Fangirling and Writer-Nerd Chaos

there's this word in Serbian 'vukojebina' which literally means 'the place where wolves go to fuck' but they use it to mean 'in the middle of nowhere'. it sure does the job well, but the visual stayed with me longer than I would have liked it to.

for chinese we have 鸟不生蛋, which is used to describe a land so barren and remote that not even birds would lay their eggs there.

In German we have "am Arsch der Welt", which means "at the world's ass"

In Finnish it's "Jumalan selän takana" - behind god's back.

I propose that these are all the same place. The world's ass, behind god's back, where birds would not nest and where wolves go to fuck.

no punctuation we read like romans

NOPUNCTUATIONORLOWERCASEORSPACESWEREADLIKEROMANS

INTER·PVNCTVATION·WE·INSCRIBE·LIKE·ROMANS

words doesn’t classical matter order in greek;

we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.

The fact that this has yet to devolve into boustrophedon is a miracle… or a challenge. I’m looking at you @terpsikeraunos @macdicilla @labellamordens

I’m up to it

Not many jnſtances of Punctuation - but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly - ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie - and the long S - ſ - vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes - & the short “s” vſed only at the end - as with the U and V, and the I and J - but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” - Y may be vſed in the place of TH - but only ſparingly - and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences - ſeeminglie without end - a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.

And furthermore, Carthage is to be destroyed.

official linguistics post

did this rat just call me a dumbass in my own native language

What are you doing, Albanian? Only for humans and bees?

I think it's funny that in French the word for "unicorn" is "licorne" because:

Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."

Reanalysis is fun.

Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).

A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.

In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).

Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.

*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common

Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!

Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!

Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!

Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.

So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."

ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen

In the X-rayed lab, straight röntgin it

I love reanalysis, so very much.

Swahili has a series of prefixes which indicate noun class, agreement, various things. Basically, every noun gets a prefix, and there are many different sets; each class has a dedicated singular and plural form.

One of the many classes is ki-/vi-: kitanda (bed) vs. vitanda (beds), kiti (chair) vs. viti (chairs), etc.

Swahili has a number of loanwords from Arabic. One of these is the word for book - in Arabic, that's kitāb ﻛِﺘَﺎﺏ .

...which Swahili naturally looked at and said, "Oh, excellent, it's a ki/vi noun!" Thus the Swahili word kitabu (book), and its plural form, vitabu.

I love what humans do with language!

This is how Shen yuan learned English for sure

When you’re an archaeologist with a set schedule, sometimes people really get to understand who you are

When I dug in France I always got a croissant at 0520 from the same exact place in Échemines. A week in, they had one lying on the counter for me by the time I walked in. By the second week I got the exact amount I’d pay in hand when I walked in, because they’d reliably have it ready. I made sure to tell the owners that I wasn’t returning on my last day of the dig.

I may mention that every time I ordered in French. On my last day the owners gave me hugs and kindly told me to never speak in French again

They had your order ready so they wouldn’t have to hear you speak French 🤣

OH, MOTHERFUCKER

please support this interracial french gay couple and their 20 kids

“le couple homosexuel interracial français milieu a vingt enfants” en fait c’est une erreur statistique. georgs d'enfants, qui habite dans une cave et adopte dix mille enfants chaque jour, est une donnée aberrante et il faudrait pas l’avoir compté

I don’t even speak French and I know what that paragraph says

“georgs d'enfants” how does it feel to be the funniest person here

Hypothetical scenario: someone is on Ao3, looking for fanfiction to read. This person only speaks/reads English, and they set the language filter to only show fics written in English.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

begging the poll anon to tell us about the argument that led to this question

Underrated English word: mortify. Why? It means "embarrassed, ashamed, or humiliated," but in its origins meant "to put to death." Basically, it became "I'm so embarrassed, you should put me out of my misery," and I think that's beautiful

ok but the full translation is also extremely good

nothing better than the wrong capitalization of Sie

#‘’we are obliged to keep this data for 4 weeks after which it will be destroyed’’#versus#‘’we are obliged to keep this data for 4 weeks after which YOU will be destroyed’’

you’re right. after which you will be absolutely fucking obliterated

Ich will das Twink vernichtet

Traditional scripts of Southeast Asia

[Map showing Southeast Asia with lines connecting examples of all the various writing systems used to the places they are used.

End ID.]

There were no fucking postcards

There was an obsession with fucking

What is this big Fucking joke?