After watching “Arrival” last night, I’m fixated on the idea of nonlinear memory. It must be disorienting, and incredibly strange to remember your entire life when you haven’t fully lived it yet.
TIL that #Polish and #Lithuanian have both taken the transcription from #Czech. Yet each has a different one. Polish took it from Old Czech. But the Czech language reformed and when the Lithuanians wanted to distinguish their language from the dominant Polish during the national revival, they adopted the transcription from modern Czech. That is why Polish has "cz" and Lithuanian has "č".
It's dragonlanging day again! We are going to return to the writing system now. We have some more consonant symbols to create, then some work to do on how to handle consonant clusters before we can fully wrap Ndăkaga.
How the Brain Processes Different Components of Language - Moving beyond neural localization of language. Posted May 28, 2024
"...This is in line with recent ideas about a "cortical mosaic" architecture for linguistic structure within overlapping portions of posterior temporal and inferior frontal cortices for processing demands that bias syntactic and semantic computations, whereby, for example, effects of composition can be found within a narrow strip of tissue within the broader lexicality-sensitive cortical sites (a spatial mosaic), or where different demands of sentence-level inferential semantics can be detected over closely overlapping temporal windows within a small area of cortex (a spatiotemporal mosaic)..."
#TIL the #TeReoMāori verb mate ā-moa which means "to be exterminated, disappear, lost forever", or just simply "extinction".
mate itself just means 'dead', among other things (https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/3845).
This is cool that the language adapted from a social/ecological thing (moa becoming extinct), and created a verb to explain it. So becoming dead like the moa is being dead forever, mate ā-moa. They probably didn't have a concept for it.
Amaze your friends with tidbits from my interview with Paul Anthony Jones as we talk about his new book "Why Is This a Question?"
If you think it's hard learning the gender of nouns when you're studying Spanish, German, or French, consider the language with more than 300 genders that Paul describes in this clip.
Check out the whole interview for more fun language facts!
I’m thrilled to announce that I will be moving to #Philadelphia for a fellowship at the American Philosophical Society, where I will continue working on locating, building, and analyzing a corpus of #Tunica language documentation, as well as gathering all information I can on the history and culture of the Tunica-Biloxi people.
Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time - by Eric Grundhauser December 7, 2016
"...Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures & histories to speak them... In the case of the ever-present Elvish in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men & hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm & Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.”...As radio & film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent..."
When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊
As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.
Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.
If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.
And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉
YouTube music often shows song titles for songs using non-Latin writing systems transliterated into the Latin alphabet, which makes the titles easier to read but hard to verify that the song is in a language that I'm seeking. I wish they would show the title both ways.
If lyrics are available, then I can use the lyrics to verify. But often they're not.