oh my god language nerd i am learning turkish and it feels like everything is backwards!!!! AM I CRAZY WHYYYYYYYYYYY??? -alimi *** Dear Alimi, You are not crazy, o emphatic person. You are totally correct. Don’t flip, it’ll be okay. Sentences are made of words. Mind-blowing, I know. But the words don’t come in any […]
The sentence which I consider le dernier cri in disjunctive pronouns – with which I, after three years of a Jesuit high school, made an enemy of my public school English teacher: “I have a new puppy; I was given him for Christmas.” I contended that the “I” was an indirect object, and that hence ‘I’ […]
Dear Language Nerd, Today, while making dinner, the topic was raised that the word for cheese in German and Spanish both sound very similar; which is an odd thing for a germanic language and a latin language to share in common. What I found even more odd is that english; which is more or less […]
Last post I addressed a question about language complexity, which you can get to here. Today, I’m going straight-up tangent and answering a second, implied question. Here’s the relevant bit: “people from the south (in america) seem to speak slower than people from the north, even though in theory we all speak the same language.” […]
so i read somewhere on the internet that all languages are spoken at the same rate. meaning that even if a language has lots of extra words or really long words, people tend to say them faster so that their sentences take about the same length of time to say as a language with short […]
So that Adele song, ‘Rumor Has It’, has been stuck in my head and has me wondering about the line, ‘she is half your age’, because Adele was 21 when she sang that….so how old was this dude? Because the only way he could have a girlfriend half his age and it not be illegal […]
How many languages do you need to speak to be a linguist? -Gamerro *** Dear Gamerro, At minimum? One. Linguistics is a wide-open field – there are a whole helluva lot of ways to study language, and not all of them require polyglottery. A linguist who works as an expert witness in legal proceedings, for […]
I’m tired of the he/she gender debate. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a pronoun that means “she OR he”? Wouldn’t that be easier? –GenderEqualist *** Dear GE, Well, people have. But they don’t tend to stick. We’ve had dozens of contenders for “he or she” pronoun in English, from “ne” to ”thon” to “po” […]
Saluton, Language Nerd! If you don’t recognize the greeting, you obviously don’t know Esperanto. Most other folks don’t either; it just didn’t seem to catch on. But I’m wondering: has there ever been a completely contrived language that hit the big time and became the common tongue in some corner of the world? -Robbie *** […]
Dear Language Nerd, What’s the difference between “begging the question” and “raising the question”? I was with a colleague yesterday and he was going on about how furious he was that people use the two interchangeably. I didn’t know why it mattered so I just nodded and grimaced at appropriate times. Please help, I am […]