Issue 71 – April 2024

Excerpts from our articles

Silly Linguistics Trivia #2

“My name is Forest, and I’m a trivia writer and host of FWD Trivia and KLCC’s weekly radio show The Conundrum on the West Coast of the USA. Here I’ll be doing a regular quiz for all of you with the goal of sharing my love for both puzzles and language. This month’s quiz has a food theme. Feel free to let me know how you did and if you have any thoughts about this or for future quizzes”

By Forest

A Bird’s Eye View

“What Do Our Names for Birds Say About the English Language, It’s Spread, and Its Relationship to the Environment? In the mid-18th century, Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus, real name Carl Linne, recognizing the necessity and difficulty in naming nature’s huge variety of species, came up with what we today call binomial nomenclature. That is, each species is to be designated a two-part Latin-based name: the first part referring to the genus, which is to also be applied to closely related species, and the second part designating the species within that genus group.”

By Trevor Attenberg

Inscripts – Writing as Technology

“It’s important to highlight this idea that we create and develop this complexity of language and these linguistic features every single day as we interact with our environment. Reflect on how your use of language
has developed over the past five, ten, and fifteen years. Parallel that reflection with how your use of technology has developed, and remember that even rudimentary
things that we use every single day were once an innovation that was simultaneously loved and feared.”

By Reagan O’Brien

Be!rs: How Taboos Work Their Way into Our Language

“Social prohibitions of words work their way into our lives daily. Some topics we like to avoid in daily speech in this way might be death, menstruation, and blasphemy. Now, while ancient Germanic tribes may not have worried about the manner in which they spoke about death, they did worry about bears. Now, if we go back to the Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE) word for “bear,” it is reconstructed as *rkso- or *rtko-. We see this continued into Latin in their word “ursa,” and French “ours,” but what about English “bear/bruin,” German “baer,” and Dutch “beer”?”

By Skylar Millet

Arrival: The Lexicon of Aliens

“The aliens that arrive on earth in the film speak one of two languages. Heptapod A and Heptapod B. For this article, we’ll be focusing on Heptapod B, the written language of the extraterrestrials that have been introduced. The genius of the logograms in this particular dialect is that it isn’t linear. Instead, they are written in circular symbols that express their sentences. You do not read it from right to left or top to bottom, because their sentences appear fully formed as a whole since they do not experience time as we do.”

By Samantha Steyn

Language around Sognefjord in Western Norway: the Aurland dialect and ancient language

“Norwegian dialects are to me, a very interesting subject, which I have written about many times before. Whilst a few years ago I would have said that the Nordland dialects of Norwegian (in Northern Norway) are the prettiest, in my opinion; the more that I listen to the Sognefjord and other western Norwegian dialects, the more I think: “hmm, I like these a lot too.” Sognefjord is Norway’s longest fjord, as well as being the deepest fjord in Norway, with a maximum depth of 4,291 feet, or 1,308 metres. The local Norwegian dialects spoken around the fjord are collectively referred to as Sognemål, or Sognemaol in local pronunciation.”

By Linden Alexander Pentecost