A visualization of the translation of Japanese, and part of why it is so difficult for English speakers. It looks like this came from a Reddit post, but I came across it somewhere completely else so I'm not sure on the origins.
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Tonight's random learning, "Get the hell out of Dodge" is a quote which was popularized on the old Western show 'Gunsmoke.' I always wondered where it came from.
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"Denali versus McKinley: a brief history of the debate over a mountain’s name"
This article highlighted something I'd never had pointed out before: that Denali had multiple names from different indigenous people.
At 20,310 feet tall, Denali is visible for hundreds of miles around. For thousands of years, it has been called not just Denali but a variety of names by Alaska Native people living around the Alaska Range, according to language experts.
Athabascans to the north and west of the range referred to "the high one" with varying names, including Deenalee in the Koyukon language, Denaze in Upper Kuskokwim and Denadhe in Tanana, wrote University of Alaska linguist and professor emeritus James Kari in "Shem Pete's Alaska," a guide to Dena'ina place names.
Groups living to the south of the Alaska Range identified it as "the big mountain," or Dghelay Ka'a in Upper Inlet Dena'ina, Dghili Ka'a in Lower Inlet Dena'ina and Dghelaay Ce'e in Ahtna, Kari wrote.
The name "Denali" is derived from the Koyukon name — which doesn't actually mean "the great one," as widely believed, Kari wrote. Instead, the word represents something nearer to "high" or "tall."
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Ballot etymology
Courtesy of Merriam Webster on social media:
During the Renaissance, people in Venice would vote by dropping little balls into an urn.
The Italian word for “little ball” is ‘ballotta.’
Now any kind of secret voting, by ball, piece of paper, or voting machine, is called a ‘ballot.’*
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"Character Amnesia in China"
During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word 'sneeze'. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the 'Harvard of China'. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word 'sneeze'? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as 'character amnesia'. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?
There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life (Wikipedia 2024a). Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem (Wang et al. 2020; Langsford et al. 2024), but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.
The answer is complicated, but it has to do with the feeble 'phoneticity' of Chinese characters, as opposed to other scripts that were specially devised to convey the sounds of a language. In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a 'virtuous circle' in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.
The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
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Some things never change
Back in 2007, when I started ManaNation's website; one of the big subjects of comment spam that the site would regularly get was for house deck/porch construction. The reason for this was simple, the homonym use of 'deck' for Magic: The Gathering (#wotcstaff) and for the home construction project of a 'deck.'
Here it is 17 years later and last night I noticed that X was serving me deck railing ads:
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Diving in on rhyming (meant for rapping)
A fantastic look at rhyming and things like the phonetic alphabet.
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A deep look at North American dialects
A man's hobby has led to this amazing resource that delves into the regions of English around North America, complete with audio samples which exemplify regional dialects.
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Polenta came from Old English
This delightful blog publishes an Old English word everyday. I don't know why, but I find it fascinating. Most days it is mundane or weird or antiquated. But to see today that 'polenta' was used in Old English is fascinating. I had assumed that word was from Italian or Spanish or some other language which English adopted.
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Writing scripts descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Found this nifty infographic which looks at languages which descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, including the language you're reading this blog in! (Presumably. I suppose there is a non-zero, though very low, possibility of someone coming to my blog and translating it into a non-indoeuropean language.)
The linked post delves into the background of the graphic and also includes several interesting tidbits about the different kind of writing systems - from "true alphabets" such as the Latin alphabet, to alphasyllabary scripts, to logograms and more.
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Hand Talk - A look at the sign languages of the First Nations
Found via kottke.org, thanks Jason!
I love learning about this, for example - the Plains Indian Sign Language condenses What, When, Where, Why, and How, into just the gesture for 'Question.' Absolutely fascinating to see!
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Gezellig
This week's Ted Lasso episode has brought this word to my attention, and this page delves into it wonderfully. The page cites Wikipedia with:
"A perfect example of untranslatability is seen in the Dutch language through the word gezellig, which does not have an English equivalent. Literally, it means cozy, quaint, or nice, but can also connote time spent with loved ones, seeing a friend after a long absence, or general togetherness."
