Badlinguistics.

I occasionally take a whack at dumb, prejudiced, or ill-informed items relating to language, but it’s a side dish at LH. To the redditors at badlinguistics, it’s the whole menu, so if you have a hankering for mockery of things like “Italian is dying because people are using loanwords and not the subjunctive” or “A questionable map of urheimats” or “Pinyin sucks because it isn’t based off the spelling systems of English, the Germanic languages, and/or the Romance languages,” head on over and enjoy. I got a kick out of the last of the decrees in the right margin: “R5: Whosever invokes the name of 𝓒𝓗𝓞𝓜𝓢𝓚𝓨𝓓𝓞𝓩 must do so in appropriately typeset form.” (𝓒𝓗𝓞𝓜𝓢𝓚𝓨𝓓𝓞𝓩 reference.)

Comments

  1. Ксёнѕ Фаўст says

    Pinyin seems unintuitive and hard to remember precisely because it mixes conventions from several European languages, i.e. c is pronounced as in Polish or Hungarian, ch and sh as in English, z as in Italian or German, x roughly as in Portuguese, q as in Albanian, zh assumes an Italian base value and adds an Englishy modifying h. Still, it’s mostly a hodgepodge of Germanic/Romance conventions with a smattering of other Eurolangs.

    I’d love to hear more about the old european ‘tree language’ and ‘bird language’. Oh, did the barbaric steppe invaders exterminate talking trees and loquacious birds? It’s so sad.

  2. David Marjanović says

    Questionable map is questionable (although it does show Hattic): South Picene is an unremarkable Italic language, North Picene is neither Indo-European nor Etruscan and known from a single perfectly legible but so far wholly unintelligible inscription.

    Found in the comments to that post: a pdf on substrate words in Balto-Slavic.

    ==========================

    Found in the comments to another post:

    What is zero conversion?

    For example if you verb a noun without any visible suffixes, which I just did.

    ==========================

    I’d love to hear more about the old european ‘tree language’ and ‘bird language’.

    Hypothetical non-IE languages that have left words for birds and trees in several IE branches.

  3. The reason for Pinyin zh, sh, ch is that in Southern Mandarin they are merged with z, c, s respectively.

  4. David Marjanović says

    …with z, s, c respectively.

  5. There is also r/shittylinguistics, which is dedicated to intentionally (i.e., satirical) bad linguistics.

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