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Original link: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8699437$from_email=comment&comment_id=18372551
This is just an isolated post on a Duolingo thread, but since I'm living in Pakistan at the moment I thought it’d be fun to share some South Asian badling wholly unrelated to Sandscript (crazy, right?). This kind of badling, where Urdu’s relationship to Arabic and Persian is exaggerated, is extremely common among South Asian Muslims.
The most egregious badling in this is the claim about Urdu having almost all sounds simply for having adopted some phonemes from Arabic that weren’t previously present in most Indo-Aryan vernaculars. It’s true that normative Urdu has a number of phonemes that are optional in Hindi: namely, /z/, /x/, /ɣ/ and /q/. However, many Hindi actors and singers maintain all of them but /q/ (as is the case of most Urdu-speakers in Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab), and /z/ at least is not uncommon in urban Hindi. This however is nowhere near the entire sound inventory that would be possible in a language -- (most) Urdu may have a couple more phonemes than (most) Hindi, but both certainly have less phonemes than Ubykh, for example. Puristic, Sanskritised forms of Hindi may also show phonemes that Urdu lacks, namely /ɳ/, /ʂ/ and /ɲ/. The idea that Urdu-speakers will be better at learning pronunciation in other languages is thus completely spurious.
The post also touches on the myth that Urdu has lots of Arabic and Persian loanwords because it was originally spoken in caravans and camps by Islamic conquerers. Colloquial Hindi is not much less Arabised than colloquial Urdu (the written language is another story), and other Indo-Aryan languages like Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, etc. are also chock-full of Perso-Arabic vocabulary. Therefore, there’s no reason to posit a strictly military origin for Urdu’s loanwords, nor are English or Perso-Arabic loanwords unique to Urdu in the Indian subcontinent.
This is probably because the Saudi king speaks Najdi Arabic, having been born and raised in Najd and from a Najdi family, whereas the Saudi redditor I linked to no doubt speaks True Arabic^TM
Did your professor buy into <em>Wars of the Anunnaki: Nuclear Self-Destruction in Ancient Sumer</em>?
> The author explains how the Anunnaki came to Earth from the planet Nibiru seeking gold to repair their ozone layer. Using genetic engineering, they created modern humanity to do their mining work and installed themselves as our kings and our gods. Anunnaki god Enki had a fatherly relationship with the first two humans. Then Enlil, Enki’s brother, took over as Commander of Earth, instating a sole-god theocracy and a war against the clan of Enki and humanity for spoiling the Anunnaki bloodlines through interbreeding. This shift imposed a blackout not only of the very human nature of the Anunnaki “gods” but also of humanity’s own ancient past on Earth. > > Two of Enlil’s attacks against the Enki clan and humanity are described in the stories of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. His final attempt, after coercing the Assembly of the Gods into voting yes, was the nuclear bombing of 5 cities of the Jordan plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, which resulted in the destruction of the Sumerian civilization and the Anunnakis’ own civilization on Earth, including their space port in the Sinai. The author reveals how, after each attempt, humanity was saved by Enki, chief scientist Ninmah, and Enki’s son Hermes. >
the words written in katakana tend to have origin in other languages, but I think it's a stretch to say that they aren't Japanese.
For example, スキンシップ is a rendition of "skinship", which, while clearly from English, is not a very English word.
Being a student of statistics, I agree with the OP about 'parameter', but I feel it's necessary to point out that the list was ultimately lifted from his book The Sense of Style (as can be discovered by following a few links to the original article) and was not concocted for the purpose of getting his name in newspapers.
In any case, what Pinker is concerned with is helping writers communicate with their readers effectively and get their ideas across. His underlying attitude is similar to that of the 'scientific prescriptivism' for which Pullum and Liberman have expressed support from time to time. He doesn't correct others' usage to be pedantic.
