The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.
you: me, an intellectual
me, an intellectual: I, an intellectual
hi where the fuck do you think that fragment is getting nominative case. listen to me. subjects of transitive verbs in nom-acc languages get nominative case by agreeing with a tense node. are you listening. fragments are accusative in english because that’s the default case when there’s no case-assigning node. meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard
you: The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.
kirby, a linguist:
meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard
Tag: linguistics
contrary to popular belief, someone who is fluent in their second language (L2) is unlikely to slip into their first language (L1) in these circumstances:
- if someone just said something to them in L2 (this a big unconscious cue, and you’d be really unlikely to respond in L1 right after that)
- when swearing in the middle of a sentence (e.g. “oh merde, i forgot my keys!”)
- during sex
- when speaking to someone they normally speak to in L2
it is slightly more common in these circumstances:
- swearing, as long it’s not part of a sentence (e.g. they might just mutter “merde” if they forgot their keys)
- if they’re surprised (especially if falling/tripping or experiencing sudden pain!)
- when speaking to someone they normally speak to in L1
- in their sleep or talking to themselves
- when very disoriented, such as when concussed or on certain drugs
that being said, it is very common for people to intentionally use their first language in front of people who don’t speak it for a variety of reasons (they might use a short expression they only know in L1, call their partner pet names, dirty talk during sex because their partner finds it attractive) – but this is on purpose!
also this doesn’t account for people who grew up in an environment where people often mix multiple languages in their speech (e.g. spanglish or franglais) – in that case, they may accidentally drop an L1 swear into an L2 sentence, though they’ll still generally stick to L2 when speaking to people who only speak that language
Tips to learn a new language
The 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
The 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
The 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
The 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
The 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences
The 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences
The 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences
The 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences(Sources: 5 Steps to Speak a New Language by Hung Quang Pham)
This article has an excellent summary on how to rapidly learn a new language within 90 days.
We can begin with studying the first 600 words. Of course chucking is an effective way to memorize words readily. Here’s a list to translate into the language you desire to learn that I grabbed from here! 🙂
EXPRESSIONS OF POLITENESS (about 50 expressions)
- ‘Yes’ and ‘no’: yes, no, absolutely, no way, exactly.
- Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
- Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
- Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
- Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
NOUNS (about 120 words)
- Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn,
winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month,
year.
- People: family, relative, mother, father, son,
daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend,
girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman,
boy, girl, child.
- Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key,
letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil,
picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.
- Places: place, world, country, town, street, road,
school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the
foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.
- Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color,
damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the
foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page,
pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather,
work.
- Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the
left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread,
food, paper, noise.
PREPOSITIONS (about 40 words)
- General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.
- Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.
- Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from,
behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below,
under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
- Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
DETERMINERS (about 80 words)
- Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
- Demonstrative: this, that.
- Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
- Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
- Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.
ADJECTIVES (about 80 words)
- Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.
- Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.
- General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot,
cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful,
funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty,
wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new,
old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not
dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.
- Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful,
dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid,
surprised, tired, well, worried, young.
VERBS (about 100 words)
- arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow,
bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop,
eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to,
hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know,
laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live
(=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may
(=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open,
ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should,
show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk,
teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk,
want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.
PRONOUNS (about 40 words)
- Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
- Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.
- Demonstrative: this, that.
- Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
- Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
- Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
ADVERBS (about 60 words)
- Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind,
nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left,
somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
- Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally,
again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always,
often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then
(=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
- Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
- Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course,
only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too
(=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
CONJUNCTIONS (about 30 words)
- Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
- Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
- Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.
Oh i love this concept!
I love it too! I love it mostly because it makes me feel less overwhelmed. When you break it down like this, everything seems so much more manageable. Like, hey, I could memorize 20 words at a time (even if ‘at a time’ varies wildly for me), and just do that like ten times. That’s a HUGE chunk of a language.
(And since I have the habit of doing languages that are similar to ones I’m already familiar with, the grammar part usually comes pretty easy, too.)
but-the-library-of-alexandria:
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.
This post needs some kind of warning sign.
I did not see that coming.
Some people say the English language is confusing. To which I say… It’s.
Totally unrelated linguistics fun fact: in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) has some different syntactic functions than SAE (Standard American English) one of which is copular deletion, copula is basically a word that kinda “ties” the sentence together, so in SAE a sentence would be
The sky is blue
But a speaker of AAVE would instead say
The sky blue
This is a deliberate move, which is in line with correct AAVE syntactic rules, of course for years in our racist cesspool of a country things like this were always corrected by grammer school teachers cause it was considered incorrect or even “lazy” but the deleting that word isn’t just being lazy, it is actually an entire different tense that SAE does not have. The copular “be” in AAVE is then added to sentences to show a habitual thing, so the difference in AAVE in these two sentences show very different meaning:
John working
John be working
The first sentence means that John is at work right now, at this time, working. The second sentence implies something John will be doing throughout time, in this case John is gainfully employed and is enjoying a job that will continue in the future.
NOW, the reason I bring all this up is in contractions in English, we have specific syntactic rules on when we can contract some words or not, such as the purposeful error at the end of OP’s post, the “we’ve” violates our contraction rules in English, and therefore sounds both wrong and meaningless, to me the end of the sentence made my brain spin around and re-read the sentence just to make sure I had it right, that’s because we expect people to use contractions only in certain environments.
So, with that in mind, when a speaker of AAVE deletes the copula such as “the sky blue” that’s also the syntactic environment when in SAE we are allowed to make a contraction:
“the sky’s blue”
And I just kinda love that, I don’t know why, it tickles my brain that we have that specific place to do that in different vernaculars of English but they show such important meaning and are rules that are very important to follow or the listener will not make sense of what’s being said.
……marry me
Absolutely!!
Literally all I want in a life partner is someone that will let me run on for hours and hours on some tangent so yes I’m down
I know I’m not the only one that says “lol” out loud in real life. I, and I’ve also heard other people do this, will say other abbreviations out loud as well (e.g. answering “where do you want to eat lunch?” with “idk, you pick.”).
But here’s the thing, if enough people do this that the spoken abbreviation is recognized in normal conversation as a single linguistic symbol with distinct meaning and definable usage, guess what? That makes it a word.
Give it 60+ years and “Idiceh (
aɪ –
di –
keɪ ): 1. ignorant of, unaware; 2. unsure, undecided” could be an entry in the dictionary.
people who dont even care about language: how can you just CHANGE grammar??? add new wORds?? unacceptable!!! language must never change!!!!!11 kids these days cant even spell!!
people who study language: ANARCHY!! ANARCHY!!!! LANGUAGE IS FLUID AND WORDS AREN’T REAL!! change! the! grammar! rules!! burn a dictionary!!! NO ONE CARES!!!!!
Me 10 years ago: I never use online abbreviations! standard english all the time!
Me a couple of years ago: u kno wat fuck it
Me now: it is impossible to communicate effectively online without using internet slang due to the mixed mode format and lack of paralinguistic features. Things like lack of punctuation, abbreviations, acronyms and such all have their own connotations and communicate far more than their commonly accepted meaning. Linguistics has evolved. n u kno what i love it
queerhomestuck 