salem

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

Hej! I’m Espen and I’m a master’s student in linguistic studies. This is my masterpost about all the linguistic topics i made posts about:

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-> 💬 Linguistics Challenge 📚 - January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November

-> The Big Lingblr Community Challenge

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Linguistic Branches

What the linguistic branches mean and what they analyse

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Phonetics & Phonology 

Linguistic abbreviations, consonants, and vowels

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Pronunciation of English consonants & vowels

Stress in sentences

Unstressed [i] & [u]

Phonetics #1: Basic Acoustics

Phonetics #2: Types of Sounds

Speech Production & Voicing

Linguistic Liaison

Phonological Assimilation

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Morphology 

Morphemes

Allomorphs of {-s} and {-ed}

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Word formation 

Word formation

How new words are created

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Syntax 

Word classes (sentence structure #1)

Phrases (sentence structure #2)

Clause elements & clause types (sentence structure #3)

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Semantics 

Ferdinand de Saussure: Sign, Signifier & Signified

Sense relations

Basic Colour Terms

Components of Meaning & Componential Analysis

What is a ‘lexical item’?

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Pragmatics

Speech Acts

Indirect Speech Acts

Deixis & distance

Cooperative Principle & Gricean Maxims

Implicature

‘Face’ and Politeness

Conversation Structures

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Text Linguistics:

What is a text?

Text types, text forms, and text form variants

Coherence & cohesion

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Sociolinguistics:

Dialects & accents, pidgins & creoles (language varieties #1)

Style and Register (language varieties #2)

Pidgins & Creoles

General American

AAVE (African American Vernacular English)

Australian English & New Zealand English

South African English (SAE)

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Language Acquisition:

Characteristics of Human Language

How do animals communicate?

How did languages emerge? (Continuity vs. discontinuity hypotheses)

Linguistic Relativity vs. Linguistic Universalism

Language Acquisition - how do children learn languages?

First Stages of Speech Production in Children

What is a 'wug’?

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Historical Linguistics:

The periods of the English language (History of English #1)

Diachronic vs. synchronic (History of English #2)

Proto-Languages (History of English #3)

Language Families (History of English #4)

Old English: 450 (700) - 1100

Middle English: 1100 - 1500

Early Modern English: 1500 - 1700

What happened in the year 1066 and why it was so important for the English language

Why is English such a global language?

i-mutation

Great Vowel Shift (GVS)

Inkhorn terms

Chain shifts

The 'minim problem’

Association/Consociation vs. Dissociation

Processes of Meaning Change

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English Linguistics:

Loan words in the English language

Loan words #2: Doublets

English tenses #1 - present tense

English tenses #2 - past tense

English tenses #3 - some differences between the tenses

English tenses #4 - future tenses & expressions with future meaning

Kachru’s Model of World Englishes

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Other Linguistic Topics:

Analytic vs. Synthetic Language

Translation strategies

Translations: Functional Analysis of the Source Text

Corpus linguistics

Bouba & Kiki

What is a 'hapax legomenon’?

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My recommendations:

Book/film recommendations for language enthusiasts & advanced linguistic topics

Recommendations for Reading/Activities before starting Linguistic Studies

Sources for Research on English Linguistics, Literature, and Culture

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-> you can find all my answered asks by searching for #ask, #ask response or #request

Phonetics & Phonology

Phonetics deals with the production and reception of speech sounds. Phonology analyses the different speech sounds of a language, their patterns, and how they create meaning.

Morphology

Morphology analyses the parts that make up a word, e.g. uninvited = {un-} {invite} {-ed}.

Word-formation

Word formation looks at how new words are created in a language.

Syntax

Syntax analyses the formation and structure of phrases and sentences, and how the different parts of such sentences are (grammatically) interrelated.

Semantics

Semantics analyses linguistic meaning in a language and the speaker’s intuition / knowledge of meaning when using language.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics deals with how context influences meaning and how language is used in communication, beyond ‘literal’ communication.

