This is relevant once again. I apologize if you are a real human getting blocked/reported.

They should have a version of Duolingo where you can learn a language in the dialect of that language’s country bumpkins. I sound like a hick speaking English so why should I sound like an overly formal city slicker speaking Mandarin?

This is actually a deeper problem as pointed out in the replies. Most language learning software teaches one dialect as the “proper” version of the language and it doesn’t reflect the vocabulary and speaking style of most native speakers. Why the fuck would an American want to learn Castilian Spanish, a central Iberian dialect, when most Spanish speakers they will meet in daily life will be from Mexico and the American Southwest and have a totally different cultural context, use different word choices and pronunciation?

German Listening Comprehension: Buying train tickets in Germany by Fabi Rommel

i have a new trendy suffix to introduce. -shed: "the area from which this resource flows to a given point". as in watershed, but the hydrologists are not content to stop there. the best usage i've seen so far is "problemshed", which is roughly "the area causing problems for a given point". very useful concept tbh

why the voynich manuscript is unlikely to be deciphered (even if it's legitimate)

script typology. "script type" refers to what the written signs represent: is it alphabetic, syllabic, logophonetic...? we can make certain guesses depending on the number of attested signs and the apparent composition of words, but there are a lot of assumptions that go into it.

corpus. this is the body of evidence. the voynich manuscript is its own corpus—there are no other known works in the same script. if the manuscript is legitimate (a big if!), this introduces many potential pitfalls of idiosyncrasy, because there's no point of comparison provided by other authors.

language. seems self-explanatory, but there is very little we can understand of a text if its language is unknown. even if it's possible to phonetically read, a lack of structural understanding makes that reading little more than a jumble of signs and sounds. to my knowledge, no proposal for the language affiliation of the voynich manuscript has been verifiable.

cultural context. there's no secure provenance for the manuscript. we have little to no idea who wrote it, when, where, or why. culture provides a lot of information, such as likely authors (if we know the extent of literacy), likely genre (if we know common contexts of writing), and likely cultural contents (if we know when and where an author lived). those clues can help point to meaning within the text when identifying individual elements.

constraint. a literal rosetta stone. having a bilingual (the same text written in another language) or a biscript (the same text written in the same language but another script) provides an invaluable point of comparison. with enough evidence, correlations can be drawn to match linguistic elements and argue for verifiable interpretations. the rosetta stone is actually a bilingual triscript, written in egyptian hieroglyphs, egyptian demotic script, and greek alphabet; its key was matching the cartouches in the egyptian text to proper names rendered phonetically in greek. the extraneous latin notations in the voynich manuscript are insufficient to constitute a bilingual or biscript, especially since there's no clear correlation between them and elements of the unknown script.

College Math.

Original comic post

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ TWITTER ◆ STORE

For some reason I keep seeing people asking whether Ukraine considers switching from cyrillic alphabet to latin alphabet, and 1) russia didn't invent and doesn't own cyrillic alphabet; 2) I would lose my mind if on a regular basis I had to write "shch" instead of "щ". That's 4 letters to write one letter, sir!!!!!

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit

This is something I’ve been dying to talk about.

There’s something called culture. People (especially USAmericans) think of culture as cultural dress, cultural food, cultural music. These are culture, but they are only the very superficial aspects of it. Like the icing on your cake. Far more deep rooted is the more meaty bits of culture: the attitudes, the ideas, the taboos.

There’s a guy on tiktok who has done a series that shows this very well, of Germans Vs Irish. In one video the German offers the Irish person two kinds of tea, green or black. The Irish person keeps putting off the choice with things like “Oh sure whatever is easiest”, “Which have you more of?” and, “Ah sure I don’t want to cause a fuss” whereas the German just wants a straight answer. This is a cultural difference of politeness.

Here in the UK, accents mark your class very openly. They let everyone know where you’re from (though this has become less pronounced in the last 50 years,) and what your background is. A lot of people (especially northerners, but also a fair contingent of working class southerners) face discrimination on the basis of their accents.

Some of us (myself included) even change register (though I believe USAmericans call it code switching) in and out of our regional accent and a close approximation of RP. We learn to do it because it makes us seem more intelligent (even though it shouldn’t) and helps us be taken more seriously.

Thus, our country carries a lot of baggage when it comes to accents. Especially those of the working class who have had their accents made fun of, or have faced discrimination based on it.

