#linguistics community
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If you have multiple just pick the one that happened first in your life (I forgot to put multiple)
#linguistics poll#linguistics#linguistics community#polled#random poll#poll#tumblr polls#poll time#tumblr poll#my polls#hyperspecific poll#polls#conlangs#languages#school
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Birds are famous for communicating vocally, but many have other options, too. Some communicate by dancing, for example, or by showing off their feathers. And according to a new study, at least one bird species does something more often associated with humans and great apes: symbolic gesturing. A songbird called the Japanese tit (Parus minor) uses fluttering wing movements to signal "after you," the study's authors report, similar to the way humans extend one open hand to let another person go first.
Continue Reading.
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ֆօʍɛ ֆɨʍʟɨֆɦ քɦʀǟֆɛֆ ʏօʊ ʍɨɢɦȶ ʄɨռɖ ʊֆɛʄʊʟ ɨռ ʟɨʄɛ
hello : sul sul! / what's up : bloo bagoo? / how are you : cuh teekaloo? / i'm hungry : oh feebee lay / something in my way : choo waga choo choo! / you've got some nerve : firby nurbs / yes : yeibs / no : neib / oh my god : jamoo / woah this is fun : bum bum! / anyone home : nash na poof? / are you serious right now : ugh...groble! / you! yes you! go away : depwa spanewash depla blah! / excuse-me! get out of the way : blursh! meshaloob blursh! / i don't like you : boobasnot / no bullying : yabihorn! / i'm so bored : uhh shamoo ralla poo / happy birthday : humple borpnah! / this food is delicious : dis wompf es fredesche / thank you : vadish / nothing is impossible if you believe : benzi chibna looble bazebni gweb / cat : minicule / dog : woofum / baby is upset : aw crankus nooboo! / i'm pregnant : baba / i think you're hot : za woka genava / selfie : ongie! / i need a taxi : nicloske ga gloop / see you soon : geelfrob / i love you : por see gab lurv / live laugh love : leeb leefuh lurve / i'm on fire : wabadeebadoo! / goodbye : dag dag
#the sims#the sims 4#the sims 3#the sims 2#ts4#ts3#ts2#sims 4#sims 3#sims 2#sims#simblr#thesims#thesims4#sims4#sims community#the sims community#text post#funny#funny stuff#meme#funny memes#humor#linguistics#language#conlang#sims 4 gameplay#ts4 gameplay#life hacks#video games
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shoutout to all the neurodivergent people/critters whose verbal language alternates between:
eloquent and fully articulate speech, filled with emotion and detail. where every word is thoughtful and is strung together perfectly to prevent misunderstanding. at times, even using words that are almost unknown or wildly underused by normal people. where grammar and proper conjugation is ideal, and everything is in there for a reason. communication is fluent and flows smoothly between thoughts, and is not unlike a medieval herald recounting a message to their townsfolk
and:
short sentence. not much word used. broken grammar; no want to be proper. don’t want speak, but must speak, so little speak. sometime not even speak real word, sometimes garbled mismash of words. lots of umm and uhh and stutters. no tone, sound like computer even.
(I am that neurodivergent critter lol)
#neurodivergent#actually neurodivergent#autism#actually autistic#level 1 autism#speech#linguistics#adhd#actually adhd#(I’m not adhd but I’m tagging them anyway)#neurodiverse stuff#verbal communication#verbal shutdown
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Rare Language Learning: Polari
If you have ever used the words:
- Naff
- Butch
- Camp
You have unknowingly been speaking the sociolect known as Polari, the language of queer people primarily used in the 30s to the 70s. Polari is now an endangered language, as labelled by the University of Cambridge
Something of note: Many resources out there imply (or state) that Polari was a language invented and used solely by white cis gay men, which is decidedly untrue. Many words of Polari come from drag culture, lesbians, and the Romani people and their language. The use of ‘the language of British gay men’ may be a more palatable title to the general public, but it is not to me. I did my best to curate a variety of resources, but unfortunately much of queer history has been lost many more decades than I’ve been alive, if you have any other resources for studying Polari I would love to read them, message me or leave a link in the replies.
Articles
Learn Polari, the Secret Language of the Gays ⚢ Out Magazine
Polari: The code language gay men used to survive ⚢ BBC
Polari and the Hidden History of Gay Seafarers ⚢ National Museums Liverpool
The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language ⚢ Fabulosa!
Polari People ⚢ Fabulosa!
Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish
The secretive gay language that gave LGBTQ people a voice ⚢ GAYTIMES
A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men ⚢ The Conversation
Study Material
The Polari Bible ⚢ Internet Archive
Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang ⚢ Internet Archive
Sociolinguistics / Polari ⚢ StudySmarter
FlashCards ⚢ Quizlet
New Polari Translator ⚢ LingoJam
Polari: A sociohistorical study of the life and decline of a secret language. ⚢ Dissertation, University of Manchester
Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish
Simon Bowkett: a short blog in Polari for LGBT+ History Month ⚢ Civil Service LGBT+ Network
#academia#studyblr#university studyblr#uni#university#student#linguistics#language study#language learning#langblr#languages#endangered languages#queer history#queer history month#lgbtq community#lgbtq history#lgbtq history month#lgbt#lgbt history month#queer academia#queer community#linguistic#Polari#Polari language#dialect#sociolect#pride#uk history#English history#university student
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languages study schedule
daily
write 1 or 2 sentences to sum up my day
learn 5 new words
listen to a song, watch a short video, conjugate a verb, read and attempt to say out loud a tongue twister, count from 1-100, sing the alphabet, read a page in a book, talk to my reflection, vocabulary flashcards (pick one)
weekly
watch a movie, episode, documentary or follow a cooking tutorial in the target language
grammar exercises
translate a short text
monthly
write an essay or report, on a chosen topic
#that girl#becoming that girl#student#nenelonomh#productivity#student life#chaotic academia#study blog#academia#study#language#language study#spanish#french#german#italian#language resources#language stuff#linguistics#study schedule#study notes#study motivation#studying#100 days of studying#study aesthetic#study community#study hard#study inspiration#study inspo#study space
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one of the most fun things so far about living with a cat for the first time (and one of the most on-brand things for me as someone with a linguistics degree) has been getting to learn cat communication. it’s so cool and interesting to be able to notice the difference between certain meows and understand what they mean, like “hey! there’s a bug over there!” and “okay that’s enough snuggling please put me down now” and “scooch over so I can jump onto the bed”. and don’t even get me started on the body language! it’s just so funny, there’s a little guy who lives in my house and neither of us speak the same language but we’re trying!
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Tbh this has been on my mind for MONTHS
Human codes… but they’re not actually codes??
A small group of humans is discovered by some curious aliens. Both sides can assume that the other is sentient. The aliens are trying to translate the humans’ language to their own, and the humans are trying to learn the aliens’ language. But since humans are tricky, they’ve decided that they don’t want the aliens to know their language, so they can have secret conversations.
So they go a little crazy. With written words, they randomly use lowercase and capital letters, even using numbers and symbols, and use a lot of slang, occasionally using words incorrectly on purpose. They’ll jumble the words a bit so that only human brains can guess their meaning (that thing where if you use all the letters and put the proper letters at the beginning and end it’ll be comprehensible), and even use additional or unofficial languages (commonly known words like ‘hola’, ‘si’, ‘oui’, etc, and piglatin, in which you typically take the first letter or syllable of a word, place it at the end, and add ‘ay’ to the end).
As for spoken words, they will do a bit of the above, mashing languages and slang, perhaps mispronouncing a few things, and quoting memes, vines, movies, and even singing parts of songs to throw off the aliens. Perhaps they will say something with a somber meaning in a joyful way to throw off the meaning, or even just naturally (‘I wanna die!’ ‘Mood’), or vice versa.
Additionally, there would have to be a TON of body language. Maybe even sign language, should they know any. Gestures and expressions, eyebrow wiggles and poorly-hidden grins. Ah, the beauties of communication.
#I’m sure there’s more#please add more#aliens#humans#humans are space orcs#haso#humans are space fae#humans are space raccoons#humans are space orcs prompts#humans are weird#humans are insane#humans are terrifying#language#communication#lingustics#? I hope this counts as linguistics??#I’ve had this in my head for an unwritten fic I’ve abandoned before its birth#just humans being clever little pricks#aliens: hello humans! we wish to communicate! please speak as you naturally would!#human: ouldshay eway unray?#other human: *offended look* Bethany. I made BISCUITS *subtle gesturing to alien food*#another human: if I stay there will be trouble~ and if I go there will be double~ so I gotta gotta know~ should I stay or should I go#alien: are we sure these are all the same species? because I’m fairly sure they’re all speaking different languages
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Try Morse Core. Women Love Morse Code.
