(Why We) Say “Cheese”!
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 […]
Shake a (Frog) Leg
Dear Biology Nerd, THIS VIDEO WHAT WHAAAAAAAAT -Amelia P. *** Dear Amelia, For those who can’t (or just didn’t) see the video, it’s somebody sprinkling salt on some frog legs, which jump around and enjoy a dance despite having no body to go with. I have a pretty simple biological theory on why this happens. […]
The Right Stuff
Hey Nerds, what all is in an ambulance? Jemmie *** Jemmie, I am an American paramedic, so my perspective is decidedly American. First, it’s useful to define an ambulance. If you are from a modern country, you probably have an image of a truck with a box on the back, with a siren and lots […]
That’s Old News
Hey Art Nerd, I was hanging out at a museum yesterday (yeah, I’m cool) and was wondering why it took so long for drawings of people to actually look like people. There were Egyptian casks, Greek sarcophagi, and Byzantine mosaics, all with flat people with weird eyes and strange poses. The Greek seems really weird, […]
Southern Drawlin
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.” […]
The Running of the Syllables
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 […]
She’s Half Your Age! (Or is She?)
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 […]
A Glut of Glots
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 […]
Shown Their Work
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” […]
DIY Languages
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 *** […]