A brilliant series of minimalist typographic tributes to scientists and their discoveries. I especially like the Copernicus one :)
Artwork by Kapil Ghagat (on Tumblr at bhagatkapil)
The Einstein one is particularly clever. :)
these are awesome! As in brilliant!
(via t-saurus-rex)
Hey guys! The Yale Linguistic Department is doing research on different accents/dialects in North American English. There are differences in the way people speak due to geography, age, ethnicity, and many other factors. We are trying to get an accurate sample of these differences. Anyone is welcome to take this survey!
Especially minorities! Most of the people who take the survey have been white. Having ethnic diversity when it comes to surveys this widespread is very important. So if you could take this survey it would be greatly appreciated!
Signal boost for native English speakers from the United States and Canada. It’s quite easy to complete, so please help this Linguistics Department out!
(via paradife-loft)
Last Friday I was watching Graham Norton and one of his guests, Miriam Margoyles, was commenting on the use of ‘like’ in English and ‘correcting’ Will.i.am and Adam Lambert – it was quite funny because all of them became so hyper-aware of ‘like’ that you could almost see the cogs going round when they were thinking of what to say, but they did tire of it after a while…even Miriam.
When Will.i.am picked up on her own use of ‘like’, she replied “yes, but I’m using ‘like’ as a verb.” It might be a bit too optimistic to hope that one day there will be a celebrity linguist who could then reply “yes, but I’m using ‘like’ as a quotative particle”, but I wish sometimes that people would pay just a little more attention to the language they’re criticising. The use of ‘I was like “x”…’ in English is not random and does not stem from young people’s inability to recognise ‘like’ as a verb or whatever – it’s a construction with particular functions that happens to have gained a lot of currency*.
At one point Miriam Margoyles said something along the lines of: I’m all for people expressing who they are but people have to learn how to express what they mean.
I was, like, “what?!” – the use of ‘like’ in these instances is actually very effective at expressing what people mean, it’s just different to the way Standard English does things. ‘Like’ can function as a quotative particle, i.e. it signals that what follows is a quote or, even more specifically in English, is an impersonation (either vocal or gestural). It can also function to slightly separate the subject from the literal interpretation of what follows, e.g. “it was, like, the funniest film ever!”, which can allow the speaker to exaggerate or approximate something without being taken at their exact word. And there are many more uses of ‘like’ in non-Standard English as well.
If only more people were, like, like to like ‘like’, like.
(*Incidentally, if an Old English speaker were around today they would probably think Modern English speakers strange for using ‘dogs like cats’ to mean that dogs are the ones who like cats rather than cats being the ones liking dogs – search Old English ‘lician’ or compare the German ‘gefallen’ if you’re interested).
(via paradife-loft)
Maps, with every name translated, back through the local tongue, into English.
Suddenly both poetic and prosaic, at once.
I don’t think you understand how much I need this.
If nothing else, that is some fanfuckingtastic placename inspiration for fantasy writers.
This is everything I love about things.
Click on the link; they’ve got ones for other countries as well. I seem to be a person of the South Wind lands. (Which makes all kinds of sense, unpleasantly, if you’ve ever been there in August.)
So very, very awesome! 8D
Apparently I live in the Land at the Little Big Hills, near Heraldwolf’s Stone.
The place where my family is from is called “Cape Reversal”
(Source: justamus)
Cisgendered. Aromantic. Asensual. Demiplatonic.
None of these are real words. The dictionary says so. Stop using them in your profiles. Stop making up new fucking social justice terms every other week. Stop stop stop stop stOP SOPT
lol those…
THAT’S NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS
Like was stated previously — words get in dictionaries because people made them up, and then they spread, and then they became common parlance.
Have you even looked at the OED lately? It has OMG and LOL in it.
BECAUSE PEOPLE USE THEM IN CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH.
I despise people who think that they can police language, and the inventiveness of the human when it comes to language. (I’m not even touching all the other things that are wrong with that post.)
*wrath*
AND, do you know how many technical words in all sorts of fields aren’t in the dictionary? Does this mean they aren’t “real” words? Whatever the fuck that phrase means. I hate that phrase.
My dictionary refuses to recognize things like “morphosyntax” or “schwar”. My papers are always full of little red tick marks!
(on an entirely unrelated note, tumblr, stop cutting off posts I want to reblog and making it stupid difficult to add quoted people on it.)
(Source: pizzaforpresident)
Unknown language found stamped in ancient clay tablet
In deciphering the tablet seen above, John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge found that many of the names on the list are not from any currently known ancient language. “One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian,” he says, “but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language.”
» via New Scientist
(via queereyes-queerminds)
Freue.
What does it mean?
Google translate says “am,” as in first-person “to be”
Is this true?
Could it maybe mean “rejoice” in certain contexts?
….So I’m fairly certain (?) that it’s a conjugation of freuen, which means to be glad/happy or pleased. Fairly certain.
Better German speakers, go.
A) This is perfect, and I am going to implement the term for tumblr crushes from now on, and B) Could Donald Glover possibly get any more perfect?
(Source: motherflippin-rhymenoceros)
I was in a class today of undergraduate students. They did an exercise where they listened to a recording of two voices (from this project) reading the same statement. The professor then asked the students to answer a series of questions about the speakers, based completely on their accents.
The chart above contains their answers.
Take a look at the guessed occupation and social class for either speaker. They assume the young Chinese woman is a student, but the guess about the slightly older Latino man’s occupation? A factory worker from Mexico.
Look, when descriptivists talk about language variation, this is the place they’re coming from. To this group of middle-class, white, educated students in a classroom, just the sound of someone’s voice suggests all these harmful social stigmas.
When we try to stop people from making judgments about others’ language use, this is why. This man could very well have been a factory worker, and he might have been from Mexico (although a student well-versed in Latino dialects said she was almost positive he wasn’t from Central America).
The point is—the assumption was made based on his voice alone that he was a lower-class factory worker. Assumptions like this are made every day about someone’s language use. And that’s why we fight for language equality. It’s not about saying nonstandard forms are better, it’s about saying they’re just as valid.
(via tanglewoodtree)
A Lovecraftian dairy delight now available in strawberry and madness. Brought to you by ActivIAIAIA.
(via jollityfarm)
The Enochian alphabet, scanned from Paul Lunde’s The Secret of Codes. It is the basis for a language developed by John Dee and his seer Edward Kelley. They believed Enochian was given to them by angels, and could be used to communicate with angels and spirits alike.
(Source: misslampface, via stigmataparty)
In relation to the poetry posts, there is this Icelandic word skúffuskáld, which means someone who’s secretly a poet. It literally means “drawer poet”, someone who writes poetry but chugs it all into his desk drawer instead of showing it to people.
Oh look this is me, except I post poems to thousands of strangers on the internet but don’t tell anyone I know in real life that I write at all.
(via topographe)
