There are seriously a lot of American Shavianists who are like “oh, my accent doesn’t distinguish between father/bother or cot/caught, can I just use any letter I like in a really haphazard manner for those?” IDK dude, if I as an Australian can fill my writing with multitudes of silent Rs, I think you can learn the difference between father/bother and cot/caught. It doesn’t really matter if you just want to write private notes to yourself, but if you want to communicate with other people it is absolutely bewildering when I see 𐑔𐑪𐑑 and realise the person meant “thought”, or 𐑢𐑭𐑑 and then realise they meant “what”.
Posts categorised ‘Languages’
Using Ukulele to Make Custom Keyboard Layouts
“So Jess,” you might say, “last week you procrastinated on your novel by recreating half your Occidental flashcards in Anki.1 On Monday you procrastinated by deleting 1.3GB of bad old photos from your iCloud storage. What have you found to procrastinate with now?”
Here is what, dear reader: I used the application Ukelele to design myself two custom …
Wiki: Brevian alphabet
The Brevian alphabet is a proposed alternative alphabet for typing English. Drawing inspiration from the Shavian alphabet, it is a phonetic alphabet which utilises letter pairs (tall/low letters for unvoiced/voiced consonants, and dotted and undotted letters for long/short vowels) to depict related letters. It was created by Brian Mansberger, and first published in 2021.
The alphabet has 40 core …
Link: “A Brief History of Dik”
Interesting piece about the unique counting system of Lincolnshire shepherds, Italo-Celtic numbers, and counting rhymes 😊
Wiki: Arpitan
Arpitan (also known as Franco-Provençal or Patois even though that second term can also be considered disparaging, and as Romand in Switzerland) is a Gallo-Romance language traditionally spoken in the east of France, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy (in the Aosta Valley and parts of Turin). It’s difficult to ascertain its present number of speakers, as reliable census data is …
On Interactive Fiction and Language-Learning
Last week, I spent a few hours going down the rabbit-hole that is experimenting with interactive fiction. This is a rabbit-hole that I do go down every once in a while, because I catch myself longing for a game to play that has a specific set of features (turn-based/not action, “quality” stemming not from difficulty but from story or general fun vibe, builds up complexity over time …
Wiki: Armenian
Armenian is an Indo-European language with about 5–7 million speakers. It is a pluricentric language with two standard forms: Eastern Armenian, which is spoken in the modern country of Armenia itself and among Armenian populations in neighbouring countries to the east, and Western Armenian, which is mostly spoken in the diaspora. Historically one of the reasons for the split is that the …
Wiki: centum-satem split
The centum-satem isogloss divides the Indo-European languages from a pretty ancient stage in their development. Essentially, the split concerns the treatment of the Proto-Indo-European velar consonants. The traditional analysis is that PIE had nine of them:
| Labiovelars | Plain velars | Palatovelars |
|---|---|---|
| *kʷ | *k | *ḱ |
| *gʷ | *g | *ǵ |
| *gʷʰ | *gʰ | *ǵʰ |
In the centum languages, the palatovelar series merged …
Wiki: Farsi
Farsi, a.k.a. Persian, is an Indo-European language spoken by 74–110 million people primarily in Iran, Afghanistan (where it’s known as Dari) and Tajikistan (where it’s known as Tajik). Historically it was an extremely influential language, exporting vast amounts of vocabulary to Ottoman Turkish and Urdu (and other Indic languages) for example, and also being the main foreign language …
Wiki: English
English is a Germanic language with approx. 373 million native speakers and 1.08 billion L2 speakers, making it the most widely-spoken language in the world (and third-most common native language). Countries where English is the L1 of the majority include the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. English is also widely spoken, and often a lingua franca, in many countries in …
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.