Text linguistics

Text linguistics mainly focuses on the question ‘What is a text?’. It deals with the structure of texts, text definition, text classification, formal texture, semantic texture, and textual intentions.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics analyses how society and culture influences language, e.g. the social aspects of language use and how different groups use language.

Historical linguistics

1st and 2nd language acquisition

Language acquisition looks at how children learn their first native language (in what stages 1st language acquisition happens, from babbling to full-on sentences), as well as how 2nd languages are acquired (this includes languages later in life, as well as bilingualism). 

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics looks at the mental and psychological processes that allow humans to use and understand language. This includes speech development and language development, as well as research in the areas of sex differences, aphasia, language after congenital or acquired injury to the immature brain, and developmental disorders of language (dysphasia), sometimes even going as far as extending research to experiments on how apes (e.g. gorillas and chimpanzees) learn (sign) language. 

Neurolinguistics 

Neurolinguistics looks at how language works in the brain, i.e. where language knowledge is stored, what happens in our brains when we learn languages, and what happens when we use it. It looks at various different topics, such as why humans are able to use language and why our communication system is so different to that of other animals, how we keep track of more than one language, and in what way our brains are different from others’ if we suffer from dyslexia or stuttering. 

Cognitive linguistics

This challenge will teach you the basics of linguistics step-by-step over the course of 12 months.

This month, we’ll look at: sociolinguistics & language variation.

Each month you get a few exercises (depending on how complex the topic is), so you can take breaks in between days or use those days to revise and practice. I’ve put links to all the topics on which i made blog posts, but you’re very welcome to do your own research online.

This challenge is based on what I learned in the first semesters of my linguistic studies at uni, and it’s aimed at giving you a broad introduction and teaching you the most important concepts from several different fields of linguistics.

Throughout the month, you’ll get the chance to apply your new knowledge in some exercises and tasks. If you want, you can share your work via reblog with the tag #linguisticschallenge, i’d love to see your contributions :)

Also, feel free to follow me so you won’t miss next month’s challenge!

Inform yourself about the field of sociolinguistics and what it analyses

Look at Kachru’s model of World Englishes

Look at dialects and accents, and how they are differentiated

Inform yourself about the differences between the General American accent & the general British accent

Inform yourself about Australian English

Inform yourself about New Zealand English

Inform yourself about South African English

Inform yourself about African American Vernacular English

Look at creoles and pidgins

Task: Find one creole language and do some research on its history and linguistic features

Task: Find one pidgin language and do some research on its history and linguistic features

Look at style and register

If you’re quick or want to learn more, you could check out my linguistics masterpost to see if i made any new posts on this topic after creating this challenge. You could also take a look at these book tips:

Book tips:

Gramley, S. The History of English - An Introduction. Routledge. 2012.

Crystal, David. English as a global language. Cambridge University Press. 2003

Wolfram, W. and N. Schilling-Estes. American English. Blackwell. 2006.

Kortmann, B. & E. Schneider. A handbook of varieties of English. Vol. 2. De Gruyter. 2008.

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Next month, we’ll start looking at historical linguistics (part 1).

a list of lists!! levels are estimated.

refold has a crowdsourced resource list for spanish, curated & with notes | A1 to C2

dreamingspanish on reddit has a crowdsourced spreadsheet with over 90 channels geared towards learners | A1 to C2

learn natively has a huge deck of spanish books sorted by difficulty by learners | A1 to C2

prensa escrita has a list of news websites sorted by country & sometimes city | B1 to C1 probably

the CI wiki has an editable list of CI resources and a couple of native content links | A1 to like B2?

comprehensible hub has tons of spanish podcasts for learners | A1 to B2

letterboxd has a ton of very fun #español lists, e.g. movies mentioned in the wild project podcast, latin american female directors, made in puerto rico | ~B2 to C2

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.