syntactician:

I asked about the construction ‘tu me manque’ (‘I miss you’) and got some speedy and helpful answers.

I was confused because it looks like it means ‘You miss me’. I was thinking of when I learnt French at school, and I thought we learnt that to say ‘I need an X’ we should say ‘Je manque un X’, meaning something like ‘I lack an X’. It turns out that this is basically right, although there should be a ‘de’ in there too. This is the construction with ‘de’ + a direct object, and it means ‘to lack something’. 

But there is also this other construction, used when you mean ‘to miss a person or place or thing’, in which the subject is the missed thing, and the person feeling the lack is the indirect object. ‘Me’ in ‘tu me manques’ is dative (= ‘to/from me’), not accusative (=’me’), and it means ‘you are missing from me’, as the gazillions of tumblr-language-romantics have pointed out. 

It’s similar, I think, to the construction ‘me gusta X’ in Spanish, which means something like ‘X is pleasing to me’. 

Never thought about these constructions in terms of datives before but now it makes so much sense.

draumar:

linguists are cute.

The Linguists - We are the World

Budapest ELTE-MTA Theoretical Linguistics Programme

“We are the world,
We are the linguists,
We are the ones who make a brighter day 
By making theories.
There’s a choice we’re making
By forming hypotheses 
And we’ll describe a language 
Just you and me.”

I’m in love

thedailywhat:

Best Word Ever of the Day: After overhearing nearby diners discuss the worst words ever (moist, etc.), blogger Ted McCagg was inspired to hold a March Madness-style contest to find The Best Word Ever — and diphthong ended up the champ. 

To which we say: Diphthong? Really? Hornswoggle should have won, hands-down.

[kottke]

superlinguo:

This is a wug.

And if there were two, there would be two ______

If you said wugs with the s sounding like /z/ rather than /s/ then congratulations! You have productive morphological capabilities. That is, when faced with a word you’ve never seen before, you were able to use your knowledge of how English works to figure out that -s is plural, and it’s voiced (z instead of s) after voiced consonants (such as g).

It’s not remarkable that an adult native speaker can do this, but when Jean Berko Gleason invented the wug for a test in 1958, she demonstrated that children can also do such things, and at a much younger age than was previously assumed.

Berko Gleason’s work is admired for its elegance and importance to the field, but many linguists are also fond of these little critters that she created. They’ve become something of a mascot for linguists, some get wug tattoos, and they appear on the International Linguistics Olympiad page.

They never fail to amuse me.

[Image is from McMaster Linguistics - a cached Geocities blog (how retro) but it’s originally from one of Berko Gleason’s papers]

Sometimes I get emotional over theta roles

But then I remember I’m the only one who knows what a theta role is

youngstero:

as a jew I can tell you that hebrew is not a real language

we made it up

just random sounds

Haha the best about this is that Hebrew really isn’t a ‘real’ language as it is spoken today because it had been completely out of use for so long that when it was revived a lot of its grammar and vocabulary had to be reconstructed from other sources.

superlinguo:

Today is the first day of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival - when funny people take over our fair town for four weeks. To celebrate we thought we’d share this excellent video from Mr Simon Taylor, who gives us his musings on why he likes language.

vowelsme:

[via]

everydayanthro:

BRICE RUSS / OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Brice Russ maps out how people refer to carbonated beverages. Yellow dots indicate “pop,” red dots “Coke,” and blue dots “soda.”

Sneakers or tennis shoes? Hoagie or hero? Dust bunny or house moss? These differences in regional speech are thriving in an unlikely place — Twitter.

A study presented by Brice Russ, a graduate student at Ohio State University, at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in January demonstrates how Twitter can be used as a valuable and abundant source for linguistic research. With more than 200 million posts each day, the site has allowed researchers to predict moods, study the Arab Spring and now, map out regional dialects.

According to the New York Times, Russ waded through nearly 400,000 Twitter posts to analyze three different linguistic variables. He started by mapping the regional distribution of “Coke,” “pop” and “soda” based on 2,952 tweets from 1,118 identifiable locations. As has been documented in the past, “Coke” predominantly came from Southern tweets, “pop” from the Midwest and Pacific Northwest and “soda” from the Northeast and Southwest.

Russ then analyzed  the migration of “hella,” meaning “very” as in “hella cool,” the Times notes. The qualifier first sprouted in California, but to Russ’ surprise, has since made its way to the Midwest. He also took a look at a common Midwest and Pittsburgh-area syntactical construction, “needs X-ed” as in “the sink needs fixed.” This phrase seems to have moved toward the South since the mid-1990s.

More 

λ♥[love] (Linguistics Love Song) (by eastfarthing1420)

superlinguo:

“holographic russian nesting dolls”

It would be nice to say that when it comes to naming linguistic phenomena things are a little more scientific than T-Rex suggested… but it isn’t really. There’s no official body for accepting and naming phenomena like there is for the periodic table (although, really, with names like Seaborguim and Ununhexium maybe they aren’t doing any better).

[Click image to get to more Dinosaur Comic goodness, or to make it bigger for reading]

Usually to name a linguistic phenomenon you have to come up with a name you have to come up with something good, and then share it with enough of your colleagues, and hope they accept it - so something of a more organic approval system. It doesn’t always take; one example that comes to mind is the ornative case used in George van Driem’s 1993 grammar of Dumi and then never again by anyone else that I’m aware of.

superlinguo:

Me (Georgia): Hey Lauren, do you think we should do some videos for Superlinguo?

Lauren: Hmm. I reckon it could be good for our readers, but what about me? I’d have to make sure my hair was all shevelled before I went on camera, sounds like a hassle.

Me: …

Lauren: Ha.

Hanging out with a friend who’s a linguistics PhD student has its hazards, including being subject to jokes based on backformation of words from their suffixed version.

An unpaired word is one that seems like it shouldn’t occur on its own, because it’s missing a prefix or a suffix of some kind. Lauren’s use of shevelled without its dis- prefix is an excellent example of this. Dishevelled is a word without a direct antonym.

My favourite unpaired word has got to be gruntled. What’s yours? There’s quite a wieldy list over at the Wikipedia page for Unpaired Words, check it out, unless you’re feeling trepid.