family, which includes Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari, Udmurt, Nenets, and the Sami languages. It and Erzya are within the Mordvinic branch (often considered to be particularly close to Mari and possibly to the extinct Merya and Meshcherian languages). This has led to both languages (and peoples) being erroneously referred to as “Mordvin”. Grammar Moksha is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mainly suffixes, to change a word's meaning and grammatical function.…

Phonetics is the study of the mechanics of speech sound production. It is broken up into three areas: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. Articulatory phonetics is the study of the parts of the body involved in the production of speech sound and how they are used to produce speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the transmission of speech sounds from speaker to the people listening. Auditory phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are received by the listener and how they are perceived. There are three main areas involved in producing speech sounds: the vocal tract, the larynx (commonly known as the voice box) and the subglottal system which is everything below the glottis. An airstream is created in the respiratory organs and then passed…

When your enthusiasm for learning a new language becomes unstoppable, you'll encounter a fairly complex set of rules. These rules seem necessary to master if you want to become a cool and proficient Indonesian speaker. For those currently learning or planning to learn Indonesian, one particularly productive prefix to understand is peng-. This prefix transforms root words into nouns with the following meanings: 1. “A person who performs an action,” such as pembeli (‘buyer’) derived from the verb beli (‘to buy’);2. “A person whose profession involves the action,” such as penulis (‘writer’) from the verb tulis (‘to write’);3. “A person possessing a particular characteristic,” such as penakut (‘a coward’ or ‘someone who is easily scared’) from the adjective takut (‘scared’);4. “A tool used for a particular purpose,” such as penopang…