wordplaywonderland

[wordplaywonderland]

[wordplaywonderland]

So like, does Gabe or one of the other Archangels get directly notified whenever Aziraphale does a miracle on Earth or…? 

[wordplaywonderland]

Holy crow, that is brilliant, totally brilliant. I'm in awe.

The opposite of “bonfire” is, presumably, “malice.”

[wordplaywonderland]

Jewish mood

[wordplaywonderland]

Cats probably wonder why soda cans/bottles yell “FUCK OFF” when they are first opened.

[wordplaywonderland]

So, apparently in colloquial Tahitian, there’s a rather interesting dissimilation.  Proto-Polynesian *t is reflected as /t/ in all contexts in careful speech.  However, in quick speech, tVt dissimilates to kVt.  This also includes across at least some word borders, so that the article te becomes ke before words starting with /k/, e.g., careful te ta’ata (person) becomes ke ta’ata but te mata (eye) never becomes *ke mata.  It also affects loan words, so that peretiteni (president, from French) becomes perekiteni in casual speech.

The Ni’ihau dialect of Hawaiian has a similar phenomenon.  Unlike Standard Hawaiian, it mostly preserves /t/, but also dissimilates /t/ to /k/ when another /t/ follows in the word (this k … t pattern also affects loan words, the English “cook”, borrowed into Standard Hawaiian as kuke is kute in Ni’ihauan).  However, unlike Tahitian, this also applies if there’s another consonant intervening.  For example, standard makahiki (year), representing an earlier *matahiti is makahiti in the Ni’ihauan dialect.  Blust suggests that the Ni’ihauan case is due to the /k/ pronunciation having prestige, since it was used in the standard dialect, and particularly used in Bible readings in religious services.  In the early 20th century, there was apparently free variation between /t/ and /k/, and he suggests that the dissimilation rule developed as a sort of “compromise” between preserving the distinctive /t/ of their dialect and adopting the prestige /k/

[wordplaywonderland]

please, just call me Craig, Mr List was my father

[wordplaywonderland]

The International Phonetic Alphabet consonants found in English, with keywords and relevant parts of the mouth highlighted and colour-coded. (Source.) 

[wordplaywonderland]

So I found this cool website for learning ancient languages

go wild

[wordplaywonderland]

i taught swim lessons and preschool, do y’all wanna hear the most ridiculous white kid names i’ve ever seen?

[wordplaywonderland]

Ancient catboys

Or, nyanderthals if you will,

[wordplaywonderland]

“Shit can be traced back to the Old English verb scitan (which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to Proto-Germanic skit (the Germans still say scheisse), and all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European word (c. 4000 BC) skhei, which meant to separate or divide, presumably on the basis that you separated yourself from your faeces. Shed (as in shed your skin) comes from the same root, and so does schism. An odd little aspect of this etymology is that when Proto-Indo-European arrived in the Italian peninsula they used skhei to mean separate or distinguish. If you could tell two things apart then you knew them, and so the Latin word for know became scire. From that you got the Latin word scientia, which meant knowledge, and from that we got the word science This means that science is, etymologically, shit. It also means that knowing your shit, etymologically, means that you’re good at physics and chemistry.”

— Mark Forsyth (The Inky Fool), The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (via wordsspentinvain)

[wordplaywonderland]

So, there’s a name Kling, which would be an anglicization of tlhIng which was originally proposed as the name of the Klingon homeworld.  Some sources suggest that Kling is the name of a region on the homeworld, while others suggest that it’s simply an alternate name for the homeworld.

Either way, however, given that the word for “Klingon” in Okrand’s Klingon is tlhIngan, and ngan means “to inhabit” or as a noun “inhabitant”, used in compounds such as tera’ngan “Terran”, it seems plausible to propose that tlhIngan originated as tlhIngngan, a compound of tlhIng + ngan.  The medial geminate /ŋː/ wouldv’e been simplified to a singleton after it was reanalyzed as a monomorphemic word.  This would be especially plausible given that, according to Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary, closed syllables are quite rare in word-medial position, while being very common word-finally.

So, if tlhIng is, indeed, the name of a region rather than the planet, this would suggest in turn that tlhIngan was not originally the name of the species, but rather, the name of one particular culture on Qo’noS, a nation which eventually unified the entire species.

This would fit in with descriptions such as the reference to the Battle of Tong Vey where a Klingon emperor leads the conquest of a city, suggesting an event that took place on Qo’noS, between different groups of what we’d call Klingons.  Presumably, then, during the time of this ancient battle, the Klingon Empire only covered a portion of the planet, and the name Klingon did not yet apply to the whole species.  The battle was, after all, described as a conquest, and not as the defeat of a rebellion or as a reconquest, implying that Tong Vey had formerly been an independent city, or part of another polity, but either way, not “Klingon”.

Of course, it’s also possible that the term “Klingon Emperor” is anachronistic in referring to that battle, and he would’ve called himself something different, with the title “Klingon Emperor” adopted after having unified the Klingon species.

[wordplaywonderland]

ye

[wordplaywonderland]

So you like chemistry puns...

[wordplaywonderland]

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York, August 10, 1926

[wordplaywonderland]

Madolche monsters are portmanteaus and puns on royal positions and sweet foods. Notable ones include:

Madolche Tiaramisu: Tiara + Tiramisu

Madolche Puddingcess: Princess + Pudding

Madolche Chouxvalier: Choux (à la crème) + Chevalier

Madolche Messengelato: Messenger + Gelato

Madolche Butlerusk: Butler + Rusk