Steve the vagabond
@stevevagabond
I love #language and #linguistics. Check out our magazine at sillylinguistics.com. Follow us at @sillylinguistics.com
English is Germanic and French is Romance. But English borrowed a ton of words from Romance (mostly French and Latin) and French borrowed a lot of Germanic (because it was founded by the Franks a Germanic tribe). Sometimes English has a Romance word but French has a Germanic word
Did you know there are links between the cute sausage dog and the word "technology"?
/r/ is a phonetic description of the R sound we find in languages like Spanish. It represents a trilled or rolled R French used to have this sound but in the course of the 1800s it transitioned to the R sound it has today (/ʁ/ in IPA). Sometimes things are much more recent than we realise
In linguistics, a "phoneme" is the smallest element of a word that makes a difference in meaning. "b" is the /b/ phoneme. But "sh" is a single sound in English and represents the /ʃ/ phoneme. Different languages have different sounds. Some languages have a lot of phonemes and some have far fewer
The next issue of the Silly Linguistics Magazine is out. Get it on Patreon sillyli.ng/YCL0Pb We explore the terminology of sailing, explore how English changed in the medieval era, and why you can't read in dreams
With the Odyssey movie now out, I thought I would explore some words that come from Greek names (like how odyssey comes from Odysseus)
While it's funny, in some ways it is also disappointing and frankly embarrassing. I used to be a programmer (actually have a programming degree) before I got into languages I love technology. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without it. But is this the best you can do?
As the Scientific Revolution proceeded, people were in need of technical terms to describe their discoveries. We mostly got them from Latin or Ancient Greek. Words like species and genus come from Latin and psyche, geology and paleontology from Ancient Greek
Thank you Google Assistant, very helpful I don't think computers are quite capable of taking over just yet 🤣
Almost all the Germanic languages use the word "ja" for "yes". The English word "yes" comes from Old English "gese" (where the "g" was pronounced like Modern English "y") where it meant "yes, it is". "se" in Old English is related to German "sind". So English was weird back then already
The word "draw" and "drag" are related. Do you have any questions about English (or other languages)? Feel free to drop them in the comments
Why not learn another language? Only have to add it to the 40 other ones I have tried 😁 What languages are you learning at the moment?
Interestingly, a lot of languages borrowed their word for "boat" from English. I wonder why that is. Is it because the English were always travelling around by boat? 🤔
English is spoken in South Africa (being a form British colony) but it has gathered some quirks over time
Issue #96 of the Silly Linguistics magazine is now available. We have articles from writers from all over the world. You can read the cover article about idioms in Mongolian, my article about the history of the English language or many other topics sillyli.ng/Jm8KXw
"debt" comes from French but ultimately from Latin debitum, and "doubt" too comes from French but also ultimately from Latin "dubitare". At some point English speakers who were fans of Latin wanted to put the "b" in to show its heritage but it was never pronounced in English
The English language took Germanic words and just changed all the meanings
What is your opinion on Duolingo and other language learning apps? Do you use them? Which ones have you used? Have you found them helpful?
I don't even use autocorrect. I would rather write "conprehend" than "cunpehrhend" or whatever nonsense autocorrect puts out