Content tagged with “language”

“ This is an official term for ‘the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans.’ ”

“ There is a simplified version of English, consisting of just 850 words. After World War II, it was promoted as a universal language for the entire world. ”

“ A specialized branch of crime investigation using writing patterns to solve crimes. ”

“ Examples of when missing or extra commas became painful legal judgments. ”

“ This is a prepositional phrase from Latin which means ‘with.’ So ‘X-cum-Y’ means ‘X with Y.’ Incidentally, this is where the degree honors come from: cum laude: ‘with praise’ magna cum laude: ‘with great praise’ summa cum laude: ‘with highest praise’ ”

“ This is an accented character, which you mostly see in languages other than U.S. English. French, for example, uses several diacritics, like in ‘façade’ and ‘café’. Vietnamese uses accented characters in almost every word. ”

“ This is the phonetic sound that results when two vowels are next to each other: ‘ai’ and ‘ea’ and ‘ou,’ for example. It’s pronounced ‘diff-thong.’ ”

“ Japan escaped serious effects from both SARS and COVID. There’s a theory that this is because speaking Japanese outputs less air from the speaker’s mouth. ”

“ The Cambodian language is notoriously hard to type. So the speakers just…don’t. ”

“For example, if often takes the form of a place name being used to refer to (1) a significant event that happened at that place; or (2) an organization, institution, industry, or concept associated with that place. Examples: ‘The White House’ to refer to a presidential administration ‘Wall Street’…”

“ Newspaper headlines have informal language conventions called ‘headlinese’ that constitute a new and different dialect. ”

“ A screencast history of the Wikipedia page for the heavy metal umlaut which traces how the page was developed and changed over time. ”

“ An infographic showing the background and history behind the names of all the major candy bars and snacks. ”

“ Japanese-speakers imitate English-speakers without speaking English, showing how they interpret the inflections, tone, and cadence (and often hand movements) of the Anglo world. ”

“ There is a sentence that uses every phonetic sound which differences between British and American English. Hugh Jackson says it before each take in which he has to play an American. ”

“ French for ‘I don’t know what.’ It means some quality that you find appealing, but cannot describe in words. ”

“‘Kill’ is a borrowed word from Dutch. In that language it means ‘body of water’ or, more often, ‘creek.’ Thus, names like Fresh Kills, West Kill, Peeksill, Fishkill, usually refer to a nearby body of water. This usage is common in Upstate New York. Oddly, the Catskill Mountains might be a…”

“ It turns out that ‘macaroni’ was a state of mind. ”

“ U.S. anthropologists will sometimes refer to ‘America/American’ by another word in order to maintain professional distance and objectivity from it. ”

“ In 1972, an Italian singer recorded a song which lyrics that were meant to sound like English, but were in fact nonsense. He sought to prove that Italians would love anything that sounded like English. ”

“ There’s a standard body of text which is used by linguists and speech pathologists to assess and compare accents when read out loud. ”

“ There is a standard written notation to describe juggling patterns and techniques, much like written music and written chess moves. ”

“ A video showing some common verbal riffs from various Aaron Sorkin shows. ”

“It’s a French suffix meaning ‘city,’ ‘town,’ or ‘farm.’ The French were allies during the American Revolution. From Wikipedia : France’s help was a major and decisive contribution towards the United States’ eventual victory and independence in the war. This led to positive French sentiment after…”

“ A librarian in upstate New York was the first to bring the Internet into libraries and coined the term ‘surfing’ to describe browsing the internet. ”