In the book, he prefaced the list with this paragraph, which shows his goal quite clearly:
> ...Most of the nonstandard usages are malaprops traceable to a mishearing, a misunderstanding, or a kitschy attempt to sound sophisticated. ... If you know a word and then come across a similar one with a fancy prefix or suffix, resist the temptation to use it as a hoity-toity synonym. Your readers are likely to react as Inigo Montoya did in The Princess Bride to Vizzini’s repeated use of inconceivable to refer to events that just happened: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
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All the same Egypt was African, and Africans have a lot of genetic diversity (indeed, more than any other group of similar size). But, yes, at least some Egyptians were black. Some were not. This may outstand some folks but such delineations are quite modern and Western.
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The lead author seems resigned to the less than ideal reporting: "I think I've learned there's not much you can do...... we had no contact with anyone about the Ars Technica article. I've also seen some other articles cropping up that are copying the original articles, and making claims I wouldn't stand by. I don't think there's anything we can do about that."
What a word "actually" means is exactly the same as how it is used. And people use it - all the time - to mean events that do not happen at one year intervals. That is what the "broadly" indicates - not that a usage is wrong or somehow unreal, but that it is an expansion of the primary sense. I am sure that if you write to Merriam-Webster and ask, they will tell you the same thing... when they get around to it. They could probably tell you a thing or two about the etymological fallacy as well.
But just for you, I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary as well. Same results.
https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=anniversary
And if I check the Oxford American Dictionary, it also gives me that definition:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/anniversary
I'm not really sure what you found on Google, or how those other results you found compile their entries. However, again, dictionaries can only record language. They cannot be used to prescribe language.
I am familiar with both uses of * in linguistics. Read your link. It’s for ungrammatical constructions. Not nonstandard. (Not that I want to get into it, but snuck is not nonstandard. It features in the speech of speakers of standard varieties of English, in North America at least.)
I Googled your Language-Change thing and assumed you were following this.
>Expressions that are invariably poor usage are marked with an asterisk (*).
Is it just me, or does Sanskrit seem to have a disproportionate number of proponents making completely ridiculous claims about its superiority in various areas?
Reminds me of this book, titled Sanskrit: The Original Source of all European Languages. The title is in fact an understatement, as the author seemingly attempts to argue that Sanskrit is the source of all languages. Observe, mentally inserting any "sic" where a nonstandard usage/grammatical error occurs:
"Inspite of all their praises the western scholars, linguists or philologists were reluctant to accept Sanskrit as the original source of all languages. To hide this fact, they advanced their own surmises and developed a new idea of the existence of Proto-Indo European language which is held as a common source of all Indo-European languages. This idea is merely based on supposition and have no confirmed or valid footing behind it and as such no genuine researcher who has troubled his head a little bit in this direction cannot hold this baseless and false assumption valid."
More of the same is available in the Amazon preview. Including an amusing discussion of one Mary Serjeantson who wrote a book on foreign loanwords in English, being repeatedly and non-accidentally referred to as "he" and "him."
> I think too often the linguistic community ignores prescriptivism as a meaningful social construct
Linguists don't ignore prescriptivism; they reject it as being unscientific. Much of what prescriptivists claim we ought to say or write doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the face of the linguistic evidence. That's the point.
It's not true to say that if you a descriptivist, you can't advocate for using formal language in an essay, or advise people on how to deliver a presidential speech. You just do it from an informed scientific point of view. For example, Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive psychologist, wrote a style guide a few years ago as a modern descriptive alternative to Strunk and White et al.
On Strunk and White, this podcast episode by John McWhorter (Against Strunk and White) will give you more insight into the folly of prescriptivism. Well worth listening to.
>Next big thing they add to the dictionary is R= are c= see u= you and so on singe those 3 letter words are way too long to type
Why do prescriptivists always go to the absurd when arguing?
>ALL words are made up. What's so bad about the fact that new made up words now officially exist?
Good sense there from that commenter.
>No, I would prefer if people didn't say useless things such as "You Only Live Once" Of course we only live once (unless you're Hindu) why is there a need for such a stupid phrase?
Like Carpe Diem is such a stupid phrase. I wonder if this person has issues with the word OK.
