Hungarian: Agglutination as a Variable Device
So, it’s finally happening. A couple of years of language enthusiast status and a good year and a half of German learning by immersion, I am taking on one of Europe’s bonafide Behemoths: I’m going to tell you about Hungarian. The Hungarian language is notorious for being incredibly hard to learn and has features not […]
Issue #69 is now available
Subscribers can download it at https://sillylinguistics.com/media-downloads/ Of N9’s and marking timeBy Angela J. Olney SlangBy MJ Brukman Does Speaking A Language Matter?By Michael Simpson Egbert’s Ineffable Taco Experience: The Inability of Language to Directly Describe Conscious, Sensory ExperienceBy Marc W. Cole Out of the Mouth of Babes: How Babies Cry in different languagesBy Patricia Syner […]
Occitan’s Representations in France
Introduction Occitan is an historic language spoken mostly in France, but also in Italy or even Spain. It is also close to Catalan, so much so that certain linguists choose to define Catalan as some sort of an Occitan dialect. From a report published in 2013, we can see that Occitan was the most spoken […]
Shakespeare Said: The Words & Phrases Attributed to William Shakespeare
English playwright, actor, and poet, William Shakespeare, also known simply as ‘The Bard’ is often considered one of the greatest writers in the English language and considered internationally as one of the world’s greatest dramatists. His plays have been translated into every major modern language and they are still performed, studied and reinterpreted to this […]
Written Spoken Language
The title sounds quite oxymoronic (or maybe just moronic), doesn’t it? But it does make sense, once you think about it. On the one hand, we speak our language every day, hence the spoken part. On the other hand, we sometimes write our language, in more formal situations, like mail (or emails these days), hence […]
Dispatches from Linguists: Trying to talk Spanish – It Goes Wrong
This month the Dispatch is from Valentin Pradelou, who uses a rather funny anecdote about the pitfalls for language learners to explore polysemy. It is always enjoyable to read of funny language mishaps especially when they are so relatable and show that such things happen to us all. I would like to tell a story […]
