Patreon

The two things I love most about language are simultaneously that the human need to communicate is so strong that we will invent languages, vocabularies, and new turns of phrases at the drop of a hat (freeing our thoughts from the confines of our mind), but also that language is so naturally limiting that it won't truly encapsulate your deepest, most inner thoughts and feelings (your thoughts are yours, but at what cost). Do you understand how feral this makes me feel. "Please understand me," we tell each other, and we both will be seen but also so, so misunderstood, and it isn't our faults, not really, and we continue trying, trying, trying to be understood.

So my lit professor is a second generation Korean immigrant born in Germany that has studied in England and now teaches in Italy (wild) and speaks Italian with the absolute CUTEST mesh up of accents (he's something like Korean around the vowels, English around the fricatives and German around the dentals) and I LOVE his syntax; like, for example, one of the locutions he uses a lot is "a déspito" which is "despite" and "a discapito" ( to the detriment of s.) smashed together. Has created a dozen of these hybrid words and everyone in class just gets along with it.

i feel like not enough alolan character writers use the added level of fucking w tourists that is, in analogue to hawai'i, alolal pidgin. a widely natively spoken creole language that doesn't have a good mutual intelligibility to standard pokénglish. often utilized mixing pidgin & pokénglish, with younger people leaning to light pidgin & older leaning to heavy pidgin. also often seen in local advertising. local alolans vc not alolan not unovan but a secret third thing :)

On my hands and knees no1 I talk to knows the difference between a pidgin and a creole its so easy its so easy stop being so sillypilled please

I thought people were exaggerating at how passive aggressive to downright mean Duolingo could get for skipping lessons but…they really did send a tsundere after me this morning for not doing my Portuguese lessons “in two days , not that I care!” when…I’m not even sure my account’s fully set up yet! 😂

(Why hadn’t I finished? Uh… it wanted me to guess a word that I Think is a true cognate to one I think I remember from Coloring Pages Only High School Spanish…buuuut…I think I want an English-to-Portuguese dictionary since from what I tried to vet out Duolingo isn’t always great at telling you what the correct answer is in the free version…just that you got it wrong. And just uh. Never got back to it.)

Quick ficlet. Sometimes Kevin and Argit are multilingual and like to make that other people’s problem.

~~

He wouldn’t have been so annoyed, probably, if he hadn’t known with certainty that Kev and Argit were talking about him. They had to be. The three of them had been talking, both of them had looked at him like he was an idiot, and Argit had proceeded to switch languages. Kevin had followed after, and now they were talking without him.

Normally it wasn’t so much an issue when people did this. The Omnitrix had a universal translator built in, and while Ben typically kept it off when he was on Earth it wasn’t all that difficult to switch it back on. But Kevin and Argit… He hadn’t had this problem with anybody else so far, just them. The Omnitrix would not translate. At most it would give him an alert asking for him to change it’s auditory parameters- which never seemed to work- or find a quieter location- which pretty much never applied. It was always with the same language, too, so he had to assume that was part of the problem.

Idly, Ben considered whether this was more or less annoying than the times when they were trying to be stealthy and bitch, which they switched over to what he had been informed was Galactic Standard Sign Language. He had to say, yes, it was less annoying when he didn’t have to listen to them.

“Alright,” he said, shoving up out of his seat, “I’m going to go grab a smoothie, feel free to join me when you’re done calling me an idiot or whatever.” Kevin snorted. Argit gave a chittering snicker as Ben walked away.

“Not calling you stupid, Benny. Calling you an asshole.”

Wowa!! It us!!!!

ok i just finally finished lagoon. ohhh my god i am so excited to discuss this in class

if you disrespect dialects i'm killing you with my mind

Patreon

maybe i should learn less languages i feel like im frying my brain

Zweite Folge des Podcasts zu „Register“

In dieser Folge geht es um Kreolsprachen.

„Kreolsprachen sind ein Wunder der Linguistik. Innerhalb weniger Generationen entstehen diese Sprachen dort, wo Menschen ohne gemeinsame Sprache miteinander kommunizieren müssen. Das Projekt A02 "Speaker's choices in a creole context: Bislama and Morisien" untersucht zwei Kreolsprachen aus Melanesien und Mauritius. Wir sprechen mit Manfred Krifka und Tonjes Veenstra.“

Writing a fantasy story where the universal language is something referred to as "common", making it the native language of anywhere (and especially, making it "the human language") is kind of boring and implies imperialistic origins - there's frankly no other way to make almost every character in the setting speak the same language as either their first language or fluent second language than by implying that the native speakers of it invaded land all over the place at some point and forced the locals to learn it, to the point that peoples who never were invaded figured it's easier to just learn it too in order to engage in business with so many other peoples.

