Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
=the corner in which you retreat when you´re desperate because of your fear when being unable to form monster words
*eye twitch*
But what I want to see now is two germans arguing over the construction of one of these monster words.
@shiplocks-of-love I don’t think that will happen. The words make perfect sense. I think if German is your mother tongue you get a feeling for combining words, like a
Monsterwortbildungsgespür
Monster = monster
Wort = word
Bildung(s) = formation
Gespür = intuition
;-)
🤡
Sprachirrgartenbelustigungsbeitrag
die Sprache = language
• irren = to become lost (also: to err, to be mistaken; to wander, to stray)
• der Garten = garden
der Irrgarten = maze, knot garden
• be- = prefix with a variety of functions: ¹as part of a compound word, it denotes a processing or change of state; ²as part of a compound word, it denotes a touch; ³as part of a compound word, it denotes a more intensive preoccupation with or thematization of something; ⁴it forms from a noun an adjective with a pseudo-participle form because the corresponding verb does not exist; ⁵as a prefix, it forms a transitive verb from a previously intransitive verb; ⁶as a prefix of a verb, it shifts the focus and thus changes the sentence structure
• lustig = funny
• -ung = suffix turning an adjective/adverb into a noun
die Belustigung = amusement, entertainment, merriment
der Beitrag = contribution, article in a newspaper or magazine, posting on social media, input to a discussion
Bloody love this language <3<3<3
The thing is, since in German you have to decline/conjugate many words in relation to the noun they are refering to those monster words actually serve a purpose of making the language simpler.
A common example is a (as in any) red wine (ein roter Wein) as compaired to the compound a red wine (ein Rotwein). If rot is an adjective it has to be conjugated: der rote Wein - des roten Weins - die roten Weine - and many more. But it if rot is part of the noun you only have to decline Wein: der Rotwein - des Rotweins - die Rotweine.
So, die Verzweiflung über die Vermüllung der Umwelt is way longer than Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung and you would have to know three grammatical genders and the words’ respective declinations. Whereas for Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung you only need to know that Verzweiflung is grammatically feminine (die) and its deklinations.
-s- // the glue that keeps german compound words together
repost // self explanatory
Doomscrollaufhellungsrepost // a repost to brighten up your doom scroll
You‘re Welcome!
The thing that I always want to point out to English speakers marvelling at German compounds is that we do this too! It’s a thing that Germanic languages are especially prone to!
It’s just conventional in English to keep writing spaces in between larger compounds, whereas in German it’s conventional to remove them. But they sound the same! Grammatically, they’re identical!
You could call it the…
English-German compound word space omission overadmiration fallacy
Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions
We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said ‘no’. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no’. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things…started to get a little murky. This isn’t just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!
So wait…does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It’s okay, linguistics has a solution!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why deciding what’s in and what’s out of the definition of a word is so dang tricky, why people love to argue about it, and how prototype theory solves all the “is X a Y” arguments once and for all.
Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 9: Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all. We’ve added an updated announcements section to the top and a few new things about prototypes and meaning to the end. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction! We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!
Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetatched rabbit-part!”
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we’re learning new words, inspired by the famous “Gavagai” thought experiment from the philosopher of language VWO Quine. We talk about how children have a whole object assumption when learning language, and how linguists go about learning languages that are new to them through either translating standardized cross-linguistic wordlists known as Swadesh lists or staying monolingual and acting out concepts. We also talk about when our baseline assumptions are challenged, such as in categorizing kangaroos and wallabies by their hopping rather than their shape, and when useful folk categories, like “trees” and “fish” don’t line up with evolutionary taxonomies.
Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetached rabbit-part!” Inspired by the famous Gavagai thought experiment, these items feature a running rabbit and the caption “lo, an undetached rabbit-part!” in a woodblock engraving crossed with vaporwave style in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black/white on shirts, scarves, and more!
“More people have been to Russia than I have” is a sentence that at first seems fine, but then gets weirder and weirder the more you read it. Inspired by these Escher sentences, we’ve made self-referential shirts saying “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have” (also available on tote bags, mugs, and hats), so you can wear them in old-time typewriter font and see who does a double take.
Finally, we’ve made a design that simply says “Ask me about linguistics” in a style that looks like a classic “Hello, my name is…” sticker, and you can put it on stickers and buttons and shirts and assorted other portable items for when you want to skip the small talk and go right to a topic you’re excited about.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the word “do”! We talk about the various functions of “do” as illustrated by lyrics from ABBA and other pop songs, what makes the word “do” so unique in English compared to other languages, and the drama of how “do” caught on and then almost got driven out again
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch
Posts that remind me to nerd out about the intricacies of historical fiction writing
This isn’t historical fiction, but period fiction, but I remember having a jarring OH reaction when discovering something that’s just a standard part of English now was less than a hundred years old by reading a book. the book was Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, published in 1930, and in the first chapter a judge is speaking:
‘It is not necessary for him, or her, to prove innocence; it is, in the modern slang phrase, “up to” the Crown to prove guilt…’
There are several particularly good examples of this in books by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who lived in both the UK and the US and several times depicts characters from those two places encountering each other. For example, The Shuttle was published in 1907 and has this delightful passage of two British characters encountering an American:
“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow—I like him. He does not wish to ‘butt in too much.’ Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.” His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields. “Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said. “It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be 'butting in’ upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,'” he added.
