Oddly many #indigenous#languages do not have gendered #pronouns and are highly likely to #misgender you on accident because its not an important thing to them. My partner has a friend in the Philippines who can't get her head wrapped around the pronoun discussion and why its such a culture war here. Many indigenous folks are now gendering themselves as they/he or they/them just as a protest against colonizer forced gendered pronouns.
♲ monads.online/
Looking for literature on German in the Netherlands for a sociolinguistics class next semester!
I'm especially interested the German-speaking communities abroad (who is part of it, what languages do they speak) & language ideologies around German in the Dutch context. Thanks! ☺️
Atlas Obscura's Dan Nosowitz set out to determine what the fastest language in the world is, and immediately encountered a problem: What does that mean? Number of syllables spoken in a set amount of time? Amount of information conveyed? Language that can be understood when cranked up to the highest speed? He spoke to quantitative linguist Francois Pellegrino about how experts measure all this, and together, they came up with an answer.
Are you starting to learn Japanese? Are you wondering whether you should learn with romaji (Roman characters) to help simplify getting started? Don't do it, you fool. Here's why.
"In a Native American language of California called Atsugewi (now extinct), if a tree was burned and we found the ashes in a creek afterward, we would have said that soot w’oqhputíc’ta into the creek. W’oqhputíc’ta is a conglomeration of bits that mean “it moved like dirt, in a falling fashion, into liquid, and for real.” In English, we would just say “flowed.”"
"A good, basic beginner’s Japanese textbook can lay a strong foundation for future success. And there’s one book that I’ve found stands head and shoulders above the rest."
Read our author's recommendation on this and other must-have Japanese language learning books below.
“Learning a different way to speak, read & write helps people discover new ways to see the world [...],” Matsakis writes. “No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.”
If someone calls you a ビッチ in Japanese, you may feel insulted. But are you being insulted for the right reason? Here's how some common "false friends" between English and Japanese may force you to re-learn your own language.
I’ve been listening to #Taiwanese language (Taigi) podcasts while running to help me stay in touch with the part of my brain that innately understands southern Min languages as a first language. I feel like I’m losing touch with it. Anyway, interesting content not available in English: heard a story investigating how the Taiwanese railway bento isn’t an ‘ancient’ food tradition like it’s perceived but rather one that came from Japanese colonialism AND food safety concerns. #Food
There’s a theory that if you say ‘tea’ or ‘thé’ for tea, instead of ‘cha’ or ‘chai’, you know the Hokkien word for tea already: teh
That those countries with this word for tea got tea first from Fujian ports; while those who say ‘cha’ or ‘chai’ got their tea through the northern land route.
Being from where I am in the world, my words for ingredients are in Malay, Teochew, Hokkien, Tamil (there’s no order to which food items are in which language. They simply.. are. Some fish we use the Malay names, some fish we use the other names. Same with veggies)
And now that I am in N America I am re-learning some words in Cantonese
I thought I couldn’t get ‘kang kung’ here but learned it’s actually called ‘ong choy’
I stayed at a hostel earlier this week which had this whiteboard in the dining area with the greeting “welcome!!” in
various #languages. I was a little tempted to ask them to change “Aloha!!” to “Welina mai!!” which would be a better translation of #welcome. “Aloha” is more of a generic greeting. But, at least most people will recognize #aloha! #OleloHawaii#LearnHawaiian#hawaiian
What would happen if natural languages behaved like programming languages?
I’m no expert in programming languages, but I know enough to realize that the slightest mistake can mess up hundreds of lines of code. Luckily for us, speakers of natural languages are better at deciphering messages, even those abound in morphosyntactic blunders.
Irish names you’re probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them
'Do you know your Gearóid from your Gobnait? Your Fearghal from your Muirgheal? To the untrained eye, Irish names can seem like a daunting ambush of rogue consonants and surprise vowels.'
One of the funniest things when I was living in Indonesia: because Malay and Indonesian are so similar, I kept saying things to the motorbike taxi drivers that to me were just things like ‘hello’ and ‘I’ and ‘brother’. I was wondering why everyone kept giving me their phone number. Those words, very neutral in Malay, were actually total come-ons and flirty language in Jakarta.
Don’t say ‘aku’ and ‘abang’ to strangers in Jakarta.
If there's no stronger argument for the need to learn how to read Chinese, it is this! Two characters can have the same pronunciation and tone but mean slightly different things. I learned the character for person (rén) 人 and its radical version 亻as a kid, and now I know 仁 which means "humane", and the way the components fit together is rather poetic.