>This is the exact reason why the English language is the hardest current language to learn. It's also why every single person learning English as a second language find it to be the worst. I didn't realize how redundant it was until I tried learning another language. The rules are hypocritical and we have 50+ synonyms for every word just for the sake of describing it under every possible condition no matter how fucking stupid it sounds. Love being an American, hate speaking English.
A little of "English is the hardest language" crap in there. Didn't realize that language could be hypocritical, but apparently English is.
I didn't have the heart to look at any more comments.
OMG, you're so right. This guy <em>is</em> crazy. > Both [shall and should] stemmed from Old English sceal 'I owe, he owes; will have to, ought to, must', sculan (inf.), sceolde (past tense) 'have to, be able to' and German sollen, which are related to the Old English world scyld 'guilt' and German Schuld 'guilt, debt'.
Hmm, so far, so good...
> Shall derives from Arabic ja3ala 'cause to become, make, prepare, to ready, work for a salary', ji3aalat (ju3l, ja3eelat) (n) 'salary; gift, bribery; corruption; dog mating' via j- and 3-merger into /sh/.
o_____o well, that doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion...
> As to the past tense morpheme is sceolde and would, it is cognate to Arabic /ta- (da)/, a past tense marker prefixed to quadrilateral verbs.
OK, dude, now you're just making shit up.
The Elements of Style is to style and language as...50 Shades of Grey is to erotic literature or the BDSM community, or as scientology is to non-cultish religions, or as the Ten Commandments are to ethics. I cannot quite adequately describe the frustration I feel that S&W is a textbook for some English classes at my uni. Which is probably why my analogies all sucked.
/u/CouldCareFewer is a bot that posts an archived copy of the offending thread. Just look for his post in any /r/badlinguistics thread if the original is modified or deleted.
> Why the fuck have I dug this far into the comments?
I particularly enjoyed all the smug but hopelessly poorly informed comments about what randomness is, whether the universe is deterministic, and whether quantum mechanics (and, for some reason, relativity) sheds any light on the question. Apparently you can violate the uncertainty principle by getting your friend to measure stuff at the same time as you do, and this proves that nothing is truly random and also allows you to travel faster than light somehow.
> Soon, "murder" will mean to give someone a fucking bouquet of flowers.
I could murder some edible flowers. Care to join me?
Well. Even without mentioning the whole "not being Standard English doesn't mean it's wrong" argument, he's barking up the wrong tree. Using "expire" in terms of death is literally acceptable.
Interesting. I never realised the Americans pronounce it different.
http://www.forvo.com/word/bologna/#en
British and Irish speakers (of which I am one (a Briton) say it the Italian way, from which the Americans deviate. Pretty much the same with lingerie, Ibiza etc.
> I have a serious concern that it will have an effect on professional/journalistic standards and the news consuming population.
It's hard to predict what effect a particular usage will have, but, it's certainly possible to see how change in meanings of words and new usages have impacted society. Language changes. Moving the goal posts became popular only within the last 30 years. Decimate means something completely different (lit. killing one out of ten). Silly used to mean holy. These changes haven't made us worse off.
So is this actually a legit linguistic theory that's nowadays been disproven?
I haven't thought about it all that much, but surely there are some different tones in English as well? I've read somewhere that English isn't a "melodic" language and that for example Swedish is, though I've got no idea what that actually means.
But for example, take the word "apa" (monkey) in Swedish as pronounced here on Forvo. We only have those two sounds for A (apart from long and short depending on the number of trailing consonants), so it's obviously not as extensive as in mandarin, but this is a tonal system as well isn't it? If you pronounced both of those A:s the same it sounds like some kind of foreign accent.
Would this people then suggest this difference is unintelligable when whispering? If so, isn't that a theory that takes about two seconds and a native listener to disprove?
(After writing this I may have come up with an English example. Wouldn't the sounds in "accent" and awe be pretty much the same?)
