Issue #88 now available at sillylinguistics.com Silly Linguistics is a magazine for language lovers

How the French, Religion, and the Bubonic Plague Forced me to Use the Word Y'all By Brandy Cross The Death of a Language By Patricia Syner And many more interesting articles about language and linguistics available in the Silly Linguistics magazine sillyli.ng/Hk0jCk

English has borrowed a lot of words from Persian

Slang changes all the time. "humbug" used to be quite offensive, on par with calling something "bullshit" or "for f*ck sake"

Reason 10393 why English spelling is weird

The origin of the word "true" in a few languages. Swedish "sann" is related to "sooth" in English "soothsayer"

The story behind names of places and countries is often very interesting

Modern English is a tranwreck between the Saxon language (and the language of the Jutes, and the Angles), the Normans and Old Norse (the language of the Vikings)

English has borrowed a lot of words from Old Norse, including the word for sky

French gets a lot of vocabulary from the Franks (even their name) who were a Germanic tribe and its the Romance language with the most Germanic derived vocabulary

Spanish and Catalan are both Romance languages and therefore share a lot of vocabulary but they are not always the same

"Vielleicht kan ich schreiben Deutsch mit nur Englisch Wörter" or "Maybe I can write German with only English words"

In English most verbs form their past tense with -ed, such as land, landed. But others form their past tense by changing the vowel such as sit, sat. It would be cooler if more verbs did that

Knowing long, complicated and rarely used word is not the same as knowing a language. Also, in German orthography nouns in a compound are just written together without spaces. In English we do use spaces but a compound noun would have the same meaning as the corresponding German noun with spaces

Who here learns in the moment German? I think that German very fun is

English is what is called stress timed which means that the timing of the words depends on the stress on those words. Japanese words are combinations of only about 100 possible syllables and they all are given equal timing

It's so funny learning another language. It reframes everything. You know you know your own language so when you can't understand something you know they had to be mumbling. But if they mumble in another language you think maybe you are just bad at the language. Anyone else had this happen?

Issue #80 is now available. Learn about the language of Moksha of the Uralic family and read a discussion of linguistic illusions. Sometimes language is not all it appears. This and more in the next issue of Silly Linguistics sillyli.ng/Ktcqun

Russian "как" comes from PIE *kʷós (“who”) but Afrikaans "kak" is probably just an onomatopoeia or imitative

The Swedish word for a beer is "öl". And the word for oil is "olja". I can easily see these getting confused

Latin is in a weird place. No longer the native language of a group of people, yet still learned. Some people are even near fluent in it. But so are some speakers of Klingon. If someone grew up speaking Klingon, would it be their native language?

English has the curious distinction of being the only Indo European language in Europe with grammatical gender (like Spanish el/la, German der/die/das and Italian il/la

Sweden, Norway and Denmark have been culturally linked since time immemorial. Also being so close physically meant that there was a lot of contact between them and they shared language. These languages are so close that one can some times look as a mere badly spelled version of the other

Bilinguals are so proficient in both languages that they often don't even realise that they have switched languages. Have you ever seen this in your day to day interactions?

Most of the languages of Europe except languages like Basque, Finnish and Turkish (amongst a few others) are part of the Indo European family of languages. Some languages change a lot and some change much less. Lithuanian is one of the most conservative (in linguistic terms) of the IE languages

The word for turkey has so many different names in different languages. In French is it "dinde" (de indie - from india) and Turkish it is "hindi" which just happens to coincide with the name of a language in English

The word "accent" is thrown around a lot. To some it means "the way someone speaks" and to others it means "speaking in a nonstandard way"

"What do you do for work?" "I am a writer" The oldest version of English that we have available to us is called Old English (aka Anglo Saxon). Some of it is quite understanable (like "That was a god cyning" = "That was a good king) but other times is very opaque. I find language change fascinating

Turkish has both ı and i. These sounds in IPA are /ɯː/ and /iː/. Because they are distinct sounds, the capitals also need to be distinguished. The capital of ı is I like our capital I but the capital of i is İ which is a capital I with a dot. How cool is that?

In Swedish compounds nouns are written together so "gods expedition" is written as "godsexpeditions". "gods" in Swedish is pronounced like the English word "goods" and has nothing to do with religion

Being a language fan, whenever you hear wonderful music in another language you end up wanting to learn that language

When you are reading something in Swedish and then someone comes to talk to you and your brain is still in Swedish mode so your respond in Swedish. Oh no! Has this ever happened to you?

When I first started learning languages the 4 cases of German seemed quite daunting, but now they seem like child's play compared to some language that have 9 or more cases. What languages have you been learning with a lot of cases?

Any Basque lovers out there?

It's always funny listening to a podcast or discussion in another language and randomly some English comes in

Can you ever resist? #language #linguistics

Issue #78 is now available at our website sillyli.ng/OZbonl

The word "water" in multiple languages #language

All these words are related. They ultimately come from the Sanskrit word शर्करा (śárkarā) #language