So when someone outside the country (usually USAmericans) makes fun of our accents they’re stepping on a lot of cultural taboos and boundaries. Especially because the “It’s Chewsday, gonnae wot-ch sum yewchube innit” is a working class accent.

Now, that’s not to say we can’t take a joke, but this is the kind of joke you share with someone who you have been friends with for a while. My boyfriend often will pick up on the way I say certain words, in much the same fashion I pick up on his idiosyncrasies of speech (English isn’t his first language so he says stuff like close the lights, which is adorable.) If we aren’t predisposed to liking you, then the joke you’re trying to make is more like an insult.

The way I like to think of it is if you were in a pub, and made those sorts of jokes to someone. If they knew you, and they liked you, they’d probably laugh along. If they didn’t like you or know you, they would punch you in the jaw.

HOWEVER: I recognise this post as a joke. I don’t personally find these jokes offensive, but then no one really makes fun of me or considers me stupid because of my accent.

Oh that actually makes a lot of sense! It’s like how it’s assumed in media that the southeastern Appalachian (‘hick’ or ‘redneck’) accent is audible shorthand for ‘this American character is stupid.’ That sentiment reinforces negative stereotypes about that region which has historically been home to a large working class population that has suffered from an underfunded education system and other systematic abuses. It is ultimately an underhanded joke, but not everyone from America (or even the region necessarily) considers it to be offensive despite its classist nature.

yes, that’s basically it! it grinds my gears when certain Very Online Americans will quite rightly say that europeans have no right to mock the us’ lack of healthcare/gun control and working-class accents…but then turn around and act like working-class british accents and foods are hilarious and should be mocked ‘bc of colonialism and the bp oil spill’ as though all british people are directly responsible for the oil spill. and then some of them conveniently forget that there are in fact british people of colour - in the wake of brexit, a smug american blog defended saying that british people upset by the referendum were getting ‘karma’ for the british empire, even when british poc pointed out that they were the ones most likely to be negatively affected by brexit, by saying ‘obviously i don’t mean you’, to which said british poc responded ‘THEN WHY DID YOU SAY BRITISH PEOPLE’

The hatred, by the privileged of England, towards Scotland and any Scottish accent was so pervasive that my mother wouldn’t let my brother and I develop a Scottish accent. She was born in Jamaica but her family moved to London when she was 11. She moved to Scotland when she was pregnant with me. Both my brother and I were born in Scotland and spent out entire childhood there. Mum was adamant that neither of us would have the local accent. It was “common” and “low class” and “would hinder us in the future”. She used to fine us half our pocket money if we used any Scottish slang or said anything in a Scottish accent. I got bullied at school for having a “posh English accent” but she thought my job prospects were more important than a modicum of happiness at school. My outsider status was doubled by that. I was brown and “English”.

Even now, after decades in Scotland, I still don’t sound Scottish. The English hear a slight lilt but that disappears as soon as I spend any time with them.

I feel alienated on two fronts now, skin colour and accent. And one of those was avoidable if it hadn’t been for the prejudice against against perceived lower class accents. Even in Jamaica Mum learnt to speak in an English accent like the white girls at her school. She could switch between the two. Jamaican with her parents, posh English everywhere else. Why couldn’t I have had that?

The fact that a lot of regional actors are expected to code-switch their accent patterns the a kind of neutral English accent in Britain shows how pervasive the classism is.

When Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who, people were surprised that he used his own northern accent, instead of performing with an accent like every Doctor before him. That was only 15-ish years ago.

Even now, this still happens - James McAvoy made a very vocal protest a couple of years back about a critic who complained about the use of Scots accents and only applauded the “plummy English” accent of one character in a play.

Regional and working class accents were used as joke accents for decades in British media. Look up old broadcasts and notice how many people only speak RP English (ie. the formal pronunciation that smacks of elocution lessons and enunciation). As media accessibility and productions expanded, there have been more regional accents showing up, but it’s still a big problem.

Putsimply when you mock “innit” you’re mocking poor people and often people of colour. Boris Johnson doesn’t say “innit bruv”.

