boring otter

a black cat jumping out of a bag that has a black Puma logo on it

Just as the prophecy foretold

Awesome! I thought someone must have noticed this, but couldn't find an example. Thanks!

TIL that there are Berber speakers in Egypt

This reminds me of the legendary post: www.reddit.com/r/baseball/c...

A shower thought related to #langsky 🐦🐦

I'd argue there's some similarity between ASL and Japanese.
Both have an “alphabet” (fingerspelling & kana), but both also have thousands of “graphemes” for common words (regular signs & kanji), since always using the alphabet isn't very efficient

I love when people use a Hawaiian ʻokina for glottal stops. No, it's not an apostrophe.
Yes, I'm a typography nerd, how did you know‽

Great r'ant! Couldn't agree mo're

Such an interesting perspective, I've never thought of something like this before:

> how I forget the word for paternal aunt because my dad doesn’t have sisters

I wonder how many of those words are originally from AAVE

From this list, I think these are (I might be wrong tho):
- bussin'
- drip
- flex
- glow up
- no cap
- rizz
- sus (at least partially)
- vibe

🐦🐦

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia) Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus mus...

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

Belgium’s forbidden language 'at the point of no return' "Walloon can only be saved by Walloons themselves."

Belgium’s forbidden language 'at the point of no return' buff.ly/6QEk3R8 #langsky #xl8

Fun fact I recently learned: English does have a Baltic loanword you probably use basically every once in a while. The name of the spruce tree is derived from Pruce, an archaic word for Prussia, whose name in German originates with the Baltic Old Prussians they displaced, as Prūsa

In my experience, words like these are often the most frustrating: they look very simple, so you think you must know them, but you don't.

Take, for example, the words “pip”, “gobby”, “nobble”, and “trug”. They all look like you should've learned them in the first years of studying

This is both mad and brilliant!

Great post!
May I ask what tool you use to create infographics like this? I love their aesthetics :)

I wish wasps would recognise ownership.

And don't even get me started on the Creole languages. Even when someone tries to cover the topic of the languages of Africa, they usually omit them entirely

The under-representation of African languages on the Internet is just tragic. A couple of days ago, I wanted to learn the meaning of a random Xhosa word, and there were less than a dozen results on Google containing it

In Niger Hausa is used as a language of exchange in markets. That's why many non-Hausa people learn to count money in Hausa before they learn to count in Hausa.

For example 20 is said in Hausa achirin (borrowed from Arabic) but achirin is also the name of 100FCFA.

As a non-native English speaker, I looked through this list and felt humiliated on so many levels…

Yeah, I know. It's just that in past years, it was actually the most learned language on Duolingo there, and now it's only second.
Apparently, Spanish has surpassed it

Since when is Swedish second in Sweden? :(
It has always been the first!

A quote from the StackExchange question

Funny quote from the comments on the question “Is there any rhyme or reason to hiragana?”
japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/47...

#langsky

I think this is a very reasonable assumption about an assumption :)
In my humble experience, monolingual people often assume that translation is done word by word.
And apparently, “igray-igray” means “to haggle at the market”. There's no such meaning in Russian, so it might be a Chinese influence

That's an interesting point, and I'm sure it applies to many pidgins and creoles.
Maybe in this case the effect would be minimal since the themes discussed are pretty common in their lives, so they most likely have already heard all the related words? But I kinda doubt it

A comparison of modern Russian-Chinese variants

And then, the most curious paper of the bunch (new author this time): www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/7/...
It looks like several Russian-Chinese pidgins are being (re)introduced by modern-day Russians and Chinese interacting with each other. And they share some similarities with the previous version.

[3/3]

Russian-Chinese Pidgin speakers

Then, I found a paper about the *modern* pidgin (again by the same author): tinyurl.com/n5eatvnc
It was published in 2021. What stands out is its list of speakers, which consists of 9 people, the youngest of whom was 67 at the time.
And yeah, this is the Ussuriysk dialect I mentioned earlier.

[2/3]

Chinese Pidgin Russian Chinese Pidgin Russian was spoken between the last decades of the eighteenth and the middle of the twentieth century in the vast territories along the Russian–Chinese border in southern Siberia and th...

I did a bit of research, and this stuff is way more complicated than I initially thought.

First, I found the Pidgin grammar in English by the same author. According to the paper, there were still ~50 semi-speakers in 2013, so it wasn't really dead but very endangered.

#langsky 🐦🐦
[1/3]

The most ironic part is that I don't even know which Rusyn you meant, Pannonian or Carpathian

It's more like near the modern Mongolian border, but back then it was part of the Qing dynasty.
But apparently, there's a dialect of this pidgin, Ussuriysk Pidgin, which was still spoken in the early 2000s. And it was indeed near Heilongjiang