mostly linguistics & language stuff
tae * 33 * canadian * queer * en/fr bilingual
sideblog is glittery-phonaesthemes
phonestheme: a sound that, because it appears in a number of words of similar meaning, has a recognizable semantic association.
So I’ve stopped getting inundated with the randomly-generated woman bots, but the past few days there’s been an influx of blank blogs with default icons BUT with plausibly-human usernames
I am assuming these are still bots, though?
Anyway, hopefully i haven’t blocked any human newcomers but I’d really suggest new users change their default icon or do something to indicate that youre a real person, or you’re probably going to get blocked on sight a whole lot
[ID: Quora screenshot of the question ‘Is it difficult to learn the Finnish language?’ to which Henry Majander, 'A Native Finn,’ has responded:
No, even small children can do it. I used to live next door to a kindergarten. There were a lot of immigrant kids there. All the kids did was stand in a puddle and scream. Especially the mornings I had hangover. The immmigrant kids stood in the puddle like the others and screamed. Then I saw them in the store, and they were translating to their parents… so, to learn a language you need to stand in the puddle and scream. I think it is called osmosis. Also helps if you are 5 years old.
It’s funny how thrown off you might feel when some language branches don’t behave like the rest of the family
When looking up etymons and diverse phonological developments amongst Indo-European languages, I get the most upset about the disappearance of initial *p- in Celtic and Armenian for instance
This initial bilabial plosive is a reliable marker of kinship among IE languages (even in languages like Germanic where *p- > *f- which retained the bilabial component) and descendants can be identified/guessed with a certain degree of confidence because of *p-’s stability
Having a look at Wikipedia puts things into perspective quite easily. Most IE language retained *p- but these 2 branches almost systematically got rid of it;
*pH₂tér- "father"
Celtic: Old Irish athir "father"; Welsh edrydd "paternal domain"
Armenian: hayr "father"
*pōds, *ped- "foot"
Celtic: Old Irish īs "below" < PIE loc. pl. *pēd-su; Welshis(od) "below, under; lower (than)“
Celtic: Old Irishimm-chom-arc "mutual questions, greetings" ; Welsharchaf "I ask"
Armenian: harcʿanem "I ask"
I’m taking PIE *p- as an example because it has been most stable throughout the many phonological stages PIE went through. Celtic and Armenian represent the most drastic departures from archaic *p-, while Germanic seems to be the second most deviant with PIE *p- > Proto-Germanic *f-
The absence of initial *p- in these groups actually appears less “upsetting” when we take into consideration the intermediary steps like PIE *p- > Proto-Celtic *-ɸ > ∅- and PIE *p- > Proto-Armenian *h-
To note that the proto-languages retained fossils of PIE *p- in some specific environments and that words starting with /b/ in Irish or /w/ and /pʰ/ in Armenian retain a fairly transparent kinship with their PIE ancestor but they seem to be rather few. For instance, an absolutely-not-representative research on Wiktionary for words in Armenian that start with փ /pʰ/ show that they mostly tend to have been inherited or strongly influenced by neighbouring Iranic languages
Likewise, for Irish words starting with /b/ seem to demonstrate that the greater provider of the initial bilabial stop are /b/, /bʰ/ or /gw/
Hey love your blog :) I've been trawling through tumblr trying to find mandarin langblrs lol I've been learning mandarin for about 2 years now (but I'd class myself as an advanced beginner tbh) do you have any recommendations for any books or apps or websites or anything where you can read stories/any texts in mandarin? preferably at a beginner (but not too easy) level? thanks a bunch! Aliyah :)
I don’t have many beginner resources sadly, but i do have a few suggestions for things you should definitely check out and maybe save for later:
Du Chinese: This is an app that has a bunch of short readings that range from easy to difficult. The readings are organized by HSK level so you can pick what level you want to read at. While reading, you can click on words you don’t know and the definition will appear on the top of the screen. Also, if you hold down on the word, a couple bubbles will pop up above the word and one of them gives you the option to save the word to a vocab list that you can review. Reading the stories is free when they come out but, after a week or two, you have to pay to view each story. It would be nice to have free access to all the stories, but you still have access to the vocab so that’s a plus.
漫画人 Manhuaren is an app i’ve talked about on my blog before. It’s an app where you can read manga translated into Mandarin for free. It’s a Chinese app, so everything is in Mandarin. Also, I was unable to find it in my phone’s app store, so I had to go to the app’s website on my phone and download it from there. It’s a resource intended for native speakers so the manga might be difficult to get through but if you’re interested in this it’s definitely something you should check out.
短美文 Duanmeiwen and 短文学 Duanwenxue are two websites where native speakers post short pieces of writing. The content ranges from poems to short essays about almost any topic imaginable. These are also made by and for native speakers of Mandarin so the website is in Mandarin and the content will be slightly more difficult to understand, but there’s definitely some interesting stuff on here. (A really simple piece I recommend is 你知道我喜欢你吗. I made a vocab list here if you’re interested)
成语故事大全 Chengyu Gushi Daquan is a website that has the stories behind a bunch of 成语 chengyu (set expressions that are typically four characters long that refer to a story or historical event; they’re like idioms but a little different).
Chinese Reading Practice: this website has short stories and poems with English translations and relevant notes. It was created to help people learning Mandarin so it’s a little different than the other resources. Everything is divided by level of difficulty. It also has a scrollover dictionary feature, so you can see the definition of words when you scroll your cursor over them.
童话故事 tonghuagushi: this has a bunch of fairy tales. I haven’t really explored this site much but it looks promising.
Another suggestion I have is to find some Chinese or Taiwanese musicians, actors, models, etc., that you like and follow them on social media. They’ll usually make really short posts and they sometimes use slang or more colloquial expressions that you might not learn when using a textbook.
Like I said, I don’t have many beginner resources for reading so I’m sorry if this isn’t helpful right now. If anyone else has some other suggestions though that would be great!
小學堂 is a super cool resource that one of my friends recommended me, and I feel like it’s worth checking out, especially for those of you who are interested in Sinitic varieties/linguistics, or for those who just want to see dialectal differences within each Sinitic branch. The main page is all in Chinese, so to make it easier for you to navigate, here’s a screenshot of the main search bar:
To search for a specific character, select 字形, and then either press enter or click on 確定送出 to get to the next step. Then, you’ll see a bunch of dictionaries/links to click on, depending on what Sinitic variety you want to search for. If you’re interested, they also have a search option for different script styles, rime table/dictionary entries, character variants, etc. It’ll look like this:
As you can see in the second bullet, there are links to Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Mandarin, Gan, Wu, Xiang, Min, Yue, Pinghua and Hakka readings, and within those categories they also have sub-categories of these Sinitic branches (Gou-Lou, Siyi, Guangfu, etc in the Yue branch for example), and IPA pronunciations for the character that was searched (along with tone numbers and tone name). Here’s an example of the Yue readings for the character 心:
It’s split up based on initial/rime like it’s typically done in Chinese phonological classification, so it’s super useful for quick reference.
This site is really useful, especially for the more linguistically inclined people who are interested in Chinese languages! I haven’t found many other sites like these that are structured so well with so much (FREE) useful information, so definitely check it out!
shows an essentialist this and their head goes boom in English, ban-ban in Japanese, cabum in Portuguese [citation needed], cataplum in Spanish, and so on
Online dating service Zoosk recently reported on the success of opening messages: A message with an exclamation point was 10% more likely to receive a response.