Seen in the HN discussion about the following paper that came to light today, criticising its author for including Russian in the analyzed languages:
Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages:
No... The original article on LinkedIn is specifically addressing women, it says so in the first paragraph.
>A few years back I noticed something: the frequency with which the word "just" appeared in email and conversation from female co-workers and friends.
[...]
>I started paying attention, at work and beyond. It didn't take long to sense something I hadn't noticed before: women used "just" a lot more often than men.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-say-ellen-petry-leanse#ixzz3eyP8LKC7
> Why hasn't 'plant-science' won out over 'biology', or 'people-rule' over 'democracy'?
I don't think it's possible to answer that question - in linguistics we often can answer how but not why, right? Have you heard of Anglish? Basically it's a linguistic exercise in which loanwords from the Romance languages and Greek are systematically replaced by native English equivalents or calques. Perhaps the most famous Anglish text is Uncleftish Beholdings and I find the result pretty similar to those new compound words coined in Japan and China.
Examples:
- togethermelt (fusion), compare to 核融合
- firststuff (element) compare to 元素
- waterstuff (hydrogen) compare to the original name for hydrogen, 輕氣 "light-gas"
- motes (subatomic particles) compare to 粒子
Chinese and Japanese ones ; ;
I did searches in Baidu and google looking for "do dragons have genders" and "dragon reproduction" (lol). The baidu searches lead to mostly yahoo answers-style answers, so they should be taken with a grain of salt, but they were all pretty unanimous that they did have sexes. Apparently some (mostly male) dragons were rather, uhhh, amorous towards humans in a few stories. Looking at Japanese dragons, it seems like a lot of famous dragons have sexes, or can transform into humans who do (who then of course sleep with humans), and while some of them are ambiguous, I couldn't find anything to suggest that they were sexless. Searching in English I found this book about Chinese Dragons that says Asiatic dragons have genders. Really, the most persuasive evidence is that dratini and dragonair have genders.
Expect for Pokemon, none of these sources are something I'd want to use in an essay or whatever, but I'm lazy, some of the stories are a lot of fun, and they at least suggest gendered dragons. If you want them to be genderless, just consider them to be genderless, I doubt they'll complain :P
Go seems to be a great game to cry into! I've only ever played it a few times, but have wanted to play more and never gotten around to it...
The top answer reminds me of that chemistry essay written solely with words of Germanic origin. If you parse the names of some elements, you could get things like "watermake" and "sunstuff".
Found it. Uncleftish Beholding.
L-l-logic?
It was just what kept coming up in searches with various combinations of keywords like "vocabulary size" and 54000.
But I think that's wrong actually, just coincidental, I just found a more probable source containing both numbers: http://www.vocabulary.com/articles/tasty-morsels/laugh-while-learning-shakespeare-style-words/
And aside from the fact that he appears to be getting his Factual numbers from a comedian's routine, he didn't even get that right! Branyan claims Shakespeare had the 54000-word working vocabulary, not everyone who lived at the same time as Shakespeare.
I don't know why you wouldn't have heard of it. It's given as a standard pronunciation in various American and British dictionaries (see wordreference's examples). In fact, I seem to remember one of my professors saying that the prevalence of -day pronunciations was a relatively recent spelling pronunciation.
From The Arabic Origins of "Basque and Finnish Pronouns": A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach
>In all his thirty-one studies, Jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-h) firmly established, on the contrary, the inextricably close, genetic relationship between Arabic and such languages phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically so much so that they can be really considered dialects of the same language, with Arabic being the source or parent language. Thus far thirty-one studies have been undertaken on all language levels.
Also he likes long lists:
>Lexically, nineteen studies successfully traced the Arabic origins of English, German, French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit words in key semantic fields- namely, numeral words (Jassem 2012a), common religious terms (Jassem 2012b), water and sea terms (Jassem 2013d), air and fire terms (Jassem 2013e), celestial and terrestrial terms (Jassem 2013f), animal terms (Jassem (2013g), body part terms (Jassem 2013h), speech and writing terms (Jassem 2013i), time words (Jassem 2013j), family words (Jassem 2013k), cutting and breakingwords (Jassem 2013m), movement and action words (Jassem 2013n), perceptual and sensual words (Jassem 2013o), cognitive and mental words (Jassem 2013p), love and sexual words (Jassem 2013q), wining and dining words (Jassem 2014a), divine and theological terms (Jassem 2014d), proper names (Jassem 2014f), and mathematical and computational terms (2014g).
