Mecislau wrote:From a grammar of Cypriot Greek, on why Cypriot Greek has a larger array of fricatives than Standard Greek:
All languages formed in warm climates contain a large collection of vowels in their words and fricative consonants which is a strong characteristic of Greek Cypriot. The reason behind this is that such languages aid in the better ventilation of the body (exhaling warmer air and inhaling colder from the outside) in response to the warmer climate.
This reminds me of a conversation I had when I had just started with linguistics. At a party I met this guy, who if I remember correctly was a foreign exchange student from I think Greece. The conversation was as follows:
Him: "what do you study"
Me: "I just started linguistics"
Him: "oh, I have a friend back in Greece who is doing a linguistics PhD. It is about how languages around the equator have much more vowels and languages spoken in harsh climates have much more consonants"
Me: "....."
Nancy Blackett wrote:Is it time we started to assign ratings to this kind of nonsense? If so what measure should we use - ducklings? webbed feet? beaks?
Pictures of Edo Nyland, out of 5. For example, the Cypriot example, which does not advocate some bizarre sort of racist agenda but still appears in an "academic" publication, should get 3 Edos, which could be rated as:
The problem here is, if one Edo Nyland equaled Edo Nyland's actually linguistic wtfery, the vast majority of things here would not be measured in multiple Edo Nylands but rather portions of Edo Nylands - in this case we might say 0.1 Edo Nylands, for instance.
Travis B. wrote:The problem here is, if one Edo Nyland equaled Edo Nyland's actually linguistic wtfery, the vast majority of things here would not be measured in multiple Edo Nylands but rather portions of Edo Nylands - in this case we might say 0.1 Edo Nylands, for instance.
Perhaps you could do simplified percentages (well, perdecages) on a scale of 1 to 10.
Edo Nyland is 100% wacky. == he's a 10
Cypriot Greece is only 30% as wacky as a full-blown Edo. == it's a 3
The idea that Russian and English are descended from the same ancestor (Sanskrit) is just some basic ignorance, but they're going in the right direction = it's only 10% wacky == it's a 1
[quote="Xephyr"]Kitties: little happy factories.[/quote]
At first it didn't seem as bad as I had expected. But then:
From these and following translations I show that both Sumerian and Akkadian words and names are assembled by scholarly manipulation from Saharan/Basque vocabulary. The modern Basque-English dictionary by Gorka Aulestia is still perfectly suitable to translate these ca 4,800 year old names and words. This means that the modern Basque language has changed very little since that time. Other vowel-interlocking name are: Sumer, which tells of the peoples' arrival in Mesopotamia:
su - ume - er. su - ume - era sustraitu - ume - eraspen to settle down - child - devotion "The devoted children settled down"
Zumir wrote:At first it didn't seem as bad as I had expected. But then:
From these and following translations I show that both Sumerian and Akkadian words and names are assembled by scholarly manipulation from Saharan/Basque vocabulary. The modern Basque-English dictionary by Gorka Aulestia is still perfectly suitable to translate these ca 4,800 year old names and words. This means that the modern Basque language has changed very little since that time. Other vowel-interlocking name are: Sumer, which tells of the peoples' arrival in Mesopotamia:
su - ume - er. su - ume - era sustraitu - ume - eraspen to settle down - child - devotion "The devoted children settled down"
Well to be fair, he used to be funny and is probably still funny for people first encountering him, but after yeeears of Edo Nyland jokes he's kind of become the ZBB's equivalent to rickrolling.
Risla wrote:Well to be fair, he used to be funny and is probably still funny for people first encountering him, but after yeeears of Edo Nyland jokes he's kind of become the ZBB's equivalent to rickrolling.
"You've been Edo'd" ?
[quote="Xephyr"]Kitties: little happy factories.[/quote]
The article wrote:Language is considered the distinguishing characteristic of humanness, and plays a large part in the human/non-human linguistic postulate. The cultural norms among the speakers of Jaqaru stress equality among women and men, and community and cooperation over competition and hierarchical structures. The language lacks any structures that denigrate women, rather the grammatical structures affirm humanness. Jaqaru’s value of humans and people in general comes out in its pronouns—one set for human beings, and a separate set for all others, including animals.
Last edited by Risla on Mon Jun 27, 2011 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The article wrote:Language is considered the distinguishing characteristic of humanness, and plays a large part in the human/non-human linguistic postulate. The cultural norms among the speakers of Jaqaru stress equality among women and men, and community and cooperation over competition and hierarchical structures. The language lacks any structures that denigrate women, rather the grammatical structures affirm humanness. Jaqaru’s value of humans and people in general comes out in its pronouns—one set for human beings, and a separate set for all others, including animals.
Someone (edit: totally NOT Risla >:| ) deserves a slap to the head.
Graves also argues that the names of the Ogham letters in the alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Ireland and Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king, and, further, that these letter names concealed lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess.
The article wrote:Language is considered the distinguishing characteristic of humanness, and plays a large part in the human/non-human linguistic postulate. The cultural norms among the speakers of Jaqaru stress equality among women and men, and community and cooperation over competition and hierarchical structures. The language lacks any structures that denigrate women, rather the grammatical structures affirm humanness. Jaqaru’s value of humans and people in general comes out in its pronouns—one set for human beings, and a separate set for all others, including animals.
Someone (edit: totally NOT Risla >:| ) deserves a slap to the head.
Oops, I typoed the language name. Fixing that now...
The weird thing is, the wiki article cites Martha Hardman for those claims; she's the person responsible for basically all decent grammatical information on Aymara and Jaqaru (which I am very glad she wrote), and all her works have always seemed very reasonable to me. I suspect that whoever wrote the article took some things she wrote very out of context in order to peddle the rather ridiculous claim that Jaqaru speakers Respect Humanity Moar.
And thanks for clarifying that it's not me who needs slapping.
Probably what they did was cite the fact that Jaqaru has a human:non-human distinction in its pronouns. But did it in such a way that it makes it seems that Hardman supports their other statements too. It was an IP address that only edited once anyway.
Sigh... although Enochian is pretty famous I thought that I'd bring it up anyway. It kind of depresses me that people could believe that a second-rate conlang by a 15-century loonie is a holy angelic tongue. (or a Satanic tongue, depending on your degree of, um, interestingness) . But they do, so, yeah.
The wikipedia article and an honest-to-god believer website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian http://biphome.spray.se/d.scot/Enochian/enocmain.htm
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