Polygłos

Hey everyone!!! Sorry I haven’t been active at all in the last… I don’t even know, but I’m carrying out a study on rhyme perception for my final-year dissertation, and I was thinking I might as well post it here too!

I think Langblr is generally versed in linguistics, so this might narrow it down already, but if you were educated in English or Polish, aren’t schooled in phonetics, phonology or just general linguistic theory and wouldn’t mind sparing around 20 minutes to run through a survey and browser experiment, I’d really appreciate it if you could take part - you’d really be helping a poor linguistics student out 🥺

The link to the survey is here, and you will be redirected to the programme once you complete it! Just take the time to read all the information if you’re interested and check you’re okay with everything :D

contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies

dropbox containing language textbooks

contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

dropbox containing books about language learning

includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb

Hey everyone!!! Sorry I haven’t been active at all in the last… I don’t even know, but I’m carrying out a study on rhyme perception for my final-year dissertation, and I was thinking I might as well post it here too!

I think Langblr is generally versed in linguistics, so this might narrow it down already, but if you were educated in English or Polish, aren’t schooled in phonetics, phonology or just general linguistic theory and wouldn’t mind sparing around 20 minutes to run through a survey and browser experiment, I’d really appreciate it if you could take part - you’d really be helping a poor linguistics student out 🥺

The link to the survey is here, and you will be redirected to the programme once you complete it! Just take the time to read all the information if you’re interested and check you’re okay with everything :D

丐.  仄.  叩.  瓦. 咫. 曰. 厄. 凹 and 凸. also 乒 and 乓. 

there are many, many characters that shouldn’t. shouldn’t what, you ask? good question. they just shouldn’t. 

in my head there are 3 categories of said characters, and I apologise to the discord server that has heard this before:

1) FAKE

the characters above, which just. do not look like any kind of characters that can possibly be real units of phonetic and semantic meaning. what the fuck are 凹 and 凸 doing??? that can’t be real???

2) ELDRITCH

the mesmerising Old Ones characters that are so deeply, perfectly symmetrical you can see yourself falling into their moth-like eyes. see further 噩 and 恶 and 垩 and 鼎. these characters will be the last you ever see before succumbing to the many-tentacled Void 

and

3) GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION

the characters that are just so hideously unbalanced or proportioned that I think either an extra simplification or conversely a traditionalisation should be in order to fix whatever some god in nappies accidentally failed at in his celestial calligraphy class. notable examples include 寝， 惩罚，and I gotta be honest with you here 嘴

Please reblog and comment with your own Characters That Shouldn’t: Fake, Eldritch or Graphic Design. Please take this study seriously. We must broaden their ranks.

But eventhough I love them, they are my little bastard children. With them I raise you the forth category of characters that just shouldn’t:

4) I’M NOT LIKE THE OTHERS, I SWEAR!

乒乓

于干千午牛

巴巳已己

且目自白日曰

Engelsgeduld: (lit.: angel’s patience) great amount of patience

Feierabend: (lit.: party-evening) the rest of the day that remains after work

Fernweh: the desire/longing to travel to faraway places/ foreign countries

Fingerspitzengefühl: (lit.: fingertips-feeling) good skill in handling things/ sensitivity and empathy

Fremdschämen: (lit.: foreign shame) shame that arises from the compassion with someone who made a fool of himself

Geborgenheit: more than safety, protection and invulnerability, it symbolises peace, warmth and calm you feel especially when you’re with the people you’re close to (e.g. family, friends)

Gemütlichkeit: feeling of comfort

Habseligkeiten: valuable and personally important possessions

Innerer Schweinehund: (lit.: inner pig-dog = weaker self) the part of a person that they have to overcome to be productive

Kitsch: objects with superficial beauty that are actually useless but are appreciated nonetheless

Konfliktfähigkeit: (lit.: conflict ability/skill) ability to deal with conflict / ability to constructively solve interpersonal conflicts

