official-linguistics-post

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not the true etymology, unfortunately!

garbage

garb

carbage/cabbage/(sewing) garbage

The word garbage sounds like it should mean clothing

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official linguistics post

do you have any recommendations for the most important things a layperson (with limited time and energy) should learn in order to not be completely stupid about linguistics?

Read up

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have you seen the movie Arrival and/or read the story that it’s based on? what are your thoughts?

i like them a lot as sci-fi stories! and i'm always down for an amy adams vehicle.

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Hi! I hope you are doing well.

Do you have any book/text recommendations for getting into historical linguistics as a field? I have some knowledge on it but I still feel shaky on the methodologies used.

i'm a fan of lyle campbell's historical linguistics: an introduction for methods

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Is there any proof that any of these supposed Proto-Indo-European words actually existed and were spoken by anyone, rather than being "conjecture" (made up) by linguists?

no! and historical linguists are very up-front about this. that's why the asterisk is used in front of those words - it indicates a reconstructed form, not one that is attested in existing documentation. those forms are our best approximation of what the language might have looked like based on known descendants. we take "proof" very seriously, and in general, if there's not contemporary written evidence of a particular form, we're not going to claim that it unequivocally existed.

but the comparative method of reconstruction is very good when you have enough data to draw from, as PIE usually does.

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by the way, people send me a lot of etymology questions (which are always fun to look up! this is not meant as discouragement!) but i'm usually just referencing etymonline which anyone has access to. in case y'all want to go hogwild.

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Does "Together" come from "to gather"? (they sound enough to me that if I pronounce one letter wrong I know I'll end up saying the other one so I was just wondering. I feel like I'm wrong tho.)

they come from the same root, proto-indo-european *ghedh-, so they're related but "together" isn't descended from "to gather"!

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hi!

I'm writing my dissertation on the Rosetta Stone, and a key point of that is the evolution of writing systems. I'm trying to find a scholarly article or book that states that writing systems usually start off ideographic but evolve wholely/partially to alphabetic.

I haven't been able to find anything apart from one focusing on ancient Mesopotamia, and I'd really appreciate it if you knew of, or could direct me in the direction of, a scholarly article that states it.

thank you so so much, I'm beyond desperate at this point 😭

first i have a caution against the "evolution" tilt — don't fall into hyperevolutionism à la sylvanus morley or ignace gelb. an alphabet isn't an evolutionary stage, it's just one possible path, distinct from other script types.

with that said, i think andrew robinson's the story of writing hits on writing system development in general, and the "further reading" section of that book has some great starting points. i can't necessarily vouch for these texts but here's some that look useful for you at first glance:

peter daniels and william bright (eds), the world's writing systems, 1996

roy harris, the origin of writing, 1986

stephen d. houston (ed), the first writing: script invention as history and process, 2004

robert k. englund, "the origins of script," science, 11 june 1993

please take note that none of these will explicitly support that "writing systems usually start off ideographic but evolve wholly/partially to alphabetic" because that just isn't true, at least the way i'm interpreting your phrasing, so you might have to tweak your argument a little bit. (don't worry, it's healthy for your scholarship!)

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Ellohay istermay/istersay/onbinaryisternay, areway ouyay uentflay inway igpay atinlay andway isway itway ethay uetray escendantday ofway atinlay, oremay anthay italianway orway anishspay?

eahyay, uresay, igpay atinlay isyay ethay ostmay oselyclay elatedray escendantday ofyay atinlay espiteday eingbay asedbay onyay ayay ermanicgay anguagelay

(idesay otenay: erethay areyay ialectalday ifferencesday etweenbay eatmentstray ofyay owelvay-initialyay ordsway?!)

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What is the etymological origin of the word sweetcorn

proto-indo-european *gre-no- "grain" > proto-germanic *kurnam "small seed" > old english corn "seed of a cereal plant," somewhat semantically narrowed over time after the introduction of maize in europe to refer specifically to that plant and its products, except in retained vocabulary like "barleycorn" (the seed of a barley plant).

"sweet" is one of the primary varieties for human consumption; it does in fact refer to the taste of the fruit, since sweetcorn has especially high sugar content.

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i will probably be particularly bad about answering asks in the next few weeks. nothing's wrong i just overcommitted to fiber craft projects with hard deadlines.

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I'm new here. What's a Fricative Friday?

it's when i post "fricative friday" on a friday and my notifications are flooded with everyone tagging their favorite fricative phonemes

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People at my college kept insisting there's a Native American language without any pronouns whatsoever. I can find no evidence of this, but they maintain Tiktok told them so. Can you help clarify this for me - is there a language, somehow, somewhere, without pronouns?

i'm fairly confident that pronouns are considered a linguistic universal - which implies that no, there is no known natural language that completely lacks pronouns. people may be conflating pronouns generally with some subset, like independent pronouns.

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I suspect that when people call each other homie that this is a mishearing of hombre. Do you think that is accurate?

no, it's pretty well established to be from "homeboy," which has its own etymology.

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fricative friday

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My favorite moment was when official-linguistics-post said "it's fricking absolute friday" and fricated.... Fric... Froke... F... All over the place

i'm a blog of the people

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she fricative on my friday till i linguistics

yeah