If you have an interest in different English accents, I found this a very interesting online book that actually goes into the different subdivisions of the lexical sets we all know and love, and how different accents pronounce them differently (e.g. the amount of variety in the BATH and CURE sets).
Great article. A Māori-run non-profit, Te Hiku Media, has collected hundreds of hours of audio recordings of Māori speakers speaking their language, which they want to create text-to-speech tools and the like… so of course, gigantic corporates have swooped in and tried to convince Te Hiku to surrender their data so they (the big profits) can sell access to the tools back to Māori people for $$$. Te Hiku steadfastly refused, and also sought to educate others as to why data sovereignty is so important.
Article talks about the word “Latinx”, a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino”/“Latina”, which has caught on largely among American academics and NGO types, but not among ordinary Spanish-speakers. The article instead points to the alternative “Latine”, and the use of -e in general as an alternative to gendered -o or -a, which is much more popular in the Spanish-speaking world and has the benefit of, y’know, actually being pronounceable.
Another article in the well-established “y’all is good, actually” genre. It makes the point that y’all is actually not first attested in the US, but in the UK – but then fails to go on to mention that its use still not restricted to the US, being characteristic of Indian-South African dialect as well, for example. When I visited Vivian’s family there, within a few weeks y’all had become part of my internal monologue, although I cut myself off and refrained from saying it aloud because I thought people would just find it funny coming from an Australian. (I mean, “ja” did come to form part of my active vocabulary for a while, and people thought that was funny enough, lol.)
Overall, though, I’m still a “you guys” person. I don’t see it as gendered; “guy” singular is gendered, but “guys” plural isn’t, sort of like Spanish vosotros (except even more so, because I would 100% address an all-female group as “you guys” and not find that weird. I mean what else am I going to say, “you girls”…?).
One neat thing I’ve noticed as I’ve worked at learning to read Shavian is how my experience has mirrored what I’ve seen in kids I’ve taught who were learning how to read. For example, I still spend a lot of time sounding out the letters, but now and then I come across a “sight word” where I just know what it is on sight, without needing to sound it out. Also, how I sometimes get impatient and just try to guess words based on what I think is likely given the context, and how those guesses are often wrong 🤣
I guess I find this neat as a reminder that kids and adults aren’t so different, really. Literacy is a hard skill to learn! Because most adults don’t ever try to learn a new alphabet, I think we forget.
A couple of times in recent weeks I’ve seen some discussion about Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and whether it was influenced by, or how it could be translated into, Esperanto. After all, Newspeak infamously uses words like “ungood” for “bad”, which is unironically parallel to Esperanto’s standard word for bad, malbona.
It seems like …
There are seriously a lot of American Shavianists who are like “oh, my accent doesn’t distinguish between father/bother or cot/caught, can I just use any letter I like in a really haphazard manner for those?” IDK dude, if I as an Australian can fill my writing with multitudes of silent Rs, I think you can learn the difference between father/bother and cot/caught. It doesn’t really matter if you just want to write private notes to yourself, but if you want to communicate with other people it is absolutely bewildering when I see 𐑔𐑪𐑑 and realise the person meant “thought”, or 𐑢𐑭𐑑 and then realise they meant “what”.
“So Jess,” you might say, “last week you procrastinated on your novel by recreating half your Occidental flashcards in Anki.1 On Monday you procrastinated by deleting 1.3GB of bad old photos from your iCloud storage. What have you found to procrastinate with now?”
Here is what, dear reader: I used the application Ukelele to design myself two custom …
The Brevian alphabet is a proposed alternative alphabet for typing English. Drawing inspiration from the Shavian alphabet, it is a phonetic alphabet which utilises letter pairs (tall/low letters for unvoiced/voiced consonants, and dotted and undotted letters for long/short vowels) to depict related letters. It was created by Brian Mansberger, and first published in 2021.
The alphabet has 40 core …
Interesting piece about the unique counting system of Lincolnshire shepherds, Italo-Celtic numbers, and counting rhymes 😊
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.