I would like to add that there was a study by the Worcester College that found that people talking with a Birmingham accent were twice as likely to be accused of a crime as people who speak RP. Accents carry huge baggage in Britain.

official linguistics post

you: suck my dick me, an intellectual: inhale my richard

here it is! the post that started a “me, an intellectual” hell frenzy, and is officially ⭐ the worst post of 2016 ⭐

Rare Achievement Unlocked:

Irrevocable Linguistic Harm

Create a memetic phrase that still sees use for almost a decade afterward

Airplane! 1980, dir. David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker

"My first language has a perfect saying for this, but it doesn't make sense in english :("

Say it anyway! You don't owe them perfect clarity. Be profoundly cryptic, speak in riddles, make them ponder what the fuck you meant by that. The anglos, like porridge, must sometimes be stirred, so they don't burn stuck on the bottom of the pot.

"If I were you, I'd spit on the floor and swim away"

"If my grandmother had two wheels she'd be a bycicle"

"You could scare a popcorn ready

"Uglier than hitting your mom."

"If you get up from the casket, the funeral ends"

"Jumping over the mental hospital wall with the gates wide open"

"Clapping for a lunatic's dance"

And if English speakers like it enough (or enough use it) it will be adopted (& probably mangled). Cause the English language is like that.

That's the best thing I've heard all day! Mental health advice like WHOA 😮!

Oh, the grandmother one reminds me of my favorite: If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass.

The worst thing about formal English is that it offers these wonderful suffixes, then only lets you use them in prescribed circumstances. I should be able to describe things as meatful or leftly or falsewise without departing from the formal register if I darn well please.

"1337? what, were you a homestuck?" no. worse, actually

you wanna know how i learned about and how to read 1337?

This comic spawned my senior thesis back in the day.

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

I'm not sure what's more concerning here: the idea that the Tumblr vernacular, a principally written idiom, is discernible in spoken communication, or the fact that if you click through to the original post, its contents appear to have been replaced at some point in the last two months with Minecraft YouTuber fanfic.

This is me, a linguist, being pedantic but what you’re describing (a particular pattern of speech/grammar/vocabulary indicative of a defined group) is technically a dialect; an idiom is a turn of phrase that means something other/additional than the literal meaning of the words (“raining cats and dogs” or “see the light” etc etc). You may have been thinking of an idiolect, which is the particular dialect of a single individual.

And if I, a linguist (an intellectual 🧐), hear Tumblr English out in the wild, I get so excited. Genuinely, I seriously considered writing my masters thesis on tumblr english and only didn’t because my advisor was a bit of a stick in the mud. This is a VERY Exciting Time™️ for linguists because the advent of the internet (and more specifically areas of the internet that encourage communities to form among people scattered across the globe) has created an era of exceedingly rapid language change, and gives us a huge opportunity to study how language changes on a much shorter timeline than usual. Throughout human history, geography has been a huge limiting factor in language bleed, transmission, and change; but now we have the ability to talk to people from all over the globe regularly enough that we are picking up vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic markers from all over the world.

Like, do you get how fucking cool it is that english speakers who have never visited Asia are able to use borrowed words like isekai and honorifics like -san fluently?? Do you get how many idioms and weird little grammatical constructions we’ve created that are unique to OUR dialect of english? Think of pissing on the poor or (like I used earlier) me, an intellectual. Our dialect, here on this hellsite, is the only one I can think of that has created a significant catalogue of complex tone markers specifically for the written form to compensate for the shortcomings of the written word in communicating meta-linguistic information like sarcasm or mockery or excitement. This dialect, primarily created in the written form (which is nearly UNHEARD OF), exploded onto the linguistics scene in 10 or 20 years when normally it can take centuries for dialects to distinguish themselves. It's academically BONKERS and I am HERE FOR IT. It's in the same realm as Nüshu, the Chinese written script only used by women.

TLDR: As linguists we are collectively shitting our pants about this fucking dialect and are OVER THE MOON to hear it 'in the wild.'

afaik the only augmentative suffix in English is -zilla.

You are forgetting "2: Electric Boogaloo".

-apalooza, perhaps?

-ocalypse, -ocalyptic, -tastic.

fuckzilla, fuck 2: electric boogaloo, and fuckapalooza work, fucktastic definitely works, but fuckocalyptic doesn't sounds right 🤔

-athon, for duration

training for a half fuckathon

Its actually -pocalypse, as in fuckpocalypse, but as an irregular augmentative you can shorten it in whatever way works best. I'm not sure fuckalypse hits as hard as fuckpocalypse, though

-itude, like "not with that fuckitude it won't"

Fuckalyptic works great

Lest we forget -gate, e.g. “this post is a linguistic fuckergate.”