I often wonder if #brewers and #linguistics both love #IPA?
…
You know…b/c….

…International Phonetic Alphabet…
Indian Pale Ale…

(look out…it’s an early sick day and I’m lobbing these beauties with zero sleep)

(what the hell was i searching again….)

Latin nerds, I need you!
Offering Elvish nerdery in return 👇

Trying to translate "keep it secret – keep it safe" to #Latin, which I know is tricksy. Looking at verbs like servare and conservare, and adjectives for "safe" like tutus/salvus/securus...??

If you can help, I will write your phrase of choice in Tengwar (Elvish script)! Here's a sample of one way I write it – though I'll do straight lines 😅
I'll write them on a livestream and link image files for you.

// #linguistics #LOTR #Tolkien

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Notebook page with deep blue-green Elvish script, visibly crooked, with a bottle of ink (Sailor Shikiori – Yamadori) and a calligraphy dip pen. The poem reads: A Elbereth Gilthoniel Silivren penna míriel O menel aglar elenath Gilthoniel, a Elbereth! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land, beneath the trees The starlight on the Western seas. (I've probably left out some accents)

[THIS IS A SELF-DISCLOSING, GOOD FAITH APRIL FOOL'S SENSIBLE CHUCKLE]

please enjoy the paper I wrote last year that is going to redefine history and linguistics as we know them as soon as anyone can stop laughing long enough to finish reading it: The Utterly Unhinged Elamo-Minoan Hypothesis

on academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/128559713/The_Utterly_Unhinged_Elamo_Minoan_Hypothesis_April_Fools_

direct raw pdf: https://0xabad1dea.github.io/bin/Utterly-Unhinged-Elamo-Minoan-Hypothesis.pdf

[YOU CAUGHT THAT I SAID THIS IS A HAHA FUNNY FOR APRIL FOOL'S, RIGHT?]

#linguistics #history

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(chart of Linear A writing system with caption) Figure 2: Undergrads will cite this version of the table because I took the time to make it nice, copy-pastable Unicode text freely posted to the internet and not a blurry pirate jpeg of a scan of a mimeograph of a soggy manuscript found at the bottom of a well on the Moon.

⚡⚡⚡ Lightning Talk! ⚡⚡⚡
🪦🔍𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗜𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗪𝗘𝗕 𝗧𝗔𝗟𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧? - 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗝𝗔𝗥𝗚𝗢𝗡 𝗗𝗘𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗙𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 - Laura Bernardy 🔐🕵️‍♂️
The dark web hides in code, and its language is built to confuse. In this talk, Laura Bernardy shows how NLP can decode the slang, jargon, and encrypted phrases used by cybercriminals

Laura Bernardy https://lu.linkedin.com/in/laura-bernardy-a95315177 is a PhD candidate at SnT Luxembourg, researching dark web content and cyber threat intelligence using natural language processing. She holds a master’s in computational linguistics and has worked on low-resource language NLP. Her work combines linguistics, cybersecurity, and AI to decode what’s being said and who’s saying it.

📅 Conference Dates: 6–8 May 2026 | 09:00–18:00
📍 14, Porte de France, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
🎟️ Tickets: https://2026.bsides.lu/tickets/
📅 Schedule Link: https://pretalx.com/bsidesluxembourg-2026/schedule/

#BSidesLuxembourg #DarkWeb #NLP #CyberThreatIntelligence #OSINT #Linguistics

📺 https://peer.adalta.social/w/t2jiAfRY8JEJ6yCcS4ySNm
🔗 [🇩🇪🇺🇸🇫🇷](https://adalta.info/articles/prstn_software_116309812954313015_de)
🔗 [ℹ️](https://leanpub.com/set/leanpub/aimasterclass")

Die `Featured Track`-Platzierung von Henrik Kniberg, Obie Fernandez und Andriy Burkov auf Leanpub signalisiert eine strategische Neuausrichtung der Plattform.

#war #software #datascience #digitaltransformation #linguistics

For example, this is Nepalese alphabet;
"यद्यपि, परिवर्तनको लहरमा कतिपय अवाञ्छित व्यक्ति"

Prompt:
Can you pull up a super brief bullet points of three most talked about things in UNOFFICIAL Nepalese online websites/forums/socials?

