In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

she, them, itself, who ← pronouns (pro-, meaning "substituting for", nouns)

suitcase, chart, spreadsheet ← pro nouns (professional nouns)

linguistics

when you think about it english-speaking people making fun of dutch and german for sounding like goofy clown english is like pointing at your parents and going "lmao 😂😂 they look like me but oldddd"

probably i just said it but i want to say it again:

- don’t apologise if you don’t know english.

- yes, english is the most common language on the internet but you are not forced to know it perfectly.

- your own language is beautiful.

- non-english people make a huge effort to write in English everyday on this website.

- support non-english people and don’t make them feel bad if they do not know English. 

- actually support all the languages.

- spread more language diversity on Tumblr.

thank you. 

Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.

Schwa [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Megan, Cueball, and Ponytail stand in front of a restaurant table.]

Megan: What's up? Was doug gonna come? Doug loves brunch. Ponytail: Nuh Uh, Doug's stuck 'cause of a tunnel obstruction. A tunnel dropped a bunch of onions. Megan: Ugh.

Caption: The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. In fact, if you stick to the right conversation topics, you can avoid learning any other ones.

jumpscare for prescriptivists

The ability to turn the post above you into the speech bubble of a character of your choice is an essential weapon of tumblr pvp.

using free software to do advanced phonetic analysis of the voices of different mario voice actors

[for reference]

TIL The word "inn" (as in the place that serves alcohol) can be traced back to Old English "inne", meaning... "in"!

They're called inns because you go "in" them!!! 🤯🤯🤯

one of those false etymology posts but with the actual etymology of the word

I swear some of you must be captioning images poorly on purpose. Either that or Tumblr's piss-poor media literacy extends so far that people genuinely believe mindlessly writing whatever details they notice at random is somehow useful to people.

As an example, I saw a thread in which someone replied with a photo of a cat as a reaction to someone else's post. It's clear from context that the cat's body language was meant to evoke a quiet thoughtfulness in response. Someone else followed up with an image description that went into excruciating detail about the cat's coloration, its markings, its fur length, its eye color, then described the color of the paint on the walls, took time to mention the random objects in the background, and *didn't* describe the cat's pose whatsoever.

Look, if you're going to try to "helpfully" caption an image, please make some effort to understand what the image is trying to communicate so that you can write a *useful* description. If someone says "wow, this is a weird looking cat" then sure, describe the markings in full detail. If someone goes "me when you take my juice box" with an angry-looking kitten, maybe talk about the cat's stance and apparent expression and skip the part where you list every title you see on the bookshelf in the background.

big fan of The Dictionary, the mythical entity that prescriptivists believe exists. I am always learning more about the beliefs surrounding it

to give some probably much needed variety to your language related asks, what do you consider the absolute weirdest quirk of english that more people should know about?

people talk too much about the weird stuff. the normal stuff is where it's at.

have you ever noticed that english doesn't have a grammatical future tense? it's true! the present and future "tenses" in english work the same way, and are better described as one unified nonpast tense

Source

Source

“On the use of the phrase ‘on the’ and the colon-delimited subtitle in academic papers: A meta-analysis”