[First] Prev <--> Next
#poorly drawn mdzs#mdzs#wei wuxian#lan jingyi#lan sizhui#jin ling#a-qing#ouyang zizhen#nameless red disciple#Girls speak in a series of clicks and trills that even the most adept linguists have difficulty decoding#Thankfully this rhythmic language can be translated to music notes#communication via specific vibrations of coiled metal wire is possible!#but- Ah shucks the guy with the guqin has his hands full. And also bloodied.#We need to resort to secondary girl communication. Blinking slowly at her. If she blinks slowly back - you're in.#if she blinks rapidly that's a threat. Is she does not blink at all you are already dead.#btw: Girls eyes translate lines of contrast to these series of air flow disturbances to create language. So they *can* read what we write.#This has been your daily GirlFacts tidbit.#Jokes aside. I get that the point was she has no tongue to speak with but it really does just come off as:#“5 teen boys in a room with a teen girl and dropping the ball so hard on how to proceed”#This is why men give up and kiss each other btw. (OKAY IM DONE SPREADING MISINFORMATION (for today))
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Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."
I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.
Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.
Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.
And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.
Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).
Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.
This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!
As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).
For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …
ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?
#translation#linguistics (sorta)#I love language so much#long post#subtitling#dubbing#transformative work#if you read all the way to the end - THANK YOU I am so impressed#localisation#this is not an academic essay but I still feel bad for not citing sources#low vs high context cultures and languages are concepts from intercultural communication studies#but idk how up to date that is or whether folks even still actually use them#I know they oversimplify things#but it helped me say what I was trying to here so shrug#languages#language soup#meta#language meta#fandom meta of sorts#thanks for the help sorting this out kayla <3#my nonsense
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Bonus 92: Xenolinguistics 👽
Someday, we might make contact with intelligent life beyond our planet. In that case, linguists want to be PREPARED. Enter the excitingly named field of Xenolinguistics!
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about how linguists might go about communicating with aliens. Drawing on highlights of the academic book "Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language", we talk about how we'd actually go about trying to communicate with aliens. First of all, how can we know that a species is trying to communicate, and how can we convey our intentions in return? Secondly, do we have a shared context: are they on our planet, are we on theirs, or are we trying to decipher some sort of radio waves from afar? Third, what sort of medium are they using: visual, audio, and touch are all used for human languages and have some obvious advantages, but what about smell, electromagnetism, or electric pulses? Fourth, what could we learn about interspecies communication here on Earth from the African Grey Parrot, the prairie dog, and the vervet monkey? And finally, what other practical and ethical considerations do we need to remember based on current linguistic documentation projects? (The aliens may have multiple languages, only some of which are appropriate for outsiders to learn. And there are no spare AA batteries available in orbit around Alpha Centauri.) Listen to this episode about how linguists might go about communicating with aliens, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
#linguistics#lingthusiasm#language#podcast#podcasts#bonus#bonus episodes#bonuses#xenolinguistics#aliens#alien communication
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I meant Langblr I am just illiterate
#conlang#conlanging#polls#linguistics community#linguistics poll#linguistics#gender neutral language
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wondering if anyone knows more about the change in the use/connotations of "handsome". obviously now it's a very masculine-coded descriptor, but it was used for women as well in the 19th (?) century. when i asked around, people said they assumed that even then, it was to describe women who were attractive but perhaps not conventionally pretty, and i'm wondering if that's an anachronism or accurate.
tldr: was handsome a gender neutral term for attractiveness in the past, or was it still aimed primarily towards masculine traits even when directed towards women?
#is this amrev? nah but i think someone in the community might know#linguistics#amrev#amrev fandom#history#history fandom
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it/its users, opinion on "that" being used for you
that example "what is that doing?"
it example "what is it doing?"
(this is your own opinion of the pronoun being used for yourself)
no abstain/see results, it/its users only (including all pronouns users, pronoun fluid users.)
reblog reminder also but if you dont want to thats fine i dont control you 👍
#langblr#tumblr polls#polls#it/its#any prns#any pronouns#neopronouns#neoprns#transgender#trans polls#otherkin#genderqueer#it/they#it/he#it/she#pronoun poll#xenogender#nonbinary#linguistics#lingustics#queer community#queer polls#mogai#mogai community#lgbtq community#lgbt pride#queer#random polls#otherkin community#objectkin
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allysion... girl i havent drawn u in 3 years
#sketch#digital art#ocs#oc:allysion#furry#sfw furry#her name is pronounced ah-liss-ee-un#shes one of my many alien cat species... shes the same species as enoseavion and areson. theyre all arteli#arteli have a clan system where different clans handle different careers and study paths. allysion is from a clan of mostly geologists#she specializes in speleology and mining technology. but she also married into a clan that specializes in linguistics#shes the direct ancestor of my oc areson. hes another i dont post often abt...#hes the last in his clan in the modern era and hes the first nonhuman to learn to speak english and communicate w/ romsir and co
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