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Side project on my to do list: A website where you enter a word or short phrase and it returns every translation for it possible.
Sometimes I just want to see a word or phrase around the world and not have a specific country or language in mind.
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Headline I saw: "Can AI Perfect the IPA?"
My brain: "How is AI going to improve on the international phonetic alphabet? Very excited to learn!"
Reality: "Oh... it's about beer."
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How different colors got their name
Fascinating. Found this on Reddit and had to snag it for the blog.
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Linguistics 101 from Yale
I am unreasonably excited to delve into this. I was in the shower and I had the thought about wanting to delve back into linguistics. I took one linguistic course in college and wished I had been able to take more.
This desire is partially driven by me having a new conlang project that I want to start playing with. We'll see where it goes, but I definitely feel rusty about linguistics related topics beyond the most base level material.
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You read the story online every so often about how the ancient Greek's couldn't see blue. And I always shook my head at it as some silly thing and nuance of linguistics, but tonight my brain just clicked on it and it made sense to me.
English has plenty of words for colors: Yellow, Blue, Green, Brown, Red, Black, Orange and Violet. (The colors in an 8-pack of crayons.)
And yet there are still more colors: black, blue, blue green, blue violet, brown, carnation pink, green, orange, red, red orange, red violet, violet (purple), white, yellow, yellow green, yellow orange. (Yup, 16-pack.)
Did these 8 new colors not exist previously? No, they just weren't named. We've identified arbitrary locations in a color wheel and assigned words to them. I guarantee other cultures and other people have identified colors and shades which English has no word for aside from #A82065 (a hex code I just made up on the spot and which turns out to be a lovely pink shade.)
So, the Greeks somehow decided to avoid giving blue its own name, but instead folded it into greens - my brain clicked on it tonight and I get it.
Well... so I decided to know more, and so I googled it and found this blog entry (take it with a grain of salt).
More specifically: yes, you can say 'blue' in ancient Greek. More precisely, Greek has words for the area of the colour palette that English calls 'blue'. But English 'blue' covers a huge region of the palette. Greek splits it into multiple smaller regions: glaukos for lighter, non-vivid shades; kyaneos for darker non-vivid shades ranging to black; porphyreos for vivid shades ranging from blue to violet to ruby, but also for less vivid shades in the middle of that range (light magenta, pink); lampros for metallic-silvery-azure. Yes, ancient sources do mention sky colour: it's glaukos or lampros. It's just that Homer doesn't mention the sky's colour (and why would he).
Colors and language. It's complicated.
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Explaining Japanese to Programmers
An interesting blog post which compares the grammar of Japanese to programming. Not revolutionary but still an interesting way to think about the language.
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The apostrophe in Hawai'i is important
It is called the ‘okina, and it is a consonant in Hawaiian. It represents a glottal stop.
Fascinating to learn!
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Boffo
Watching Christmas movies with Katie and we get around to watching White Christmas, which I don't believe I've ever watched before. I was captured by one of the fake headlines it shows in the movie, were Variety refers to the lead duo as "Going Boffo."
So I looked it up:adjective adjective: boffo
(of a theatrical production or movie, or a review of one) very successful or wholeheartedly commendatory.
(of a laugh) deep and unrestrained.
But when I go deeper, Wikipedia I discovered a rare direct contradiction within an entry:
Boffo, an informal term meaning very good, originated with the Hollywood trade magazine Variety.
It's a portmanteau of "(B)ox (Off)ice" with the final "o" appended for effect, and while some may claim its origins were with the trade journal "Variety", it's more likely it came from the trade journal of the motion-picture theater business that called itself "Box Office".
I couldn't find a hard source and honestly don't care to delve into it. I did, however, submit a change cutting the problematic half of the first sentence to allow the second sentence to stand.
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Thinking about making a Mastodon instance specifically for using Tolkien languages. No other languages permitted, except if with Tolkien langs (ie translating) Because my biggest issue in learning any language is having a continuing place to use it and engage with it.
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TIL that a Petard is a small bomb, and that you get hoisted and NOT foisted in the saying
"Hoist with his own petard" is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown ("hoist") off the ground by his own bomb (a "petard" is a small explosive device), and indicates an ironic reversal, or poetic justice.
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