#or just. overall. ask me shit abt linguistics. rememberw hen i got an anon asking me what a wug is

[xenoglots]

RANDOM ASS TEXT POST DESCRIBING SOME OF THE SHIT I USE AS MY TAGS BECAUSE THEY ARE WONDERFUL FUN LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS, THANKS.

COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY. a quote from noam chomsky that he wrote to show that a sentence can be grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. it shows the lack of a connection between the syntax of a sentence and the semantics. he also wrote the next sentence, which was “*furiously sleep ideas green colorless” which, again is nonsense, but also doesn’t make sense grammatically. even though both are not actual possible concepts, we know that the second one is not a correct english sentence. also, there’s the whole idea of the statistics that this was literally the first time this sentence had ever been uttered due to its lack of true meaning, something pretty profound with how long language has been around, but i digress. 

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR is another chomsky thing because when you study linguistics step 1 is to get all up in this dude’s shit, honestly. also referred to as mental grammar, this is the theory that the ability to learn a native tongue is hardwired in every human’s brain, and that as long as a person is brought up in a quote-unquote normal setting language acquisition will manifest. this goes into then the language acquisition period within a child’s life that they can learn native-speaker level of a language, and also goes into the reason why it’s so easy when one is younger to learn a language.  y’all know what a PALINDROME is if you’ve seen the movie, and it’s obvious why i have it as my hannah tag, but my in character tag is also a palindrome. ARE WE NOT DRAWN ONWARD, WE FEW, DRAWN ONWARD TO NEW ERA ? reads the same backwards and forwards. the idea of there being no cohesive beginning or end is a very important concept to this movie and therefore this blog, and also i wanted to make sure for anything ic it’d be a palindrome. i read it even further with the actual context of the sentence irt going forward to a new era and louise’s story, but i will suffer quietly over this on my own, thanks.

a GARDEN PATH SENTENCE is one that starts one way but ends in a way you don’t first expect it to end. they are grammatically correct and usually require a re-reading because your brain, by the end, has to reinterpret it to actually grasp the meaning. one example is “the prime number few.” at first it seems like the syntax is incorrect, but reading prime as the noun instead of prime number as the noun phrase makes it understandable. a PARAPROSDOKIAN is similar in this concept, where the ending word(s) in a sentence completely change the meaning. often humorous, a lot of famous quotes use this. for example, einstein’s “the difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

the self tag is REFLEXIVE, aka a pronoun that refers back to the subject. the IMPERFECT INDICATIVE is a verb tense that expresses the concept of habitual actions of the past that are no longer occuring aka lol my ian tag. not every language has an actual set tense for this idea. SEMANTIC SATIATION is the phenomenon where repetition causes one to forget the meaning of a word or phrase. SZALÁMITAKTIKA is not a linguistic concept, but instead referred to in the movie but never said. it literally means “salami tactics” in hungarian, and is the idea of beating your opponent slice by slice before they even realize it.

i think those are all my fun ones okay thank u, have a good night.