Fuck Yeah My Language

Yo, you know (sighs) soccer commentators are the rudest people they’re so blunt! Like, any other sport, like with basketball, you got a bad player on the court “Ah there goes Johnson. Havin’ a rough season, havin’ a rough season. Hopefully he can turn things around”. Soccer lets you know how they really feel. [in british accent, which somehow has a drawl] “Oh boy. And on the field is Bonaducci.” “Is he really that awful, Stanley?” “He plays like a ziploc bag full of semen.” “Honestly I just want to know why the manager put him in” “Bonaducci for the penalty. And of course he misses by three continents and a Toyota”

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I got to spend Friday at the University of Sussex down in Brighton for Doing Public Linguistics. The one day symposium was, as the name suggested, about linguistics beyond the academic context. Unsurprisingly there was a healthy contingent of Twitter Linguists there, and lots of action on the official #PubLx hashtag. Laura (of linguistlaura blog fame) very kindly storified for the tweets, and you can read them at the above link.

It was really exciting to meet many people I know from twitter and/or whose public writing I’ve been following for a long time. I was awesome to get to meet Laura (@linguistlaura) finally, as well as Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist), Lane Greene (@lanegreene), Jane Setter (@JaneSetter), Debbie Cameron (@wordspinster), and Geoff Pullum (of @LanguageLog fame). I also got to catch up with my fellow Aussie-in-England Adam Schembri (@AdamCSchembri). Yes that *was* some gratuitous name-dropping right there, but it’s one of the nice things about being on this side of the world these days.

It was a day of interesting conversation - mostly aimed at those who are already participating in public-facing linguistics already, rather than people who are thinking of starting out (for that, check out this awesome 2017 LSA Lingstitute course Gretchen McCulloch is going to run!). It was also heavily grounded in the UK context, so there was lots of discussion about how media stuff in particular is framed within the “Research Excellence Framework” that has academic departments around the country in a flurry.

Although it emerged slowly over the course of the day, there was not a lot of explicit discussion at the start about the difference between doing ‘public media’, ‘research impact’ and ‘public engagement’. The discussions about linguists’ role in shaping primary and high school curricula made that clearer in the afternoon. It also became clear that doing media (traditional or social) does not, in itself, constitute research impact, although university departments often think that it does.

Linguists have an important role to play, in the media, in advocacy and in education, but we need to negotiate increasing demands from universities, and a rapidly shifting media landscape. We still need to build a (ahem) ‘brand’ for linguists as a source of reliable and scientifically-robust language commentary. Thanks to Laura for also turning this Language Log motto that Geoff discussed into a meme for our enjoyment [original here].

Subjunctive does often come after quizá/quizás

Someone asked if I could do a masterpost on vocab lists I’ve done (so far). So, if you’re interested in lots and lots of Spanish vocab, here you go!

This masterpost is designed to help people improve their vocabulary… or as I would put it, how to Spanish with useful or better words.

Household Items (and The Basics) / Cosas caseras (y lo básico)

The Human Body / El cuerpo humano

Sports & Exercise / Los deportes y ejercicios

Kitchen (and Restaurants) / La cocina (y los restaurantes)

Theater (and Cinema) / El teatro (y el cinema)

Weddings (and Family) / La boda (y la familia)

Fairy Tales / Los cuentos de hadas

Politics / La política

Cars and Driving / Los carros, coches, y autos

Trees and Flowers / Los árboles y las flores

Birds / Las aves

Sea Creatures / Las criaturas del mar

Races and other Human Things / Las razas y otras cosas humanas

Para gustos hay colores - More color words than you will ever need to know

Various Vocab tag

Palabras Claves tag

Spanishskulduggery Vocabulario tag

Some Spanish Verbal Prefixes w/ Examples

Spanish Suffixes -ez and -eza

Spanish Suffixes -ura

Spanish Suffixes -ista

Spanish Suffixes -dumbre

Spanish Suffixes -ería

Spanish Loanwords in English

Why’s that word masculine when it ends in an -a?

Why does that word have a masculine article but takes a feminine adjective? - el agua, el alma, el ave, el águila and other Spanish rarities

When Gender Changes Meaning

Fruit / Fruit Trees / Fruit Plantations - Look at those linguistic suffixes and characteristics in action

Compound Words / Palabras compuestas

Palabras compuestas #2

Using Diminutives

Using Augmentatives

Spanishskulduggery - Word Association Masterpost #1

Countries and Cities Around the World - Brought to you by fact-checking, WordReference, and lots of Wikipedia searches

Nationalities & Demonyms - Good luck

Heads or Tails (by Spanish-speaking country)

So many Reflexive Verbs

Verbs + Prepositions

Stem-Changing Verbs -zco

Spanishskulduggery - Unexpectedly Useful Verbs Masterpost #1

Past Participles in Spanish - Regular, Irregular, & Secondaries

The poner Family Tree

Idioms with prestar

Idioms with dar and darse

Idioms with tener

lo que is a noun

qué is a question word

and que by itself is a “that/which” so it’s a conjunction that connects clauses.

You don’t say “qué lo que”*, you just say lo que as in… lo que no entiendo “what I don’t understand”

*EDIT:I didn’t know this but apparently qué lo que is slang for “what’s up?” for some people. 

A lo que is “the thing that” or “that which”… translated as “what”, but it’s not the same as the question word.

Using qué is used when something is unknown and the question is being asked: ¿Qué es? “What is it?” or ¿Qué son? “What are they?”

They’re used more or less interchangeably in most situations.

escoger is “to pick”, while elegir is “to choose” or “to elect”

The real difference is that escoger is thought of as more physical since it relates to (Spain’s) coger which is “to grab”, so it’s “to pick” more or less. While elegir is related to “elect”

The other difference is that la elección is “election” as in politics, or it’s “a choice”, and you don’t see a spin-off of escoger used for that.

The big difference is that elegir a alguien is “to elect someone”, and so elegir is more common when used for people particularly in politics. And escoger is more common with inanimate objects.

lo de + noun

lo que + conjugated verb

So for example… siento lo de ayer “I’m sorry about yesterday” vs. siento lo que dije ayer “I’m sorry about what I said yesterday”

More specifically, lo que often connects clauses between one conjugated verb and a second one, the same way that que does with compound sentences. The que or lo que in general is more likely to show up when there’s one clause with a subject and verb (sometimes they are the same thing because Spanish verb conjugations are unique to certain subjects) + another subject and verb.

So you can see no es lo que quise decir “that’s not what I meant” where es and quise are connected by lo que which works as a noun+conjunction in a way.

This is why I have trust issues XD