Silly Linguistics

An exploration of the past tense of ‘yeet’

By Edward Bedford The verb yeet /ji:t/1 is a neologism which seems to have been coined around February 2014. Originally the name of a sort-of dance, it has undergone verbification to form the verb that this article concerns. For the purposes of this article it doesn’t really matter what it means, which is useful as […]

The Viking Language and her Children

By Sveinn Ullarson VIKINGS! They came from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hotsprings blow… except they didn’t, not from the land of hotsprings (Iceland), not generally speaking anyway. However Norsemen certainly did! So what’s the difference between Vikings and Norsemen and what language did they speak? Let […]

An Overview of the History and Legacy of the Baltic and German Prussians

By Naoki Watanabe In 1871, the various German-speaking states of Western-Central Europe unified to form the German Empire. The largest and most powerful of these states—and the one that initiated this Unification of Germany—was known as Prussia. The “Prussians” were well known as a fierce and highly militaristic people that conquered large amounts of territory […]

Ma-ma, Pa-pa and Ta-ta Eat Your Brain Cells: Greeks to Blame

By Apio Frito Anyone who’s studied Spanish for about a month or two is likely to be nearly ecstatic about how reasonable and friendly gender in Spanish is (given exposure to other languages that have it: I’m looking at you, German!). Isn’t it absolutely gorgeous? Masculine if it ends with an ‘o’, feminine if it […]

Brazilian Portuguese: a Sea of Metaphors

By Tom Moore Rio de Janeiro – Every culture and every language lives not only through its concrete vocabulary, but most vividly through its stock of poetic imagery and metaphor. (The most compelling imagining of this may have been that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard was literally unable to communicate with […]