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🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Languages

The word mamihlapinatapai is derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It has been translated as "a look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but that neither will start" or "looking at each other hoping that the other will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do".

A romantic interpretation of the meaning has also been given, as "that look across the table when two people are sharing an unspoken but private moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. An expressive and meaningful silence."

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Mark V. Shaney is a synthetic Usenet user whose postings in the net.singles newsgroups were generated by Markov chain techniques, based on text from other postings. The username is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person.

The system was designed by Rob Pike with coding by Bruce Ellis. Don P. Mitchell wrote the Markov chain code, initially demonstrating it to Pike and Ellis using the Tao Te Ching as a basis. They chose to apply it to the net.singles netnews group.

🔗 Linguistics

In linguistics, comparative illusions (CIs) or Escher sentences are certain comparative sentences which initially seem to be acceptable but upon closer reflection have no well-formed meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have. The effect has also been observed in other languages. Some studies have suggested that, at least in English, the effect is stronger for sentences whose predicate is repeatable. The effect has also been found to be stronger in some cases when there is a plural subject in the second clause.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Writing systems

The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence. It depends on how easy it is to predict the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling: shallow orthographies are easy to pronounce based on the written word, and deep orthographies are difficult to pronounce based on how they are written.

In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: from the rules of pronunciation, one is able to pronounce the word correctly. In other words, shallow (transparent) orthographies, also called phonemic orthographies, have a one-to-one relationship between its graphemes and phonemes, and the spelling of words is very consistent. Such examples include Hindi, Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Latin and Italian.

In contrast, in deep (opaque) orthographies, the relationship is less direct, and the reader must learn the arbitrary or unusual pronunciations of irregular words. In other words, deep orthographies are writing systems that do not have a one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) that represent them. They may reflect etymology (English, Faroese, Mongolian script, Thai, French, or Franco-Provençal) or be morphophonemic (Korean or Russian).

Written Korean represents an unusual hybrid; each phoneme in the language is represented by a letter but the letters are packaged into "square" units of two to four phonemes, each square representing a syllable. Korean has very complex phonological variation rules, especially regarding the consonants rather than the vowels, in contrast to English. For example, the Korean word 훗일, which should be pronounced as [husil] based on standard pronunciations of the components of the grapheme, is actually pronounced as [hunnil]. Among the consonants of the Korean language, only one is always pronounced exactly as it is written.

Italian offers clear examples of differential directionality in depth. Even in a very shallow orthographic system, spelling-to-pronunciation and pronunciation-to-spelling may not be equally clear. There are two major imperfect matches of vowels to letters: in stressed syllables, e can represent either open [ɛ] or closed [e], and o stands for either open [ɔ] or closed [o]. According to the orthographic principles used for the language, [ˈsɛtta] 'sect', for example, with open [ɛ] can only be spelled setta, and [ˈvetta] 'summit' with closed [e] can only be vetta — if a listener can hear it, they can spell it. But since the letter e is assigned to represent both [ɛ] and [e], there is no principled way to know whether to pronounce the written words setta and vetta with [ɛ] or [e] — the spelling does not present the information needed for accurate pronunciation. A second lacuna in Italian's shallow orthography is that although stress position in words is only very partially predictable, it is normally not indicated in writing. For purposes of spelling, it makes no difference which syllable is stressed in the place names Arsoli and Carsoli, but the spellings offer no clue that they are ARsoli and CarSOli (and as with the letter e above, the stressed o of Carsoli, which is [ɔ], is unknown from the spelling).

🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Languages 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Linguistic purism in English is the preference for using words of native origin rather than foreign-derived ones. "Native" can mean "Anglo-Saxon" or it can be widened to include all Germanic words. Linguistic purism in English primarily focuses on words of Latinate and Greek origin, due to their prominence in the English language and the belief that they may be difficult to understand. In its mildest form, it merely means using existing native words instead of foreign-derived ones (such as using begin instead of commence). In a less mild form, it also involves coining new words from Germanic roots (such as wordstock for vocabulary). In a more extreme form, it also involves reviving native words which are no longer widely used (such as ettle for intend). The resulting language is sometimes called Anglish (coined by the author and humorist Paul Jennings), or Roots English (referring to the idea that it is a "return to the roots" of English). The mild form is often advocated as part of Plain English, but the more extreme form has been and is still a fringe movement; the latter can also be undertaken as a form of constrained writing.

English linguistic purism is discussed by David Crystal in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. The idea dates at least to the inkhorn term controversy of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 19th century, writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and William Barnes advocated linguistic purism and tried to introduce words like birdlore for ornithology and bendsome for flexible. A notable supporter in the 20th century was George Orwell, who had a preference for plain Saxon words over complex Latin or Greek ones, and the idea continues to have advocates today.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Literature 🔗 Linguistics

"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Etymology

This is a list of etymologies proposed for the word OK or okay. The majority can be easily classified as false etymologies, or possibly folk etymologies. H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, lists serious candidates and "a few of the more picturesque or preposterous". Allen Walker Read surveyed a variety of explanations in a 1964 article titled The Folklore of "O. K." Eric Partridge described O.K. as "an evergreen of the correspondence column."

🔗 China 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Linguistics/Etymology 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

The etymology of the word tea can be traced back to the various Chinese pronunciations of the word. Nearly all the words for tea worldwide, fall into three broad groups: te, cha and chai, which reflected the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world. The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into these three broad groups are mostly from the minor languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant, and likely to be the ultimate origin of the Chinese words for tea. Notably, none of these words mean 'dinner' or a late afternoon meal.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Theoretical Linguistics

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions. This results in generally more easily deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word. This usually results in a shortening of the word, or it provides easier pronunciation.

Agglutinative languages have generally one grammatical category per affix while fusional languages have multiple. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from a morphological point of view. It is derived from the Latin verb agglutinare, which means "to glue together".

Non-agglutinative synthetic languages are fusional languages; morphologically, they combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, drastically changing them in the process, and joining several meanings in a single affix (for example, in the Spanish word comí "I ate", the suffix -í carries the meanings of first person, singular number, past tense, perfective aspect, indicative mood, active voice.) The term agglutinative is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for synthetic. Used in this way, the term embraces both fusional languages and inflected languages. The agglutinative and fusional languages are two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one or the other end. For example, Japanese is generally agglutinative, but displays fusion in otōto (弟, younger brother), from oto+hito (originally woto+pito), and in its non-affixing verb conjugations. A synthetic language may use morphological agglutination combined with partial usage of fusional features, for example in its case system (e.g., German, Dutch, and Persian).

Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very few irregular verbs. For example, Japanese has very few irregular verbs – only two are significantly irregular, and there are only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity; Ganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is defined); while in the Quechua languages, all the ordinary verbs are regular. Korean has only ten irregular forms of conjugation except for the passive and causative conjugations. Georgian is an exception; it is highly agglutinative (with up to eight morphemes per word), but it has a significant number of irregular verbs with varying degrees of irregularity.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Phonetics 🔗 Opera

The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealization, pulse phonation, creaky voice, creak, croak, popcorning, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape) is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure that permits air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency. During this phonation, the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together, which causes the vocal folds to compress rather tightly and become relatively slack and compact. This process forms a large and irregularly vibrating mass within the vocal folds that produces the characteristic low popping or rattling sound when air passes through the glottal closure. The register (if well controlled) can extend far below the modal voice register, in some cases up to 8 octaves lower, such as in the case of Tim Storms who holds the world record for lowest frequency note ever produced by a human, a G₋₇, which is only 0.189 Hz, inaudible to the human ear.

Vocal fry is thought to have become more common among young female speakers of American English in the early 21st century, with the style of speaking being considered informal, nonaggressive and urban-oriented.