When writing your thesis, follow the armorer’s advice!
Armorer: Persistence without insight will lead to the same outcome
drlinguo reblogged
drlinguo reblogged
Sí, oui, òc!
Italian sì, Spanish sí, Portuguese sim and many more Romance words for 'yes' come from Latin sīc, which meant 'so; thus; like that'. In Popular Latin it got an extra meaning: 'yes', born out of the sense 'like that', i.e. 'like you said'.
French oui has a completely different origin. It comes from Old French oïl, a univerbation of o il, literally 'yes, it (is/does/has etc.)'.
O stemmed from Latin hoc (this), which became òc (yes) in Occitan, a group of languages whose name was derived from this very word.
drlinguo reblogged
me when i have to put proper citations: ugh this is so annoying who even cares what i do in the footnotes
me when i can't find a source because it hasn't been quote correctly: i am going to track down the authors and they will answer to me. i will find out who caused this suffering. there will be blood.
drlinguo reblogged
Waste, vast, devastate, gastar, wüst, woestijn
The English words (to) waste, vast, and to devastate are all etymologically related. They come from the Latin adjective vāstus (desolate) and the verb (dē)vāstāre (to lay waste). More distantly, they're related to Spanish gastar (to spend), German wüst (desolate; chaotic), and Dutch woestijn (desert). The infographic shows how.
Latin vāstāre should have produced forms with a /v/ in Romance. The fact that they start with /g/ instead points to Germanic influences. When a Germanic word starting with /w/ was borrowed into Romance, this became /gw/ in most languages, which later became /g/ in some of them. Compare *want (glove) > Spanish guante, Italian guanto, French gant, and *Willjahelm > Guillermo, Guglielmo, Guillaume.
drlinguo reblogged
drlinguo reblogged
drlinguo reblogged
I love following linguistics academics, because who else is going to explain to me how modern slang terms relate to the 16th century renaissance period.
“People that we think are very smart are not necessarily very smart. They are more likely to be educated in their particular field or very experienced in their careers and we confuse that with smartness.”
morphosyntactic plural ≠ semantic plural
(Source: Wang 2023)