Ge’ez Who?
The Language Nerd is doing a series on Ethiopian linguistics – intro here, then parts one, two, and three. So throughout this little Ethiopian lingventure I’ve been mentioning Ge’ez and the Fidel. Ge’ez down to here, Ge’ez out to there, Ge’ez to where it stops by itself. It’s about damn time that I gave it […]
To Use a Language
This is the third post in the Language Nerd’s series on Ethiopian linguistics. Follow the links for the intro, part one, and part two. Today’s post comes mainly from an interview with Dr. Moges Yigezu and from his book Language Ideologies and Challenges of Multilingual Education in Ethiopia: The Case of Harari Region. As I […]
Open Your Ears (And Write It All Down)
This is the second article in the Language Nerd’s series on linguistics in Ethiopia. Intro here, part one here. So you’re a linguist, and you’ve decided to document a language. Maybe it’s a big language, with millions of speakers; maybe you’ve been invited to a tiny community where the speakers number in the dozens. Maybe […]
The Endangered Zone
The Language Nerd is in Ethiopia! This is the first in a series on Ethiopian linguistics. The introduction is here. These posts are not in the usual q-and-a style, because I don’t exactly have a backlog of Ethiopian linguistics questions. But by gum, if you’ve got an Ethiopian linguistics question, then send it in, double-time! […]
Welcome to Ethiopia
You’re in Ethiopia? WTF? Why? What’s going on? –pretty much everyone I know *** Dear Everyone, People, Ethiopia is Language Nerd Heaven. The real question is why I didn’t get over here sooner. There are eighty-odd languages in Ethiopia. Some say 82, some say 85, some say more. Part of the reason it’s difficult to […]
S/he Said
Dear Language Nerd, I see “Latin@” all the time on tumblr (referring to people from South America/Central America/Mexico). What’s the deal with the “at” sign? -Gringo (Gring@?) *** Dear G, Grammatical gender and a healthy dose of language politics. Let’s dig in. We have a handful of nouns in English that are connected to a […]
The Accents They Carried
I have an unpleasant acquaintance, an American learning Chinese. He was mocking another student of Chinese, a woman with a Southern accent, saying the accent carried over into her (advanced) Chinese, “Neeeee haa-yoh,” and so on. I don’t know her, and I don’t know Chinese, but this really burns me up. So my question for […]
TLN Interviews: Bianca Clarke
For once, the Language Nerd is asking the questions, not answering them! I’m joined by Bianca Clarke, a hip-hop artist from Mobile, Alabama, and the winner of both Hottest Female Mixtape and Hottest Breakout Artist at the 2015 Alabama Music Awards. She sat down with me to talk about language, hip-hop, and the language of […]
How Ya Like My Essay on Criticism Now?
Dear Language Nerd, When I write sweet lyrics for phat beats, I write in patterns. Specifically, the rhyming word at the end of my lines is based on basic 4/4 rhythm. Here is how I write them, where every letter is a matching rhyme word: A A A A (cat, hat, stat, plat (ypuss)) A […]
The Masters of Your Master’s
Dear Language Nerd, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking tell me that robots are going to kill me and take my job – and now they’re grading the GRE?! NOOOOO! Bill Riales *** Dear Bill, I hate to tell you this, but not only is a robot involved in GRE grades, it’s exactly the kind of […]