Silly Linguistics

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

Hi @irishlanguage.bsky.social, I run a website all about languages and linguistics and I really enjoyed your article. Are you interested in letting us publish your article on our website? You can also reach us at steve@sillylinguistics.com

Thanks!

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

What language is this?

Hmm. I can't think of any

Oh, interesting. It's funny how languages borrow words but also use the differently

Its like the breathy "wh" (w with a breath) you hear in some older speakers in words like what and where

No worries :) I try to have a broad range of content for linguists, linguistically minded but also people who just like words

This is just for the comic and the website. For more general language memes I have bsky.app/profile/stev...

German never went through this so the words are more German like Anwalt for lawyer, Beklagte for defendant and Ankläger for prosecutor. I wonder what these words would be in English if 1066 had never happened

Well, French was the language of the upper class and of government for hundreds of years. English would eventually re-emerge as a language of government but by that point people were so used to using the French terms for government things that it just stuck

"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

Literally translated it is "Beef labeling surveillance assignment transfer law" or "Law dealing with the supervision of the labeling of beef". Famous only because of how long it is. The word has no use outside of law or pages that talk about languages like this one