Response:
Nepal's top 3 online conversations right now:

1. "Are our people safe?" — 2.5-3 million Nepalis in the Gulf. One confirmed dead (UAE drone strike), 15 injured. Families panicking. Workers posting from dark rooms in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Government launched an emergency portal but admits mass evacuation would need a "national plan."

2. Fuel panic — Only ~10 days of reserves. Queues at Kathmandu petrol pumps, some already posting "no fuel" signs. Economists openly warning of a "Sri Lanka-style crisis" if it drags on.

3. Remittance collapse fear — 26% of GDP comes from remittances, 41% of that from the Gulf. Labour permits halted — 1,500 people/day who were about to leave for jobs now stuck at home with nothing. If this lasts months, rural Nepal's economic lifeline breaks.

#language #autotranslate but better #linguistics #nepal #epsteinwar

Ever since I read a critique of dictionaries as being "endlessly self-referential" I haven't been the same. #Linguistics I guess??!

@infobeautiful 7th way: by words of endearment: Love, Sweetheart, Babber, Hen, Chuck, Pet.

#uk #linguistics

Linguists: writing like this (superfluously mixing three languages in one fucking sentence!) does not make you seem like some sort of linguini houdini. It makes you seem utterly unable to communicate

#linguistics

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PDF screenshot: ... in the proto-language senso lato, it is not the case that any one etat de langue is...

I need a better, more succinct way of communicating that "I have big feelings right now, but I can't tell if they're genuine or if I'm just tired because it's late and dark and I feel lonely."

Is there a word or pithy phrase for that in any language?
#Linguistics #WritersOfMastodon

“gee Ms. A Bad Idea, how did you get so smart at languages, I keep trying but it never sticks”

The trick to actually really for real learning a language when you’re not immersed in it as the living language of your everyday life is to WRITE IT DOWN

ON PAPER. WITH YOUR HANDS

USE A BETTER PEN, THOSE CHEAP BALLPOINTS WILL INJURE YOU

JUST COPY A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE IF THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE, IT *WILL* HELP

#linguistics #fountainpen

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My Classical Chinese notebook and beloved Pilot Falcon fountain pen (you do not need a Pilot Falcon. A professional-grade $2 gel pen with a cushioned grip will do)

Hey all

We had another linguistic thought.

(You can see our previous linguistic queries on looking for words for the pain of being misunderstood and finding an alternative word for hope.)

We realised that English has a specific word for the inability to experience pleasure from activities you'd usually enjoy: anhedonia.

However, it doesn't seem like there's an equivalent official word for the inability to experience hope.

Instead, there are only words like hopeless or hopelessness, but those words do not really suggest that the person can no longer derive hope from situations they'd normally expect to.

Following the same logic as the above, we think it would be something like an- plus either elpĭ́s or elpída.

So, we think it'd be either anelpis or anelpida.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Corrections?

#AskFedi #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuysPlease #English #linguistics #hope #hopeless #hopelessness #anelpis #anelpida

Hey fedizens

Bit of an odd linguistic query for anybody with knowledge of English, in any and all forms, regions, dialects, etc.

Is there a simple, true neutral (realistic) alternative for the verb to hope, and maybe even a true negative (pessimistic form)?

We've thought and posted a fair bit about the concept of hope recently-ish, particularly in this post after watching a John Green video.

On the back of this, we've realised that hope is a word that has a positive, optimistic connotation inherently within it, at least as we understand and use it.

When somebody says that they hope that something will happen, they are simultaneously communicating that:

• they want this thing to happen;
• they recognise that it may not happen;
• they nonetheless believe that it could happen, and are somewhat biased towards it happening.

We've seen underhope and overhope suggested on Wiktionary, but never read, heard, or otherwise seen these in real world usage, and overhope is what most people seem to mean when they use variants of hope like hopeful.

The closest we've found is wish, but it doesn't work as a verb replacement. You can use it as a noun to some extent, but it sounds anachronistic and clunky.

e.g.,

• I hope that you are doing okay.
• It is my fondest wish that you are doing okay.

We're curious about all the other forms and variants, but it's the verb that we cannot find in-use realistic or pessimistic forms for.

