I really love Duolingo, by the way, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a language. It's free and though they don't have courses in every language, they are continually adding new ones.
Honestly I wasn't too pleased with Duolingo-- I struggle with grammar even in a normal class, and Duolingo doesn't actually teach grammar so much as tell you when you're wrong and expect you to understand why.
I actually liked that about Duolingo - I felt like it mimicked learning a language as a baby (or at least how I've thought of it). I couldn't tell you most of the grammatical rules of the languages I've spoken my whole life, but I can follow them perfectly well. With Duolingo (because I didn't bother to more than skim the explanations), I felt almost the same way and it was a pretty cool feeling. In traditional language classes, I've been frustrated by having to write out endless declension charts and never learning anything else.
Yeah, this. I like inferring grammatical rules more than learning them by rote, when they're simple enough to be comprehensible that way; helps me remember them. (Although that really doesn't work with higher-semester Japanese, jeez. Complicated language. 8|)
Well, it's the theory of immersion wrt to second language acquisition. .... Which I don't actually know much about, but yeah the idea is to mimic the way babies seem to learn and that kind of thing reportedly gives good results. Like you hear a lot of good things about both Duolingo and Rosetta Stone and they have the same approach. You could always try to supplement Duolingo with some grammar help sites online, the same way you do some traditional grammar learning in school with your first language.
Yay! Aight. The assignment is to come up with a "future English" after it's had prolonged contact with another language. We could pick any language except Germanic or Latin/Romance languages, because English is already heavily influenced by them, and so there'd be less to come up with. We could even pick ancient/dead languages! There was a footnote at this part. It said something like "although, if you do choose a dead language, I will assume your backstory involves some sort of time travel." And my group's eyes just LIT UP. So we decided to do a dead language, because how could we NOT? Latin was out, but I have a tiny bit of background in Biblical Hebrew, so we decided to do that. Biblical Hebrew uses root templates to conjugate verbs. Each root (usually three letters) has some sort of meaning attached to it. Then you put in the vowels and affixes around it to inflect. We wanted to adopt this idea into English mostly because of Rule of Cool. But we wanted to figure out a way that's believable. Well, some verbs in English already change vowels. Like, ring, rang, rung. That's changing across tenses and not person/number because English only does that in 3rd person singular (and first person for to be). But there are a lot of words that do that! So we got a list of all the English irregulars, figured out the vowel patterns and collapsed them down. Then we took the most common vowel from the Hebrew conjugations and used this to make up our own. So present tense is XE1XH1X... Okay, an example is easier. For "find" we have FND as the root. Then it gets the vowel from present tense, which is just [aɪ] or "eye," and the vowel from Hebrew is [ə] so "uh." So that becomes, [faɪnəd] or "fi-nud." Past would would be [feɪnodət] "fae-nod-et," and past participle is [feɪnudɛn] "fae-nu-den." So we regularized English verbs by looking at English irregulars. That isn't all we did, we figured out phonology, nouns, adjectives, sentence structure... We presented what we had so far today, but we still have another week to write the paper, and so we need to figure out things like how to do passive, or imperatives, and other sentence types. Adverbs. Probably more tenses. Things like that. I'm so excited!!! I was really worried about how it was gonna turn out, but once we nailed down the verbs, it all really started coming together. It's so cool.
Oooooh that's absolutely fascinating! (Please continue to gush if/when you have time.) Funny, I wound up on the wiki page for Singlish recently (which is basically English + Malay + various Chinese languages/dialects if I recall correctly) but I'd forgotten about it until your post reminded me. It was pretty interesting looking at the example sentences 'cause I think at first it just looked like a written version of accented English, and then I realised that there were words I didn't know and the sentence structure wasn't quite what I was used to.... It's really neat to see how languages change.
I'm glad you guys like it! And it was a lot of fun, wow. I thought it would be really hard, but it's not that bad. =D And, yeah, my professor mentioned a few like that, that already exist. I mean Yiddish is kind of a Hebrew/German mix, iirc. (Also I've been assuming that not everyone here is a linguist, so I've been trying to translate technical terms into everyday stuff, and also phonetic-ish transcriptions if you can't read IPA (hell, I can't always read IPA... fucking vowels, man.) Apologies if this ends up coming off condescending or anything.) Okay, what else... Ah! So stops (p, b, t, d, k, g) and fricatives (f, v, th in tooth, th in they, ch in (scottish) loch, and, uh the German g, sometimes? ) in Hebrew are complementary anglophones of each other. Which means that each pair are considered the same letter (p/f, b/v, etc). Also, there are rules about which ones appear where. Stops only happen in double consonants, and after "closed" syllables (syllables which end in a consonant). Fricatives can happen anywhere. We're simplifying the rule. English doesn't actually have double consonants, even though we write them, so the only place stops should appear in the middle of a word, is after a closed syllable. bas-ket stays the same, but ba-boon becoms ba-voon. Also, the only place fricatives should appear in the middle of a words is after an open syllable. co-ver stays co-ver, but pres-i-dent becomes pres-i-thent. Oh, and if it's at the beginning of the word it stays the same. We decided that even before English came in contact with Hebrew, singular they would be perfectly acceptable in the general population, and maybe some dialects would pick up "th'all" the same way they did for "y'all". Hebrew genders nouns and such, but English doesn't. But we liked the plural system in