And yes, that is one sentence...
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3572067
A discussion in French about a sentence in the Spanish course. Many people got it wrong because they made a "mistake" in French. The authors of the course claim that "se rappeler" (to remember) takes a direct object, and that "se rappeler de" is wrong, even though a large proportion of French speakers say the latter, which sounds more natural to me. One of the participants wrote: "So when 50% of people make a mistake, the mistake becomes a grammar rules? We should do the same with history, I'm sure we would have surprising results."
Coming into this late, but the Wikipedia article is itself a Gamergate battleground, as Wikipedia has been dealing with pro-Gamergate trolls and propagandists for a while. There is some concern that Wikipedia's arbitration process has been gamed (or subverted), and that the Gamergate articles are not entirely truthful about how horrible Gamergate is.
I feel like its business model is making headlines so dumb you just have to see what they are. There was this https://thenextweb.com/science/2018/12/06/how-the-human-eye-could-destroy-quantum-mechanics/ which was probably the worst article I've ever read. It's like some crank's manifesto condensed into popsci
You will have to download a 3rd party extension. I use ContentBlockHelper, which is available for Chome & Opera. Here’s what I did:
- Right click on the page.
- Hover the cursor over ContentBlockHelper
- Click Detect CSS selector
- Your cursor should now be highlighting elements in blue. Click an element.
- Click Add a CSS rule
- Click OK in the box that pops up.
Also, if you want to reverse an obstruction, simply repeat the process.
Hope that helps. Let me know if that works.
The Oxford Dictionary Online uses this entry for literally, and it includes a use where literally intensifies something that is already figurative. It does seem to have an opposite meaning to one of its other meanings.
Your frustration seems to be something professional linguists share. It would be nice if more people did their homework.
> Eh, calling a word a slur is more of a socio-historical claim than a linguistic one, so I wouldn't call this bad linguistics.
Fair enough.
> I also think that if you consider "handicapped" a slur, it's not ridiculous to consider "crazy" a slur, as the latter is used pejoratively just as often if not more often.
I think there's a pretty big difference though in that handicapped only denotes disability, whereas crazy denotes a manner of acting. Also handicapped is a commonly used word for being handicapped, but no one's getting diagnosed as "crazy". Actually, based on current usage if I didn't know the history of the word I would've thought crazy was an adjective that could be applied to but didn't define certain kinds of mentally ill people. Sort of like how people can be pale because of their complexion or because they're currently sick. That can't be said for most synonyms of crazy such as insane, deranged, psycho, maniacal, mental, demented.
I don't really understand the difference between moras and syllables so I won't comment on the second part.
As to the first part--according to jisho.org today is actually きょう. So there's ki with the i silent as one syllable and yo(u) as the second syllable. Seems to me like there's even more characters than syllables here. I don't see the hiragana deficiency in this example, unless there's something I'm missing.
> * Inversion for questions
I know French can use inversion for questions. This Encyclopedia Britannica says that it occurs in other Romance languages also
Also r/baddevelopmentalpsychology:
>babies can learn object permanence and language from nothing
Obviously nothing can be learned from nothing and a blank slate can't learn. Plus all evidence nowadays points to object permanence being innate since a) they have from as early as we've been clever enough to design a test for (See Renée Baillargeon's amazing body of work, including Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman (1985), Baillargeon & De Vos (1991), and particularly [Baillargeon, Li, Gefiner, and Wu (2011)](labs.psychology.illinois.edu/infantlab/articles/baillargeon_li_gertner_wu2011.pdf) for a very up-to-date survey of all the experimental evidence), and b) there is no plausible learning path to object permanence: The whole point is it's about objects you don't see, so how could you possibly acquire any new information about that? Object disappears on the left, object reappears on the right,... how could that help you infer the object kept existing in between? If you think objects you don't see disappear, then seeing an object disappear behind a curtain and then reappear when you move the curtain is not counter-evidence to your world view. And if you fully lack the capacity to think of objects you don't see then you can't possibly construct hypotheses about what those objects are up to when you don't see them. If anything children encounter a ton of contrary evidence. Imagine all the times they leave a toy on the floor and next time they come it has moved onto the shelf.