For the realistic (true neutral) form, we're looking for a verb that conveys that:

• you want this thing to happen;
• you know it technically could happen, from a statistical point of view;
• you cannot be hopeful, as you have decent grasp of the situation, the challenges, and so on.

For the pessimistic (true negative) form, we're looking for a verb that conveys that:

• you want this thing to happen;
• you recognise that it could happen, theoretically;
• you do not believe there's any realistic prospect of this happening.

Any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions within the broad scope of all English variants?

Genuinely asking, but -- as per usual -- no reply guys please 🫶

Boosts and friendly quotes welcome

In the meantime, where hope is the defacto optimistic form, all we feel like we can say to folks is something like:

We wish we could hope that...

#AskFedi #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuys #English #linguistics #hope

How far back into history can you go before written English becomes unintelligible? It's a thorny question

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fark&ICID=ref_fark

#stem #science #history #linguistics #language #interesting

This explains something.

My father's side of the family are notably understated in their spoken opinions, a trait I inherited. It's not just English stoicism—my grandfather on that side was born in England, and my grandmother came from the South Downs, then a very English part of QLD—but even more so. A couple of generations farther back, though, the male line crossed the sea from #Germany, and it seems Germans do this, too:

https://youtu.be/97VhJyx-3jk #anthropology #german #linguistics #genealogy

Suck it linguists I'll make my own grammar rolls 😜😂

@linguistics @humor@fedigroups.social @humor@lemmy.world @aiop @writingcommunity @writingbooks

#LinguisticMemes #Meme #Memes #Linguistics
#Language #Words #Humor #Humour #Funny
#Reading #Readers #ReadersOfMastodon #ReadingCommunity
#Book #Books #Novel #Novels #Fiction #Bookstodon

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Post by keva Here's my first attempt at synonym rolls, with attached picture of cinnamon rolls. Reply by BrazilFlair Just like grammar used to make.

If you're a wordnerd who occasionally plays with Old English (the language, not the wood polish) then you might come up with a fun word such as

ǣlmiht

which means "eel power."

Holy flat tails of Flotsam and Jetsam, Batman!

#words
#UseYourWords
#wordnerd
#languages
#linguistics
#CompoundWords
#ILoveLanguage
#OldEnglish
#TheLittleMermaid

Hey lovelies 🩷

Is anybody aware of an existing word in English or any other language for the intense pain of being misunderstood?

We're thinking specifically about the kinda of pain that neurospicy folks often feel from being constantly misunderstood by others, but particularly by non-neurospicy folks.

It's usually a cumulative pain that builds up over years or even decades, and factors into neurodivergent experiences like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)

Thanks in advance 🫶

Edit:
Here are some examples of the type of word we're looking for:

• Nostalgia
• Anemoia

We lack sufficient knowledge of correctly combining ancient Greek words to find the correct words and forms for "being misunderstood" and "pain".

#neurodivergent #neurodivergence #PainOfBeingMisunderstood #linguistics #language #AuDHD #ADHD #ActuallyAutistic

Our book is available for preorder!

Valentinsson, Drake and Fountain 2026

'Language and Social Issues: An Investigator's Toolkit'

Cambridge University Press

@linguistics #linguistics #sociolinguistics #linguisticAnthropology #languageAndSocialIssues #TheGenderChapterWillDefinitelyGetMeFired

https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/language-and-social-issues/5C1D0C2F61B4D0ADA69AE7024EF1E1E2

I'm saddened by the intellectual constraint outlined below by BL Whorf, quoted in "Geometry, pregeometry and beyond" (pp. 435-464 of STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE PART B, volume 36, issue 3, September 2005) by Meschini et al.

"'It was found that the background linguistic system ... of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas ... . We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.

"'This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation ... . We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.'"

To find out why this saddens me, see my previous journal quote (anniversary) today.

#learning
#linguistics

also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.

Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:

- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"

- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)

- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.

- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.

So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)

But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.

Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.

... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!

#linguistics #chinese #classicalchinese

“secret” and “secrete”are both derived from a word meaning “to separate, set apart.” (edit to be very clear: I mean "secrete" as in "ooze"!, not merely as a verb form of "secret")

A common Mandarin word for “secret” is 密 mì, and there is also a word for “secrete” 泌 mì (note the shared 必 phonetic component in the characters, indicating they were also pronounced very similarly thousands of years ago; the dots on the left side of 泌 mean water whereas in 密, the phonetic component is enclosed between a roof and a mountain).

