I was trying to check when the great English vowel shift happened and got the strangest ad I've seen lol

I'm now obsessed with the idea of buying a phonological change. Like, popping down to the store and completely changing the way you speak.

official linguistics post

I mean that about sums it up

official linguistics post

Just learned about garden path sentences.

They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.

So we get gems like

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

babe i love you but your confusion of the anglo saxons and the britons was just fucking embarrassing. and to make matters worse you even then called Shakespearian English "old english" instead of early modern English. get out of my room already

Star Wars in Ojibwe/Anishinaabemowin!

(for further reading)

This is so cool!!!!!!!!!!!

And Ojibwe is such a cool and beautiful language!!!!!!!!! It has one of my fave adjectival mechanisms!

Ooooh. I’d love to read the translation as re-translated into English with the phrasing retained.

Me when I completely forget someone's name: Hey, what are your pronouns, by the way? And also your... noun?

not only are there no bad languages there are also no bad or annoying dialects

Every dialect you don’t like is a friend you haven’t yet made

If you find yourself disliking a dialect, that's a little string you can pull on to unlearn some bullshit. There's a very good chance that you'll find that dialect is associated with

got a new book about octopuses and learned that octopuses is actually the correct word and not octopi

let's validate all plurals and especially octopodes

What meaning first comes to mind when you see "POS"?

There's a poll in this post asking about this question, but I'm giving you some space here, so you can consider what you first thought, before you see the poll options.

Here's some more space. Do you have your answer? Okay.

none of those words are in the voynich manuscript

I think American accents are cute I love hearing American cuties talking yes bitch show me how rhotic your rs are

Especially because I hear absolutely nothing but Australian accents and I'm so tired of it. I want an American girlboy gf. "Waahtermelon" yes bitch.

carr keys. starr worrs. superr duperr. etc

Music to my ears

Excellent work ladies

fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,  Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.

on a similar note, a traditional Ojibwe greeting is “Nanaboozhoo” so when the French first landed in southern Canada they thought that they were saying “Bonjour!” Which is fucking wild to think about. Imagine crossing the ocean and the first people you meet in months somehow speak French.