Hebrew. So we decided there would be three noun classes. "male" for any word that ends in an "oh" sound, "female" for any words that end in an "ah" sound, and neuter for literally everything else. Plural for male gets "-eem," female gets "-ot," and neuter gets "-es." The neuter ending comes from English. We figured that English speakers are used to romance languages enough that they would just retroactively classify the words that way. Oh, and obviously gendered words, like "mother/father" would probably get modified somewhat. Gendered animal terms too. I think we'll have gender neutral occupation terms eventually, though, so I'd like minimal of that, personally. I think officially we made it optional, so that you could add the ending or not, depending on if you wanted to gender (or if you want to gender nonbinary...) There are other odds and ends, but I wanna skip to some sample sentences! Because we are nerds, we used some Monty Pyhon lines... English: She turned me into a newt! … I got better. IPA: [ʃi tɔ.ræ.nәt ɛt mi in.tu nut! … haɪ gɔ.ðæ.ðәt bɛt.r] Iŋlish: Shi toraenuht et mi intu nut! ...Hai godhedhuht bet-r. (our attempt at a phonetic transliteration. dh is the "th in they" sound.) Phonetically: she to-raa-nut et me into newt (or at least using more English-like spelling...) Literally: she turn-past DO me into newt English: Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries. IPA: [mә.ðә.rɑ ov-ju wɑz hæm.tәr. fʌ.ðu.ro ov-ju smo.læ.lәt kɛʔ-ɛl.dәr.beɪ.ri.ɛs] Iŋlish: muhdhuhra ov--yu waz haemtuhr. fahdhuro ov-yu smolaeluht ke’elduhrbeiries. Phonetically: mothera of you was hamter. fathero of you smo-laa-lut keh-elderberries. Literally: mother of you was hamster. Father of you smelled like-elderberries. Sorry, that was a little messy. If you can read IPA, great! Otherwise, uh. Whichever works for you? xP Sorry. But yeah! That's our thing. Verbs are unwieldy, but oh well~
i thought some of you might get a kick out of learning how we wound up with -ought for the past tense of words like think and bring at one point in english history infixes were used to indicate tense, which is where we get conjugations like sing/sang/sung. sometimes n would also be in a word to indicate the present tense. so the root of think would've been something like thik. the past tense version of the vowel in think and bring was pronounced like the vowel in paw, and the past tense also got the suffix -te. thoukte/broukte are kind of awkward to pronounce, so k appears to have become a fricative, giving us thouxte/bouxte (where x is pronounced like the fricative in german bach). then the fricative and the -e disappeared, and now we have seemingly senseless conjugations like think/thought and bring/brought.
OH MY GOD THERE'S A LANGUAGES THREAD. I sadly only fluently speak English. I do know bits of Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Irish, and Pali though. I really need to get back to actively studying Arabic instead of being a lazy bastard. I'd like to become fluent in Arabic. For reasons. These reasons being that out of the various languages I've worked with Arabic is probably my favorite. It has a lovely grammar and a lovely sound to it. And just. Those roots and patterns urgh. The cultures and religions attached to it too. I really want to know Arabic. Just so I can peel it apart and go "So this is how you work. INTRIGUING". That and be able to look at older forms of the language and really be able to get things and how they work. I'd like to do such things with Pali and Irish too, for religious reasons. I'm very interested in the idea of critical analysis of the Tipitaka as it stands in Pali. For religious reasons. Gonna be a radical linguist nun yeaaaaah. Maybe. But yes getting how those languages actually...Work. As opposed to just "I can speak/read/understand this thing". That isn't enough. That and just language in general? I have a lot of reading to do. I've only just recently started bashing my face against Chomsky lately, as opposed to just picking up bits of him from other things. That and actually taking classes would help as opposed to just reading things and talking occasionally with linguistics students, leeching their information like some sort of...leech. I blame Tolkien for this entire thing. It is that grumpy bastard's fault. I mean learning language in second language courses or by myself was fun but it just wasn't as fun as it could be. And then I looked into Tolkien more and dug through articles and journals written about his stuff. Which was very fun really and it's one of the areas I point people to first if they want to get something of an idea of linguistics? Learn the wonders of sound shifts and more all while reading about ELVES. I'd like to become a linguistic anthropologist. It will take a lot of time and doing, but I think that that is probably where I wish to go. Definitely some form of linguistics in some variety. Or some sort of anthropology. First the general ed must get out of the way. And then. Then I can truly embark on this grand quest.
my favourite professor basically does linguistic anthropology - he even does a course that's basically a linguistic analysis relating a bunch of languages. he's also just up and plonked himself in the middle of communities to learn languages/myths. i'll double-check my copy before i go promising anything, but iirc his "nart sagas from the caucasus" has a bunch of linguistics blended in with the mythology, both of which are quite fun. another work you might be interested in is "the horse, the wheel, and language", which is about proto-indo-european (theoretical common ancestor to everything from irish to sanskrit). it has a bunch of stuff on archaeological digs (esp. grave sites) but also a good chunk of linguistic material that i think is pretty accessible even if you're not a ling major.
I know enough Chinese to order in a restaurant without accidentally asking for anything vulgar. Unfortunately I didn't learn the dialect used in mainland China. I swear Chinese people from mainland China mumble like they're talking around a mouthful of rocks. Also, not really "language" per se, but Bad Conlanging Ideas is hilarious. (About half the jokes are comprehensible with only the basic parts of speech you learn in English class, and pretty much everything else can be elucidated with a quick Google.)
I love that Bad Conlanging Ideas tumblr. Especially since I know some of those bad ideas have been tried ...