I find it fascinating when completely unrelated languages converge on the same subtly interwoven concepts. #linguistics #chinese

7 mysterious languages that have yet to be deciphered

by Alexander Freund

Indus, Rongorongo, Linear A: Some ancient writing systems cannot be deciphered. Can artificial intelligence help crack the codes of the past?

https://www.dw.com/en/7-mysterious-languages-that-have-yet-to-be-deciphered/a-75249574

Archeology at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=archeology

#archeology #history #linguistics

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The Phaistos Disc - side A. The disc is a circular clay tablet, appearing to be terracotta or fired clay with a brown/reddish-brown color. The disc is mounted on a display stand with metal supports holding it upright for viewing. The disc is covered with stamped symbols arranged in a distinctive spiral pattern that winds from the outer edge toward the center. The symbols are organized into distinct groups or "words" separated by vertical lines that create wedge-shaped divisions radiating from the center. The spiral contains multiple concentric bands of these symbol groups, creating approximately 4-5 levels as it spirals inward. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc#/media/File:Phaistos_Disc_%E2%80%94_Side_A.jpg

the entire field of linguistics is an elaborate prank

#linguistics

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excerpt of an academic book: The most convenient way to present the finals of Middle Chinese is by their distribution classes: in traditional terminology, these are 1) division 1 finals, 2) division 2 finals, 3) division 4 finals, 4) division 3 finals.

According to a new study reported in @sciencefocus, swearing can be good for us, allowing us to score better in tests of strength and endurance. "The way I express it is to say that swearing is a cheap, readily available, drug-free means of self-help," Dr. Richard Stephens told the magazine. We want to know: Are you a swearer?

https://flip.it/FU9Fhn

#Language #Linguistics #Swearing #Science

From *Thinking fast and slow*
by Daniel Kahneman

"Sales-people quickly learn that manipulation of the context in which customers
see a good can profoundly influence preferences."

pg. 361

Why yes, if a store has a good washroom that would influence me for sure!

Down a Garden path and, a comma would have been polite but context is clear.

#Linguistics

A history of punctuation

How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling

by Florence Hazrat

https://aeon.co/essays/beside-the-point-punctuation-is-dead-long-live-punctuation?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=77aa6a8db4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_12_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-4ef8a26106-72664972

#language #linguistics

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An exclamation mark with a comma instead of a full stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#/media/File:Exclamation_comma_3.png

We’re hiring! PhD and postdoc positions in Futures of Language

Jobs! If you are interested in fundamental research at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look at the PhD and postdoc positions we are advertising. We look forward to growing the Futures of Language team.

https://ideophone.org/were-hiring-phd-and-postdoc-positions-in-futures-of-language/

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Drone picture of Radboud Universiteit campus in the golden hour. A large tower in front is the Erasmus building, hosting the Centre for Language Studies and the Futures of Language team.

- Statistics, as a field of study, gained significant energy and support from eugenicists with the purpose of "scientizing" their prejudices. Some of the major early thinkers in modern statistics, like Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, were eugenicists out loud; see https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014/
- Large language models and diffusion models rely on certain kinds of statistical methods, but discard any notion of confidence interval or validation that's grounded in reality. For instance, the LLM inside GPT outputs a probability distribution over the tokens (words) that could follow the input prompt. However, there is no way to even make sense of a probability distribution like this in real-world terms, let alone measure anything about how well it matches reality. See for instance https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf and Michael Reddy's The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language

Early on in this latest AI hype cycle I wrote a note to myself that this style of AI is necessarily biased. In other words, the bias coming out isn't primarily a function of biased input data (though of course that's a problem too). That'd be a kind of contingent bias that could be addressed. Rather, the bias these systems exhibit is a function of how the things are structured at their core, and no amount of data curating can overcome it. I can't prove this, so let's call it a hypothesis, but I believe it.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #GPT #Gemini #Claude #Llama #StableDiffusion #Midjourney #DallE #LLM #DiffusionModel #linguistics #NLP