An Etymological Map Of The Brain By Neuroskeptic

Kashmir is bleeding

TW// mention of violence

PLEASE SPREAD AWARENESS.

There’s an issue our lands are dealing with, and it deserves all the global attention possible. To give a short and not-so-detailed explanation, I’d tell you that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were once one, before getting colonised by the British. Once the states became independent and the British finally left, a territory was left disputed, Kashmir. Since 1947, the two countries (Pakistan and India) have been fighting for Kashmir (as it’s historically important for each one).

(You can search up the entire story of Kashmir and understand both Pakistan and India according to their history and culture and religion. I can’t write it because I don’t want my opinion to enter this post- I want people to understand it all through an unbiased view, and also because it’s too much to mention in limited time. )

Yet mindsets have changed. While the prime minister of Pakistan has declared that the “Kashmir solution” is now all up to the cizitens of Kashmir and not Pakistanis, india is deploying 35,000 more soldiers in addition to the 500,000 they have already sent in the disputed territory. The Indian government has declared the repealing of article 370- saying that it is going to ‘improve the lives of kashmiris’. The people of Kashmir are going to die. They have been getting killed day by day since the past years, little babies, school going children, bleeding teenagers, dads and mothers lying dead on the road sides, grandparents. Their land will no longer be their land.

Here’s a bit more explanation.

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This isn’t a solution, terrorism is NOT A SOLUTION. Kashmir should get what Kashmir wants, if they want to go to pakistan, become independent or join India, anything THEY want, it’s a home they’ve been living in since 1947. It’s about time we let Kashmir speak, and because they’re bleeding right now, we need to speak for their voice.

This needs attention so please spread some, it’s the least we all can do.

laptopped:

imagine banana wiht any other vowel

bununu

benene

bonono

binini

bynyny

y is a vowel???

Imagine your icon forcing you to learn a fake language

I wanted to reply to a friend’s post but I didn’t have the right word for ‘really formal and proper language’ so I looked it up and this is what I got…

So, apparently, if you don’t want to seem like a stupid teenager online use mostly utter waffle

so we went to an improv show and we played this game where somebody is given a trait and another player has to guess what it is based on how they answer questions

and one of the players who was a taxidermist was asked “what do you do for a living?” and she replied “oh you know…. stuff” AND TO THIS DAY THAT IS THE GREATEST PUN I HAVE EVER HEARD MY GOD

there is no reason for “sean” to be pronounced “shawn”

Yes. Yes. Hello. Linguistics grad student here. Big fan of historical and socio- phonetics. Let's look at a few concrete examples.

"It is a widely held belief that colonial or Extraterritorial (ET) dialects are inherently conservative. Being out of touch with the trendier developments of their Mainland sources, they develop more slowly, and are likely to show distinctly archaic features. This property has come to be known as 'colonial lag'. The notion is alive and well in English folk-linguistics: the 'pure Elizabethan English' periodically supposed to be spoken in the fastnesses of Appalachia is one of its loonier and better-known manifestations. Even sober scholars are prone to hold similar ideas; though colonial lag as a global property of ET dialects has now been discredited in a fine study by Manfred Görlach (Lass, 1990)." Some examples from this article of cases in which neither American nor England English are the most traditional: Modern Scots, despite being, you know, in Britain, has a number of conservative forms such as the velar fricative (like the <ch> in "loch", or German "Bach", found in Old English pronunciation of words like "night") that are lost in most other Englishes. While most Englishes merged the vowels of words like "earn" and "urn", Southern Hiberno-English (Ireland, though not all varieties) has kept these separate (with roughly the vowels of "bet" and "but" respectively).

Many dialects of North America keep the r where standard England English drops it, but here's some sounds Americans changed and the English preserved (from Schneider et al., 2004): pin/pen merger: the "eh" vowel becomes more like "ih" when before nasals (n, m, ng), so where in the conservative form "pen" and "pet" have the same vowel, in the innovative form found in the speech of many Americans (MOST MARKEDLY IN THE SUPPOSEDLY TRADITIONAL SPEECH OF THE SOUTH), the vowel in "pen" merges with the vowel in "pin". Betty bought a bit of bitter butter: in RP English, every /t/ in this phrase is pronounced as a classic t sound, but becomes a light d sound in North American speakers. (Compare "bitter" and "bidder" in an American accent and a posh English accent.)

This is all just English, but I'm sure New World French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and other post-colonial European languages work similarly. Icelandic is another interesting example: often referenced because of its geographic isolation from other Scandinavian languages, it kept certain Old Norse verb endings, but lost features like vowel length (Lass, 1990).

So what did English of Shakespeare's time sound like? There were many dialects of English back then and the language was in flux, so there's no single answer, but in general, it was definitely not identical to any current living dialect of English. If you can imagine a slightly illiterate Canadian pirate, you're in the ballpark. (For examples and explanation from scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s )

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood linguist

The sources: Lass, R. (1990). Early Mainland Residues in Southern Hiberno-English. Irish University Review, 20(1), 137-148. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484343 Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. (2004). A handbook of varieties of english: A multimedia reference tool two volumes plus CD-ROM. De Gruyter Mouton Courses I've taken, including sociolinguistics, history of English, and historical linguistics.

In short: Statements like 'Americans kept the original British accent' or 'Southern drawl is slowed-down British' are drastic and misleading oversimplifications. Dialects that are conservative in some senses are innovative in others. Because languages - ALL languages - change over time. Also, Shakespeare would sound strange to any modern ear.

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents

This whole thing is gold but I lost it at the Southeast food slide.

I made this powerpoint for this week’s lesson - Regional/Iconic American Foods. I went back through and replaced all the text with my student’s reactions.

二

Two horizontal lines = 2.

Pretty straightforward.