Korean Arabic 🤝 salty = good 🧂

friend I'm catching up with after a few months: are you learning any languages these days? me: uhhh yeah mainly working on French and Arabic, dabbling in Hokkien a bit since I'm visiting Taiwan next month my (partial) recent Youtube and PDF history:

Therapist: Syriac Mongolian isn't real, it can't hurt you Syriac Mongolian:

and yeah, the historical links are obvious. I just remembered this text about the Mongol invasions from Thackston's "Introduction to Syriac"

with one month left to cram Hokkien, I've gotta say I appreciate how regular tone correspondences between Chinese dialects can be, despite all the other wild phonetic variation if you know Mandarin and one southern dialect you can deduce the Hokkien tone >90% of the time

so at some point the Sino-Korean pronunciation for 秒 ("second") just had a random irregular change (from myo to cho) and everyone was like "no it's fine let's keep it"?

It's well documented that Chinese people had font support issues since early Western Zhou.

Cabo Verde in the World Cup, Curaçao at the top of their group, big day for Portuguese-based creole languages

oh so this means that the native Korean word for "to learn" was originally a causative form of "to soak"? 🧽

linguists: a unit of sound is a phoneme, a unit of writing is a grapheme, a unit of morphology is a morpheme Greek: a unit of sports is an athleme

I decided to take a closer look at this by scraping all of Wiktionary's "X terms borrowed from Y" categories... according to which these are the top creditors and debtors 🔄 Romanian as debtor #1 seems plausible enough, though the sheer number of loans from French feels high...

dᶻədís - "tooth" in Lushootseed 🦷 dᶻədís - "the teeth" in some sort of heavy European accent, probably

🚨LANGUAGE LEARNING EMERGENCY UPDATE🚨 book club I'm in decided to read a Polish book next (Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night) & I'm going to try my best to read the original need to pause my Southeast Europe dabbling tour to get Serious with Slavic again? #langtwt

The White House in Chinese: "White Palace" (白宮) The White House in Korean: "White Clay Hall" (白堊館) which is fine, but the characters for "white clay" also mean "Cretaceous period" 🦖 so to me it sounds like it's referring to a dinosaur exhibit in a museum or something lol

calling a white person "Boston" - the preferred nomenclature calling a white person "Boboston" - a slur apparently (pastəd is just the regular phonetic equivalent of "Boston" in Lushootseed)

no way, faux Georgian

Greek Turkish Finnish 🤝 🤝 adding -ma to verb stems to form verbal nouns

演出 in Chinese and Vietnamese - to perform/to act 演出 in Japanese and Korean - to direct/to produce 😵‍💫 (yǎnchū/diễn xuất/えんしゅつ/연출)

every time I talk about Persian in French (not very often, but often enough...) I hesitate over what the language is actually called, so I finally decided to look it up, and the official rule is that modern Persian is "persan" but ancient Persian is "perse" wtf whyyy

interesting that Polish coined a native word for "parasite" but also it literally means "butt grazer"???