And the more I see historical examples of people encountering novel expressions that are utterly unremarkable to us now, the more I think, you know what, I might as well approach language change with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff.
I like the expression new-fangled. I don’t know what it means for something to be fangled, but I sure as hell know it was recent
It’s from the Old English word feng, which can mean “to take”, or also “to grasp, hold, or embrace”. So something that’s newfangled is something that was taken up recently.
The reason it’s using this pretty archaic root is that it’s an older word than a lot of people think. Here it is in the Canterbury Tales.
ALT
Minutes after posting: “Why did I write archaic when I could have gone with old-fangled?”
Joined by former guests Kelly Wright and Maureen Kosse, as well as Kelly Yoshida Nuttall in the background, this episode is a free-flowing conversation about “Karen,” how it’s NOT the n-word, why these non-slurs (insults, in fact) are equated to slurs, and what can be done about Karens.
‘ard’ is a real suffix in the english language just like ‘ly’ or ‘ify’, it just isnt common enough for us to notice its usage. ‘ard’ means ‘too much’ or ‘too easily’
so ‘mustard’ is something that is ‘too pungent’, just as ‘wizard’ is someone who is too wise, ‘coward’ is someone too easily cowed, and ‘drunkard’ is someone too often drunk
this implies that ‘bastard’ is someone who is too ‘bast’ and this needs experimentation and research
Are you fucking serious omg
This is pretty much correct. According to the OED bastard is from Old French and the bast- part means “pack saddle” which was used as a bed by mule drivers, giving the phrase fils de bast, a child conceived on the pack saddle instead of the marriage bed. In English it becomes bastard, the -ard being a pejorative. It is the same one as wizard and coward and drunkard.
types of ard
must
bast
wiz
cow
my brain feels Expanded
further types of ard, since etymonline has a whole section about it (art is an accepted variant)
Gretchen: Sometimes “That’s not a word,” is a shorthand for: I don’t think that’s a real thing, I don’t even know if that’s a thing, or I haven’t heard this word before.
Lauren: I felt really embarrassed because I was probably about 26 or 27 the first time I heard the word “isthmus.” I just did not have it – it turns out, we just don’t have isthmuses in Australia. It’s like a peninsula- type thing.
Gretchen: Yeah, it’s kind of – I don’t know what the difference is between isthmus and a peninsula now that I’m thinking about it. I’m sure someone does but off the top of my head –
Lauren: The difference is that I had heard of the word “peninsula” before I was 27.
Gretchen: I mean, I grew up on a peninsula, but there was definitely also some places near me called called isthmuses – isthmi? Isthmapodes? What is the plural of an isthmus? I’ve said this word too many times now.
Lauren: But yeah, like when I heard “isthmus” the first time, it would be easy to have this knee-jerk reaction of, “That’s not a word!” Whereas instead trying to have the first reaction of, “That is not a word I have encountered yet.”
Gretchen: Exactly, just being able to say “I haven’t heard of that, but that’s interesting!” And how sad the world would be if I knew all the words already. Can you imagine not learning any new words? You’d never have that like, “Whoa, what is that?” or “I learned a new thing now.” Imagine a world where you’ve learned all the words. That’s a terrible world!
Lauren: Imagine a world where the vocabulary was so finite that you’d run out of new words and experiences to have.
”
Excerpt from Episode 25 of Lingthusiasm: Every word is a real word
The inspiration for this blog post comes from a presentation I gave at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival (you can find my presentation here). The topic of the festival was Light and I took this as an opportunity to talk about how words in a language come to have certain meanings — and why in English we seem to use certain sounds when we refer to phenomena that have to do with light.
What does this sunset sound like?
And this reflection?
Consider the pictures on the right. Both of these pictures show certain types of light — I hope that you would agree that a fitting word to describe the sunset in English would be glow. In the second picture, the kind of reflection on the water can be described by the word glisten. We can repeat this with other kinds of light and chances are that you’d use words like gleam, glitter, etc. So could we go ahead and suggest that words that start with the sounds [gl] always refer to light in some sense? And why would this be the case?
To explore this question, we can go ahead and formulate a hypothesis about English and see whether it is true.
Some sounds, like [gl], refer to the concept of “light”.
Signs: arbitrary and conventionalised
Before testing whether this hypothesis is true, we need to get an idea about how sounds of words and the meanings of words are put together. This is where things get interesting. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously argued that the connection between sound (i.e. the way a word sounds, a signifier) and meaning (i.e. the concept a word refers to, a signified) is arbitrary.
This means that there is no inherent connection between a word like tree and the concept it refers to. There is evidence for this: the concept “tree” is referred to differently across languages and people generally don’t have any trouble associating different sounds with the same concept. (A lot more can be said about this, obviously.)
