Messages

1

English & Linguistics / Re: Dear Expert

« on: June 14, 2016, 02:45:12 PM »

I just realized that we had fake infix "languages" that we used when we were kids. I heard several versions - one was called "Oppish" and was created by inserting the syllable "-opp," such as in "OppI'm Soppo hoppappoppy toppoo soppee yoppou!" The others were just a variation on the syllable you inserted. I always thought it was interesting when I was young how it sounded so complicated at first but then once you got the hang of it it came as second nature, both speaking and listening. But now I'm realizing we were just teaching ourselves a grammatical feature that didn't exist in English, but once it was learned, like any other foreign grammatical feature, our brains dealt with it just fine.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Dear Expert

« on: June 13, 2016, 12:57:37 PM »

One of my linguistics professors told me that there is only one inflix used in the English language but he wasn't going to tell us what it was.

I figured out what it was and then challenged him, because I live in Utah and that's the exact sort of usage we would make new versions of. Abso-friggin-lutely.

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English & Linguistics / Re: English-to-English translation

« on: June 13, 2016, 12:55:50 PM »

Interesting. I've never heard that expression before.

Me neither, all of the South Africans I know wish me ill.

(Just kidding, I actually know three and they are lovely people)

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English & Linguistics / Re: Quotes from work

« on: May 31, 2016, 03:17:53 PM »

"for your FYI"

Is there any possibility they were trying to be clever here? I can see myself saying that in a casual group email trying to be funny.

But it probably wasn't, was it? It was probably a treatise on political instability in sub-Saharan Africa.

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English & Linguistics / Re: English-to-English translation

« on: May 12, 2016, 12:10:47 PM »

Amusement level for the win!

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English & Linguistics / Re: English-to-English translation

« on: May 10, 2016, 02:12:29 PM »

I've probably shared this in this thread before, but I was highly amused when my Australian mission companion referred to traffic cones as "witches' hats." Australians just name things better.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: April 29, 2016, 04:10:26 PM »

Wait, vos is less formal than tú? That don't make no sense.

I know, right? But it is.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: April 29, 2016, 02:18:26 PM »

I find it really interesting to see how different European languages have dealt with the whole singular-plural/formal-informal thing with second-person pronouns. In English the singular became so informal that it became pejorative, so it disappeared. In French they simply use the plural as a formal pronoun. In Spanish they have separate singular and plural forms for formal and informal, though I've heard that different dialects of Spanish do things differently. In German they used to use the second-person plural as a formal pronoun, but then it gave way to using the third-person plural as a formal pronoun, so formal "you", whether it's to one person or more than one, is actually "they".

Yeah, Spanish does it a lot of different ways. Tú and usted are pretty universal for informal and formal, with ustedes as the plural in most cases. Then in some dialects there's a informal plural - vosotros. Then in some dialects there's a singular that's even less formal than tú: vos. So in my husband's family, for example, tú is sort of kind of formal, like you'd use it for your parents but sometimes also for strangers, usted is so formal that the only time they really use it is at church where that's kind of become a pan-Hispanic Mormon way to refer to fellow church members, and then vos is how you would address your kids or someone you were angry with.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 29, 2016, 02:11:30 PM »

That's interesting!

My husband and I have talked about bodega before. It's only in certain varieties of Spanish (Puerto Rican was the only one we've come across) that it has the meaning of "small store" that we use it for in English. In all the other varieties of Spanish he's familiar with, it still means something like "cellar" or "storage area." In his Honduran Spanish the meaning is closer to "warehouse," and in the Spain Spanish in Pan's Labyrinth they use it to mean a pantry.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 22, 2016, 01:26:29 PM »

They're like the M&Ms of vegetation.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 12, 2016, 04:08:00 PM »

That's true - it's a Dutch thing.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 07, 2016, 02:32:25 PM »

In French, the word for the bird turkey means "chicken from India," which is equally erroneous.

It is the same in modern Hebrew.

Everyone in the world is confused about where turkeys come from!

Except for Asians. Chinese just call them fire chickens and the Japanese call them seven-faced birds.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 07, 2016, 12:35:22 PM »

We were thinking of foods that are named for places, like Lima beans, Jerusalem artichoke, tangerines, Brussels sprouts, Yorkshire pudding, and he challenged me on oregano.

How about hamburgers, frankfurters and weiners?

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: April 07, 2016, 12:34:41 PM »

Turkey is one of those, though an erroneous one. In French, the word for the bird turkey means "chicken from India," which is equally erroneous.

Turquoise, on the other hand, means Turkish in French.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« on: April 04, 2016, 08:06:44 AM »

Yeah, whenever I read someone writing about the Internet, I can't help but assume that the writer is Jen from The IT Crowd.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Dear Expert

« on: March 30, 2016, 03:16:13 PM »

also forms nouns, usually derogatory, for persons or things exemplifying or associated with that specified by the base noun or adjective ( cheapo; pinko; sicko; weirdo; wino).

Yeah! That's what I was looking for - the other words I could think of were sicko and wino; I wondered why the -o was a little bit negative in meaning.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Dear Expert

« on: March 30, 2016, 01:19:33 PM »

Etymonline is failing me on this one: where does the -o in weirdo come from?

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« on: March 29, 2016, 01:41:19 PM »

Check this out: a video project to produce animations narrated in Mexico's indigenous languages. They're really beautiful. The videos are subtitled, but only in Spanish, but they're cool anyway even if you don't understand just to listen to the huge variety of languages and they have some very lovely animations. The Maya one is my favorite so far.

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English & Linguistics / Re: New column-type thingy

« on: March 28, 2016, 12:20:51 PM »

That was pretty great. It also made me a little sad about lost etymologies that we may never find. Linguistics is like a field where you can kind of find out cool stuf . . . for a while, until you go further and further back in time and then you have no way of ever knowing. It gets more nihilistic the further back in time you go.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Word and phrase misuse

« on: March 21, 2016, 03:41:35 PM »

Good one!

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English & Linguistics / Re: Word and phrase misuse

« on: March 21, 2016, 02:49:50 PM »

That is interesting!

Yeah, I know both meanings, but I guess I just haven't used them in writing enough to ever remember which spelling goes with which meaning. I feel like it's a distinction that might be on the road to extinction. It's a distinction . . . headed for extinction. This calls for a linguistic rap battle, I think.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Word and phrase misuse

« on: March 21, 2016, 10:58:06 AM »

That's one of those distinctions that I know exists but can't make stick in my head - I have to look up which is which every time I want to use it. I think it might be because "discrete" is such an abstract concept? It's hard to make an easy example of the concept stick in my head. And it's used rarely enough that I imagine a good number of people might not ever encounter it. All the contexts that I can think of seeing it in are scientific or mathematical.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: March 18, 2016, 10:57:43 AM »

At our annual Christmas, excuse me, holiday, party that year, all the offices from around the country had to perform Cheese-related skits and such.  My office sang "My Cheese" to the tune of "My Girl" Who's got cheddar, on a cloudy day . . ..  (My boss shot down my suggestion of "Yes, I love cheeses").

I recall sitting with a colleague as we were forced to watch one presentation after another and whispering to her, "I Camembert it any longer!"

This sounds like maybe the worst thing ever. I'm glad you improved the situation as much as you could with some valiant puns.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: March 17, 2016, 02:58:24 PM »

About 120K a year.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: March 17, 2016, 02:07:49 PM »

I once had some home teachers who taught me and my roommate a lesson from Who Moved My Cheese, and it was one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard.

Those guys work in corporate jobs in downtown Salt Lake now, I guarantee it. And they probably make way more money than either of us.