Language & Linguistics
This board explores the development, use, and study of language.
68 Pins
·4y
A Proportional Perspective of the World's Native Languages
A World of Languages - This infographic shows how 23 of the world’s most common languages are distributed around the globe. "There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people. We represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country."
Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper
"Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper" - The complaint tablet to Ea-nasir is a clay tablet from ancient Babylon written c. 1750 BCE. It is a complaint to a merchant named Ea-Nasir from a customer named Nanni. Written in cuneiform, it is considered to be the oldest known written complaint and is currently kept in the British Museum.
The Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World
If all of the languages spoken in the world were proportionally represented by 100 people at a party: 17 would speak Chinese, 6 would speak Spanish, 5 would speak English, 4 would speak Hindi, 3 would speak Arabic, 3 would speak Portuguese, 3 would speakBengali, 2 would speakRussian, and 2 would speak Japanese. Without a fellow speaker of their native language to talk to at the party, the other 55 would just dance awkwardly. Source: Ethnologur / The World Bank
Six ways to divide England linguistically
1. What do you call your evening meal? 2. At school, everyone played _____. 3. What do you call a medium sized lump of bread? 4. Does 'scone' rhyme with 'gone' or 'alone'? (The scone is gone; The scone is probably gone; The scone is alone) 5. Do 'put' and 'but' have the same vowel sound? ("But" rhymes with "put"; "But" and "Put" have different vowels) 6. Most spoken language: (English, Old English mixed with Scots and Viking?) Source: samesamebutdifferentblog, 2018.
Philosophy of Language - Moore's Disbelief
Although this problem has received relatively little attention, it intrigued philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein when G. E. Moore presented it to the Moral Science Club at Cambridge. The statement “Albany is the capital of New York, but I don’t believe it” is not necessarily false, but it seems to be unassertable. The speaker cannot simultaneously assert that Albany is the capital of New York and his disbelief in that statement...
Thinking about how beautiful the contemporary English verb "waslike" is.
(As in: "She waslike, yeah he did, and I waslike, oh my god.") "Waslike" means both "to be" and "to say," so it's a term that implicitly acknowledges the entangled ontology of being and speaking. When "I waslike ohmygod," it means both that I said something like "Oh my god" and that my being was infused with ohmygodness. Also, "waslike" is an inherently contingent verb: it implies that what is being said is not exactly what happened but is close to it... ~ @HarryGiles
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