Innehållsförteckning för Issue 85 från Silly Linguistics

Any case of language contact will almost certainly result in change to both languages. That’s more pressing in situations where an invading language takes a position of power. E.g., the Norman French invasion of England resulted in almost half of our 1000 most commonly used words being French in origin (though only 4 of our 100 most commonly used words). Still that language influence can have remarkable and significant impact, including forcing me to use the word “y’all”. I’ll start this with an example, which is actually an impactful one, the word joyous leading to joyful: Joyous – c. 1300, from Anglo-French joyous, Old French joios “happy, cheerful, merry, glad” (12c., Modern French joyeux), from joie. The first written record of this (That I can find) in the English language…

Spring is just around the corner and even if we haven’t yet entered the astronomical season, I sure can’t wait to kick winter in the butt. You never realize how depressing and miserable winter in the city is until it gets above 13 degrees Celsius, sunny, and it no longer gets dark at 5pm. You suddenly get that dopamine rush and do put the miserable weather into perspective. I promise I’m getting to my point here. Easter. Yes. Easter, probably my favourite holiday as Spring is my favourite season no doubt and preparations have already started, like lent for example, and all its connected holidays and traditions. Yeah, Bulgarians are big on their traditions. So here I am searching for Easter stuff when suddenly I get hit with an ad…

The two previous Silly Linguistics articles that I wrote before this, were part two of languages in the Ural Mountains, and the second article was about Kabardian and language in the Caucasus Mountains. Continuing on with this theme of mountain ranges in Eurasia, this article will discuss language in the Pamir Mountains. This leads on from my previous two Silly Linguistics articles, in both of which I touch upon both the Scythians and ancient hominins in relation to language in some way. These themes also continue into this article. Note also that in my previous Silly Linguistics article I also provided a link to an article that covers some of this hominin and language topics in more detail. I have also written other articles covering different aspects to these topics…

Why is it worse to be considered “Extinct,” rather than “Dead?” It is because a dead language still has some users who speak it but none of them are native speakers. An example would be Latin. We still study Latin and its ties to other languages. Other dead languages are Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and even Biblical Hebrew, which are still studied by scholars and religious leaders to aid in translation of ancient documents. On the other hand, a language becomes extinct when the people who utilize it pass away. When the last native speaker dies, the language often dies with it. The languages of quite a few Native Americans have met their demise in this way. There are over 7,000 languages spoken worldwide currently and hundreds are considered endangered. The…

Historical linguistics is the study of how languages change over time. It is one of my favourite parts of linguistics. Every language that is spoken in the world today is like that because of changes that it went through in the previous decades and centuries. No language today is exactly how it was 100, 200 or 500 years ago. Language is always changing. English emerged as a distinct language during the Old English period. Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated to Britain during the 400s. Over time their dialects began to mix together and new language was born. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, was highly inflectional reflecting its Germanic heritage. Old English is itself descended from an older language linguists call Proto Germanic which was spoken…

Although we hear the same sounds, each language has its own way of interpreting them. The bark of a dog or the honk of a car might be universal in reality, but how we describe these sounds is far from consistent. That’s where onomatopoeia comes in—words that imitate sounds but shaped by cultural and linguistic elements. Take the sounds of chicken, for example. In English, it goes cluck cluck. In Thai? Not even close. Chickens in Thailand say âyk-ée ây gà-âyk (ไก่เอ้กอีเอ้กเอ้ก), which sounds a little like the bird's squawking mixed with a musical rhythm. It's longer, more exaggerated and if you’ve ever visited a rural Thai village at sunrise, you’ll understand how accurate this is. This difference in sound imitation isn’t because animals make different noises in each country…

As people interested in language (or, better to say: Language, as a system in general, and not any particular one), the area of creative expression that we are usually most interested in is writing: questions of style, pacing, structure, vocabulary, etc. Those of us who enjoy this kind of linguistic expression probably also enjoy occasionally watching or reading interviews with famous authors, where they explain their approach to language, and their creative process that involves it. However, there are things that aren't intrinsic to literature, but shared between different arts, as well. Examining these things sometimes gives us a better insight into the literature than examining specific traits that only the art of words contains. Similarly, sometimes the research of broader cognitive processes, or of the communication systems in general,…