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justlingthings:

fun fact: “coccodrillo” is Italian for “crocodile”. The spanish word is essentially the same, but the “ll” is pronounced as a /j/ (English ‘y’ sound) instead of a /l/.

But the Spanish word for crocodile is “cocodrilo” not coccodrillo, but it is pronounced practically the same.

(xkcd)

linguisticsyall:

No motherfucker if I can’t tell the difference between written German and written Russian there’s no fucking help for me.

allthingslinguistic:

science-of-noise:

Damn Amerindian languages, you scary!

xɬp’χʷɬtɬpɬɬskʷc’ - who needs vowels?

Another excellent illustration from SpecGram.

I’m aware of two unrelated languages that allow vowelless words: Nuxálk (formerly known as Bella Coola), spoken in British Columbia, and Tashlhiyt Berber, spoken in Morocco. There’s a lot of phonological ink used in effort to make them fit with theories of syllable structure.

oranc:

Brahms: Violin Sonata No.2 op.100 - II. Andante tranquillo - Vivace - Andante - Vivace di piu - Andante - Vivace (05:56)

comoespinademaguey:

6 ejemplos para dar la hora en náhuatl

Antes de la hora decimos ticateh ipan (literalmente ‘estamos en’), luego el número y podemos terminar con yohuatzinca (madrugada), teotlahca (tarde), yohualtica (noche), o simplemente dejarlo así y que se entienda por contexto.

Medianoche se arma con yohualli, noche y nepantla, en medio de. Mediodía se arma con tonalli, día y nepantla, en medio de.

Bibliografía
Ejemplos tomados de: Matinahuatlahtolzalocan, aprendamos el idioma náhuatl de Isidoro Meza Patiño, editado por la SEDEREC y el GDF.

linguisticsyall:

The real question tho.

yourfriendlyscop:

Powerpoint finished! You can reblog it now.

LIST OF RESOURCES I use

• www.bosworthtoller.com (use the ADVANCED search feature, the regular search feature sucks)
• http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_phonology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Orthography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar
• www.etymonline.com
• www.wiktionary.com

(Source: filthypolak)

estifi:

languageismybooze:

ferrisie:

allthingslinguistic:

Morphological Typology (illustrations from SpecGram)

Descriptions adapted from The Lingua File: 

Analytic languages: also known as isolating languages because they’re composed of isolated, or free, morphemes. Free morphemes can be words on their own, such as cat or happy. Languages that are purely analytic in structure don’t use any prefixes or suffixes, ever. However, it’s rare to find a language that is purely analytic or synthetic since most languages have characteristics of both. Morphological typology is like a spectrum in which languages fit in somewhere from analytic to polysynthetic (a subtype of synthetic languages we’ll get to in a moment).

Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese are good examples of analytic languages. […] English, on the other hand, is one of the most analytic Indo-European languages, but is still usually classified as a synthetic language. […]

Types of synthetic language (i.e. languages that have prefixes/suffixes): 

Agglutinating Languages:With these languages, morphemes within words are usually clearly recognizable in a way that makes it easy to tell where the morpheme boundaries are. Their affixes usually only have a single meaning. Turkish,Korean, Hungarian, Japanese, and Finnish are all in this group.

Fusional Languages: Similar to agglutinating languages, except that the morpheme boundaries are much more difficult to discern. Affixes are often fused with the stems, and can have multiple meanings. A prime example of a fusional language is Spanish, especially when it comes to verbs. In the wordhablo ”I speak”, the -o morpheme tells us that we’re dealing with a subject that is singular, first person, and in the present tense. It’s difficult to find a morpheme that means “speak”, however, since habl- is not a morpheme. Fusional languages can be tricky!

Polysynthetic Languages: These languages are undoubtedly some of the most difficult to learn. They often have verbs that can express the entirety of a typical sentence in English, which they do by incorporating nouns into verbs forms. For example, the Sora language of India has one word that means “I will catch a tiger”. Many Native American languages are polysynthetic.

This FASCINATES me.

My question: is Ubykh written in IPA here, or is that actually how it’s written, or…?

After research: Wikipedia says that it is extinct, as of 1992. The Wikipedia page only has what I consider to be IPA. Maybe they wrote in IPA. Maybe they didn’t have a script? It was spoken in very southwestern Russia, near Georgia. Maybe they wrote in Cyrillic? Maybe in the Georgian Alphabet? It’s in the Northwest Caucasian Family…I’ve never heard of any of these languages, so I don’t know anything about them:

There was never an official script, and the only people who wrote it down were linguists. Generally it’s a mix of the IPA, as linguistic researchers do, and the Latin alphabet. One guy developed Latin and Cyrillic variations to write the language.