This can be taken further: the linguist André Martinet coined the notion of “double articulation” or “duality of patterning”. This means that meaningful words are made up of smaller units that are meaningless. Consider again the word tree. It is made up of three phonemes, a /t/, a /r/, and an /i:/. It is difficult to argue that /t/ refers to the trunk, /r/ the leaves, and /i:/ to the branches of a tree — or any other combination. Yet when put together in a certain order, speakers of English understand this sequence of sounds to refer to a particular concept involving a trunk, leaves, and branches (a very prototypical kind of tree).
Now this leaves us in a pickle: if de Saussure and Martinet are right, there is no way that a combination of sounds like [gl] can refer to any semantic concept: [gl] is not a “word” on its own, it is merely a sequence of sounds that do not have their own meaning. So why do we find these sounds showing up again and again in words referring to light? Before tackling that question, let’s look at a corner of language in which de Saussure’s arbitrariness is less pronounced (pun intended).
De Saussure was aware that not all signs are completely arbitrary: certain sounds are iconic. This means that the way they sound reflects the concept that they refer to. A well-known phenomenon of this sort is onomatopoeia (for lovers of Wikipedia lists, I recommend this gem). Onomatopoeia is interesting because it seems to provide counterexamples to the claim that all signs are arbitrary: is it a coincidence that words referring to snoring across languages have [r], [k] and [s] sounds in them?
These sounds obviously try to imitate the extralinguistic phenomena that they refer to, so in this sense they are not arbitrary. But they are not fully iconic either: as de Saussure also suggested, arbitrariness is one side of the sign-meaning coin. The flip side is “conventionalisation”. This means that while the sign-meaning connection is often arbitrary, it is not fully arbitrary. Not everyone makes up their own arbitrary sounds when they refer to trees! A language community uses certain sounds that are generally agreed upon to refer to a certain concept by convention.
Interestingly, the same holds for onomatopoeia. While snore might sound more like snoring than tree sounds like, err, a tree, when using the concept of snoring as a verb, speakers of English cannot help but use the conventionalised verb snore rather than merely imitate a snoring sound. The same force of conventionalisation can also be seen when comparing how different languages express animal noises, a classic example of onomatopoeia. In Hungarian, a pig’s grunt is referred to by röf röf. In English, it is oink oink. Both of these sounds are said to be iconic, yet they don’t even share a single sound! Part of the reason is that languages have different inventories of sounds, so röf röf wouldn’t even be a possible English word.
In an English speaking community, I cannot go around and expect people to understand what I’m referring to if I say röf röf, even if it sounds more like a pig than oink. In Hungarian and English, respectively, these two different sounds are the conventionalised ways of referring to pigs’ sounds (listen to a pig here).
Is there a language of light, then?
Where does this leave us with respect to light? We have seen so far that arbitrariness and conventionalisation exert a certain force on words in a language. There is an elephant in the room here, however. If onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like what they describe, how can we talk about iconic words referring to light? Light does not “sound” at all, so why should something like [gl] refer to light? How can a sound be iconic and refer to something visual?
An answer here is that this is due to history: in Proto-Indo-European, a hypothetical language spoken some 5500 years ago, a word like *ghel- (the “*” indicates that this is a reconstructed form) meant shine (http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=glow). This word was very successful and has survived thousands of years in forms like glow, yellow and others like glass, glitter, etc. So this is where the connection between [gl] and light in English comes from.
Speakers of English (or any other language), however, are not living etymological dictionaries, however, and this piece of information has to be looked up. Thanks to scores of Indo-Europeanists, we can actually do that (go and thank your favourite Indo-Europeanist now!). But what speakers of a community can do is associate a sound like [gl] with a concept like “light” because there are many words that sound similar and have similar meanings.
Back to our hypothesis: do sounds like [gl] refer to light? In a way, they can, but at the same time, words with [gl] do not have to refer to anything that has to do with light. Think glove. So our hypothesis is wrong, although we have seen that it is not straightforwardly wrong, and that there is a lot to say about “the language of light”.
One last thing — sign language!
Just like it might be strange to think about spoken language words imitating soundless phenomena like light, one can ask how onomatopoeia and iconicity work in sign languages. Isn’t sign language more likely to have an iconic expression for tree than spoken language is? A tree, after all, can be sensed visually more then by listening to it. At the same time, what about sign language and animal noises? Look at the following videos and see whether you can find out which one of these British sign language (BSL) refers to “light”.
Did you manage? In case you didn’t: don’t worry — sign languages use expressions that are arbitrary and conventionalised just like spoken languages. Like all other languages, they have some iconic expressions, but again, these have to follow certain conventions! (The first sign actually means tree in BSL, the second is sun or sunshine. The videos are all from the UCL British Sign Language SignBank.)
To sum up: all languages use signs that have a somewhat arbitrary connection between sound and meaning. But the degree to which this is the case varies, and certain parts of a language’s vocabulary are more iconic than others. Whatever the connection between sound and meaning, spoken as well as sign languages make up meaningful expressions from smaller, meaningless units, sounds and gestures, respectively.
So next time you hear a word that starts with [gl], you can think of Ferdinand de Saussure, André Martinet and this blog post and be fascinated by how we create meaning (and light) out of thin air!
ALT