GetPocket is at it again. It suggested this article today. At least it doesn't say "untranslatable". (In fact, it could be goodling, or not-badling anyway. But I don't really wanna check.)
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/43-embarrassing-grammar-mistakes-even-smart-people-make
Blah blah blah, we don't know the difference between orthography and grammar, blah blah blah, some perfectly good words aren't words at all (gasp!), blah blah blah, I'm sure none of our readers have ever heard this one before!
Most of these are along the lines of eggcorns, so I can't be too mad, but a few of these are annoyingly prescriptive. Also, the title claiming these mistakes are embarrassing leaves a bad taste.
I'm not really sure what's been written on hypercorrection. But, to me, it doesn't seem like it should be that different from other forms of overgeneralization.
You might find the Lasnik & Sobin paper posted above interesting, same with <strong>Sobin (1997)</strong>
I had this dictionary when I first went to Korea and it has a fantastic list of English words matched to the Korean sounds, so I never had any trouble with anything other than the eu/으 sound. After a decade of living in Korea, textbooks, phrasebooks, studying at university, that was still my go-to book for little grammar tips. Unfortunately I loaned it to some girl who first arrived and never got it back.
These days Ive gotten pretty lazy and my wife gives me no end of shit about it, so whenever I have to use a double consonant, I make sure to say it like I'm taking a massive dump at the same time to really emphasize the sound.
>Isn't all gender assignment semantic by definition ? As in "meaning it's of such gender" ?
I don't know what you mean. I am talking about assignment of grammatical gender / noun class to a particular noun.
>Therefore, if a masculine or feminine noun is understood as referring to people regardless of their sexes, the word's gender cannot be used to contradict that understanding since we already know we are in one of the many (and majority of) cases in which grammatical gender is divorced from the sex of the signified.
You're missing something here. Corbett (2010) lays out two main types of gender assignment. Semantic assignment is based on the meaning of the word. In a sex-based gender system (not the best terminology), that semantic assignment will come from the sex/gender of the referent. In an animate/inanimate system, it's whether the referent is perceived to be above a certain level of animacy. Other systems have more categories with complex semantics.
The other side is formal assignment, which may be from morphology (being assigned based on declension class, for instance) or potentially phonology, without any regard to the meaning of a word.
A language can have only semantic assignment, or it can have semantic and formal assignment. I don't believe there has ever been a system found that only has formal assignment.
In the case of German, morphology does often dictate the gender of the noun, even overriding semantics. However, human males are almost always masculine and human females are almost always feminine, and you can express the (social) gender of a person by changing the (grammatical) gender of a word (usually with some morphology, though). So the semantic assignment is based on social gender (and biological sex in animals). That it can get overridden by formal assignment does not mean it doesn't exist.
> So is Latin but the Turks created new vowels to adapt. They could've done the same for the Arabic script
True - fair point. I'm not sure how languages like Farsi, Urdu, etc., handled them.
> The short vowels were marked with diacritics and the long ones with distinctive letters.
This may be true of learning materials, but neither Arabic nor Ottoman normally mark short vowels in print. Although there was some method to the madness of Ottoman spelling, the huge admixture of Arabic and Persian vocab and grammatical structures meant that literacy in Ottoman took much more time and effort compared to the modern alphabet.
Geoffrey Lewis wrote a short, but good monograph on the reform that I recommend to anyone interested in it.