Linguistics - Blog Posts
Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books that I try to update regularly
What is a ‘wug’?
If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?
The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:
“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules—for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:
This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.
Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.
The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:
This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.
This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.
(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)
Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings—to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms—to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words—implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.
The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”
Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:
Sources:
Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic
Polyglot Punishment
Did you hear about the french chef who committed suicide? He simply lost the huile d’olive.
This is my mother fr! For example, if I say the American version of an English word, or if I ‘ma però’, or if I mix up any language/sentence structures of any of the languages she knows, she will IMMEDIATELY correct me and point out why I was wrong 🥲. Like sorry Im dyslexic while you have multiple language degrees lol.
Linguists are like vampires but instead of drinking your blood they harass you about a weird irregularity in your speech that no one else would have noticed.
Give me a word and I'll translate it to one of the oldest languages - Hebrew!
Any word!!!!!!! ヽ(*ﾟｰﾟ*)ﾉ
Stay yourself, stay curious
Merhabalar ✋🏻
{Ladin}
Lingo by Gaston Dorren
so true and no less valid the other way around. most likely, it was noam chomsky who introduced me, a social scientist, to linguistics.
DM Me For Your Digital Painiting🎨✨
“A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age. Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.”
Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1325668490431246336 (which include more “memeorite glyphs”
In french to text someone dw (don't worry) we write tkt which is short for "t'inquiètes".
First thing to note is that as you can see there is no k in "t'inquiètes" but we still write tkt instead of tqt
Second thing to note is that "t'inquiètes" is short for "t'inquiètes pas" , literally "worry not". B u t w e d r o p t h e "pas" w h i c h m e a n s "not"
So, to say "don't worry" we say "worry yourself"
I love it
At age 8 i liked history and linguistics
At age 21 i like rocks and batman
At age 8 i learned some simplified hieroglyph alphabet i found in a book
At age 21 my mom got angry at me when we were on a walk bc i kept looking at every freaking pebbles
i need to know every language immediately
Words to describe blood without saying crimson or blood?
Blood—the fluid that circulates in the heart, arteries, capillaries, and veins of a vertebrate animal carrying nourishment and oxygen to and bringing away waste products from all parts of the body
Arterial - relating to or being the bright red blood present in most arteries that has been oxygenated in lungs or gills
Body fluid - a fluid or fluid secretion (such as blood, lymph, saliva, semen, or urine) of the body
Carmine - a vivid red
Cerise - a moderate red
Claret - a dark purplish red
Clot - a coagulated mass produced by clotting of blood
Cruor - obsolete: the clotted portion of coagulated blood
Ensanguine - to make bloody; crimson
Geranium - a vivid or strong red
Gore - blood, especially: clotted blood
Hematic - of, relating to, or containing blood
Hematoid - resembling blood
Hemoglobin - an iron-containing respiratory pigment of vertebrate red blood cells that consists of a globin composed of four subunits each of which is linked to a heme molecule, that functions in oxygen transport to the tissues after conversion to oxygenated form in the gills or lungs, and that assists in carbon dioxide transport back to the gills or lungs after surrender of its oxygen
Hemoid - resembling blood
Ichor - a thin watery or blood-tinged discharge
Incarnadine - bloodred
Juices - the natural fluids of an animal body
Maroon - a dark red
Plasma - the fluid part of blood, lymph, or milk as distinguished from suspended material
Puce - a dark red
Ruddle - red ocher (i.e., a red earthy hematite used as a pigment)
Russet - a reddish brown
Sanguine - bloodred; consisting of or relating to blood
Scarlet - any of various bright reds
Vermilion - any of various red pigments
More: Word Lists ⚜ Blood ⚜ Exsanguination ⚜ On Blood
i hate when people in movies/tv are reading ancient languages and they translate everything really smoothly and poetically, as if when people who study ancient languages aren’t consulting three different commentaries and sobbing profusely when we read
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
you know how mathematicians have the journal of recreational mathematics, right? where they publish stuff like, ‘oh i found this cool property of this one seemingly boring number’, or, ‘this is literally nonsense but it sounds ~scientific~’ and it’s all great fun to read?
well
behold, the journal of recreational linguistics
with such delightful papers as ‘tennis puns’, ‘animals in different languages’, and ‘gifts from a homonymous benefactor’
excuse me while i go read all 50 volumes in one sitting
Pro Tip: The Way You End a Sentence Matters
Here is a quick and dirty writing tip that will strengthen your writing.
In English, the word at the end of a sentence carries more weight or emphasis than the rest of the sentence. You can use that to your advantage in modifying tone.
Consider:
In the end, what you said didn't matter.
It didn't matter what you said in the end.
In the end, it didn't matter what you said.
Do you pick up the subtle differences in meaning between these three sentences?
The first one feels a little angry, doesn't it? And the third one feels a little softer? There's a gulf of meaning between "what you said didn't matter" (it's not important!) and "it didn't matter what you said" (the end result would've never changed).
Let's try it again:
When her mother died, she couldn't even cry.
She couldn't even cry when her mother died.
That first example seems to kind of side with her, right? Whereas the second example seems to hold a little bit of judgment or accusation? The first phrase kind of seems to suggest that she was so sad she couldn't cry, whereas the second kind of seems to suggest that she's not sad and that's the problem.
The effect is super subtle and very hard to put into words, but you'll feel it when you're reading something. Changing up the order of your sentences to shift the focus can have a huge effect on tone even when the exact same words are used.
In linguistics, this is referred to as "end focus," and it's a nightmare for ESL students because it's so subtle and hard to explain. But a lot goes into it, and it's a tool worth keeping in your pocket if you're a creative writer or someone otherwise trying to create a specific effect with your words :)
horsethoughtbarn 5 name
if horses werent called horses what do you think they should be called
A loanword is a word taken from another language, such as ‘angst’ or ‘tsunami’ or ‘calque’. A calque is a literal translation of a word from another language, such as rhinestone (from French caillou du Rhine) or blueblood (from Spanish sangre azul) or loanword (from German lehnwort).
fellow writers, how do you properly research translations / language info? lately i’ve been googling, not just using google translate, but different sources give me different translations. how do you go about translating? help!