Rochelle has a free program called Learn ASL in 31 days, currently I am on day 10ish or 12, (idk I’m on learning my numbers currently) but I believe this site will help people that are either curious about ASL and just wants to learn, or actually is Deaf but can’t afford to going to actual class or something, or just hard of hearing. 

Weak Evidence for Word-Order Universals: Language Not as ‘Innate’ as Thought?

About 6,000 languages are spoken today worldwide. How this wealth of expression developed, however, largely remains a mystery. A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has now found that word-orders in languages from different language families evolve differently.

“Our study shows that different processes occur in different language families,” says Michael Dunn. “The evolution of language does not follow one universal set of rules.” For example, the “verb-object” pattern influences the “preposition-noun” pattern in the Austronesian and Indo-European languages, but not in the same way, and not in the other two language families. The researchers never found the same pattern in word-order across all language families.

Since the 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky has been defending the view that there are universal similarities between all languages. He claims that this is due to an innate language faculty that functions according to the same principle in any human being. On the other hand, the linguist Joseph Greenberg does not put forward the existence of a genetically determined “universal grammar,” but does speak of a “universal word-order,” whereby the general mechanisms of language-processing in the brain accordingly determine word-order and sentence structure. These new results are inconsistent with both of these views. “Our study suggests that cultural evolution has much more influence on language development than universal factors. Language structure is apparently not so much biologically determined as it is shaped by its ancestry,” explains Stephen Levinson.

So being that it is Ramadan beginning tomorrow, I decided for the whole month I’m going to post at least one Arabic word, with its Classical Arabic pronunciation — and of course, why not begin with the word رمضان?

So the word رمضان, in Classical Arabic would be pronounced as [rɑmɑɮˤɑːn], interestingly enough. This actually caught me off surprise today when I was reading up a bit and noticed the ض, which of course would mean that the word رمضان has a pharyngealized lateral fricative! This may also explain as to why the pronunciation in Indo-Iranian languages places a [z] in the place of [ɮˤ], and also why the modern Arabic pronunciation uses [dˤ]. If the coronal area of the tongue was used in the pronunciation, when the sound began to lose its articulation the logical conclusion would be that the sound shifted from [ɮˤ] > [dˤ].

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

三叠字 Triplets 你见过它们吗？ Have you ever seen them before?

So here comes a language that people familiar with more obscure Semitic languages might know. So as assumed, most Semitic languages are fairly widely spoken unless it’s name is Hobyot [hoːbjoːt], Bathari [batˤħari], Argobba [argobːa], or anything that can be very generally called “Aramaic”…and then there’s Harari. Harari isn’t necessarily restricted in speech community size — it has around 120,000 speakers — it’s simply restricted in a geographic sense. Harari is from, well, Harar; a city found in north eastern Ethiopia on the end of the Ahmar mountain range. And well, this is the only place you’ll actually find large amounts of Harari-speaking populations in Ethiopia.

While there is obviously a Harari diaspora in both Addis Ababa and outside of Ethiopia, Harari seems to only have a low transmission rate in these situations (from personal knowledge, I could be wrong). Yet nonetheless, Harari is not an endangered language in relatively any way, shape, or form. It actually has a fairly extensive literary history — I actually own a manuscript that is most likely in Harari. So the language is not necessarily obscure (if you study Semitic languages that is), or threatened in any way unless you’re speaking of the religious sphere where it’s lost the battle against Arabic for the most part. Harari is a fairly interesting outside of its sociolinguistics situation as well.

It’s closest relatives around found relatively distant from it, Zay being located in and around one lake in central Ethiopia, and both Silt’e and Wolane being located in Southern Ethiopia near the Outer South branch of Ethiopian Semitic. Interestingly enough, despite the geographic distance, there is far less lexical difference. Harari relatively has some where around 70% lexical correspondence with Zay and somewhere around 60% with Silt’e (there is no data for lexical similarity with Wolane). It is also fairly closely related to Amharic, being that it is a member of the Transversal branch of South Ethiopian Semitic.

In Neapolitan nouns referring to family members can take the possessive suffixes -mo, -ma “my” (singular), -to, -ta “your” (singular) to indicate possession. Moreover, mate, pate, no’ and zio usually are prefaced by the word oi or o/a which functions as a vocative interjection, e.g. oi ma’, oi pa’, o no’, a zia.

‘o = the (m. s.) ‘a = the (f. s.)

You’re awesome. I really appreciate this!!