A US linguist dev specialized in rare and agglutinative languages. Sharing my personal observations on languages. Making ALL rare languages accessible.
Once I learn a few more US indigenous languages, I wanna pick up Somali and at least finish the Colloquial Somali course … I just love how that language sounds 🤤
Louisiana had so much French programming in the 70s.. most US indigenous languages had dozens of speakers at that time.. it ticks me off that there was no funding for THEIR broadcasting.. now we have to work from scratch with no speakers .. at least it’s possible to revive em…
I’ve mentioned this before, but my roommate for one of the grad school years was a West Frisian zoölogist. So, even though I didn’t keep up my studies (like so many other wonderful languages 😔), West Frisian is the first language I tried to learn “fieldworkingly”.
I don’t care how good AI ever gets. A good quality conversation with a human being will always be great and you always learn from people who have different opinions than you. I always learn something from everyone new I talk to.. even those I know like my brother.
for the life of me i can't figure out why people travel in Central Asia and don't at least learn to read Cyrillic
an Israeli guy i had dinner with last night was like "you know what i miss? shawarma" and we were right around the corner from a restaurant with a massive sign that said "ШАУРМА"
It’s sad how vocab gets lost unless you regularly use a language. If you asked me a few minutes ago what the word for ‘gums’ is in Hindi, I’d not have been able to answer. But I’ve known masūṛā since I was a child. Just that I haven’t used any Hindi in close to a decade now, ...
easiest way to determine this is looking at linguistic diversity. any place where there's traditionally extremely high linguistic diversity indicates areas where small groups of humans are self-sufficient, hence some of the ideal territory for humans to live
(1/20) Here's the HUGE news for Chhé'ee Fókaa (Northeastern Pomo): I have been working on a dictionary of the language for 11 years, and earlier this year I declared my draft complete. To my knowledge, I had found every written example of the language as spoken by fluent speakers
The Ethio-Semitic languages have many fascinating examples of lexical replacement where the original lexeme/root was not completely lost but was rather relegated to a very restricted distribution or construction.
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