I think a more fun alternative would be that "common" formed as some sort of an ultimate pidgin that eventually developed into a more-or-less universal creole. The different peoples that mixed together started using loanwords from each others' languages because their own doesn't have a specific word for that oddly specific thing, and their polyglot kids are already losing tracks which word for "horse" comes from elvish and which one was the original human word for "anvil" or "ship".

While the spreading creole would definitely have local differences, being originally a mashup of dwarvish and gnomish at one end of a continent and a fusion of human tongue and orcish on one end, it would slowly mend together, becoming more standardised over time as the words that are the easiest for each people to pronounce become more common. Eventually the Common Creole becomes so consistent and uniform that almost anyone who speaks one or two of the most common five languages can vaguely pierce together what a conversation spoken in Common is about.

Common

There's a bunch of posts about how to fix the issues with the assumption of a "common" language already and I'm here to add my own, based on what I have in my setting.

Ever since sailing became common, the high elves of the Chont-Okery region and the orcs of Ri'Erman have traded with each other but those trades were often difficult.

Elvish was an incredibly difficult language to learn with its polysynthetic words, incredibly large phonemic inventory, tone, and logographic script with thousands of different characters. Orcish, too, was far from easy to learn for the elves who struggled with its rigid sentence structure and inflections. Over the centuries, a trading pidgin emerged, sometimes called the common orcish-elven trading pidgin.

Then, in the 10th century BT, a large group of human refugees arrived in the area. Their home continent had been ravaged by a divine disaster and many of them settled with the orcs or elves, but most of them formed a new nation in the land behind the mountainranges that seperated Chont-Okery and Ri'Erman on land. Previously thought to just be more mountains, the land was still unsettled.

The humans brought their own language with them. This human language was significantly more similar to orcish than elvish was, and the elves also found it to be simpler than orcish and so many of its features made their way into the common orcish-elven trading pidgin.

But it was no longer a simple trading pidgin. It also became the language of choice to communicate with the human refugees living in Chont-Okery and Ri'Erman and human traders started using it at home in their own communities where it slowly fused with their original language. The trading pidgin had become the common orcish-elven-human creole, or Common for short.

Over the following millenia, the three regions became very influential globally and spread Common all over the plane. Even trading ships that were exclusively orcish or elvish often chose to teach their trading partners Common as doing trading in Common came to them more naturally than in their own native language.

Nowadays, Common is by no means a universal language, but it has become widespread enough that it has become a lingua franca. Not everyone everywhere speaks it, but if you want to be understood in as many parts of the world as possible, Common is your language of choice.

can i ask how it feels to work within a parrots social boundaries? i feel like it would be significantly harder and less intuitive than a dog or a pet w no social needs like a snake. do you ever act like a parrot would to make them happy? i know theres stuff to avoid too, like touching them a certain way that makes them attracted to u, are there ways to pet them that dont register that way? like platonic preening?

so thanks to the fact that

a) I'm autistic and had to learn most social interaction/cues from the ground up anyway

b) my weird affinity for sauropsids of any kind (ask @ladyraekingmaker for zoo trip stories)

c) the fact that I study birds for my job

d) I'm a nerd who researches a lot so I read like all the books before bringing birds home

for me birds haven't been that hard. They do their own thing, but after a while it's just like a second language, really. The birds, in turn, know quite a lot about us - how we use tone, body language, and our routines. They also know some English words, and Ellie and Aurora can even talk in appropriate situations. It's all about seeing them as equals, really, and trying to communicate effectively, like how you're supposed to with a baby. So @plokool and I joke that our house mainly uses a pidgin between English/Human/Mammal and Conure/Cockatiel/Parrot/Bird. Which... isn't exactly wrong

So, I often do Birdie behaviors in response to my birds. Eye blinking to indicate safety especially, but many others as well.

As for touchies, you're not supposed to stroke the back. But giving scritchles to the head area is OK, whether preening or not.