Kummerspeck: (lit.: grief/sorrow bacon (fat)) gained weight from emotional overeating (especially after a breakup)

Lebenslüge: (lit.: life’s lie) a lie that you tell yourself to make life more bearable

Mitdenken: (lit.: with-thinking) ability to think for yourself and do more than what you were demanded to do / trying to find a conceptional solution to a problem together with other people

Sehnsucht: intense inner longing for somebody, something or a place

Schnapsidee: (lit.: schnapps idea) a ridiculous and crazy plan/idea you have while you are drunk or an idea that is so stupid that people think you had it while being drunk

Sprachgefühl: (lit.: language feeling) feeling/sense of language, instinctive feel for a certain language / intuitive feeling of what is linguistically appropriate

Stehaufmännchen: (lit.: little stand up man) someone who doesn’t give up and begins anew

Torschlusspanik: (lit.: gate-closing-panic) the fear of missing something important / not being able to do some things (because you’re too old)

Verschlimmbessern: (lit.: verschlimmern=exasperate, verbessern=improve) improve something for the worse / make something worse but with having had the intention of improving it

Vorführeffekt: (lit.: demo effect) the effect that something you’re actually able to do doesn’t work when you want to demonstrate it to other people

Waldeinsamkeit: (lit.: forest loneliness/solitude) the seclusion/solitude of the forest

Warmduscher: (lit.: warm showerer/ somebody who showers with warm water) a wimp / a person that doesn’t like to leave their comfort zone

Weltschmerz: (lit.: world pain (world weariness)) gratuitous melancholia / kind of feeling experienced by someone who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind / the feeling of anxiety caused by the ills of the world

The project is split into 2- the first edition of the dictionary contains 80 terms such as:

Anghyfunryw-Heterosexual

Anneuaidd- Nonbinary

Anrhywiol- Asexual

Bwtsh-Butch

Camenwi- Deadnaming

Cydryweddol- Cisgender

Deurywiol- Bisexual

Dirywedd-Agender

Dyn Traws- Trans Man

Dysfforia Rhywedd- Gender Dysphoria

Hollrywiol- Pansexual

Hoyw-Gay

Lesbiaidd- Lesbian

Menyw Draws- Trans Woman

Niwtrois- Neutrois

Rhyweddhylifol- Genderfluid

Trawsryweddol- Transgender

Ymgwestiynu- Questioning

And many more terms to fill in the gaps of language, such as coining terms for aromantic, transmasc, transfem and mspec identities! 

I would really appreciate if you could reblog this and share it with any langblrs you know to spread the word!

I also run a Welsh LGBTQ+ discord, dm for a link!

[...]

(1) For polyglots, language is fundamentally a skill. Skills can be segmented, tested and ranked (Urciuoli 2008). They can be trained and, more importantly, ‘hacked’.

[...]

(2) Efficiency is the guiding principle of language learning. Approaching language learning through discourses of time/speed and productivity entails narrowing our goals to measurable and verifiable skills [...]. Although polyglot language learning methods are presented as ‘exciting’ and ‘fun’ lifehacks, they look very much like yet another encroachment of managerial rationality onto our non-working lives.

[...]

(3) Language learning is personal. [...] The internet has annihilated the barriers of space and time in language learning. Thanks to the apparent immediacy of communication, today we can learn any language anywhere anytime. This puts the onus on the learner: languages are no longer taught, they are learned.

[...]

(4) Finally, for polyglots, language is individual, not social. Polyglots approach language primarily as a skill, rather than as a social practice. Abstracted from social practice and actual speech communities, language becomes a bundle of skills, a system that can be ‘hacked’. In contrast, social practices cannot be ‘hacked’, there are no ‘shortcuts’ or ‘accelerators’ for them. [...] The idea of language as individual echoes the neoliberal erosion of the social and its high regard for freedom and individuality (Brown 2019). By pretending that all languages are on a level playing field, it also obscures the forms of inequality that characterize language in the era of globalization (Blommaert 2010).