reject the melancholy cabbage

Anonymous asked: CONLANGING IS AWESOME CONLANGING IS GOOD AND HOW COME MY OLD-ENGLISH PROFESSOR NEVER MENTIONED ANYTHING ABOUT THE 4-WAY NEGATION/AFFIRMATION THING OMG

WELL IT’S CERTAINLY… IT’S A HOBBY. I was trying to come up with a naming language and picked up the Language Construction Kit book and now I’m sort of. Wandering in the wilderness of cases. Fuck the instrumental!!! I just wanted a locative!!! WHY MUST LANGUAGES HAVE REGULARLY INCREASING NUMBERS OF CASES?? HOW DOES PRONOUN???? WHY IS ADJECTIVE

Anyway, I think he might not have mentioned it because it may not have been a very prominent feature of Old English! It was followed much more enthusiastically in Middle and Early Modern English. (Chaucer follows it almost perfectly and so does Mallory, though Wycliffe less so.) It’s weird to me that I’ve never seen it before too. As far as I can tell, it’s because More is the only documented person to lay out the rule, in a book that was so massive it was partially lost and never widely reprinted in any form.

I see Marsh points out that Cranmer also used “No” instead of “Nay” in his translation of John, which is—well, I want to say hilarious, but also historically interesting! Stylistic overlap between Tyndale and Cranmer has shaped a lot of formal English style and idiom, between the KJV and the Book of Common Prayer, and I don’t really know much about it.

So I’m researching ways to make negatives that aren’t just yes/no systems and apparently English’s system used to be four-way, and not two-way? I had no idea. You’d say yea and nay for the expected answer to a yes/no question and yes and no for the unexpected. I mention this because Thomas More gives an entirely sassy exegesis of this and I think it’s relevant to some interests on my dash:

I would not here note by the way that Tyndale here translateth no for nay, for it is but a trifle and mistaking of the Englishe worde : saving that ye shoulde see that he whych in two so plain Englishe wordes, and so common as in naye and no can not tell when he should take the one and when the tother, is not for translating into Englishe a man very mete. For the use of these two wordes in aunswering a question is this. No aunswereth the question framed by the affirmative [sic]. As for ensample if a manne should aske Tindall himselfe: ys an heretike meete to translate Holy Scripture into Englishe ? Lo to thys question if he will aunswere trew Englishe, he must aunswere nay and not no. But and if the question be asked hym thus lo: is not an heretike mete to translate Holy Scripture into Englishe ? To this question if he will aunswere trewe Englishe, he must aunswere no and not nay. And a lyke difference is there betwene these two adverbs ye and yes. For if the question bee framed unto Tindall by the affirmative in thys fashion. If an heretique falsely translate the New Testament into Englishe, to make his false heresyes seem the word of Godde, be his bokes worthy to be burned ? To this questyon asked in thys wyse, yf he will aunswere true Englishe, he must aunswere ye and not yes. But now if the question be asked him thus lo; by the negative. If an heretike falsely translate the Newe Testament into Englishe to make his false heresyee seme the word of God, be not hys bokes well worthy to be burned ? To thys question in thys fashion framed if he will aunswere trewe Englishe he may not aunswere ye but he must answere yes, and say yes marry be they, bothe the translation and the translatour, and al that wyll hold wyth them.

—Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, pp. 430

To my mild chagrin, this is a real-ish rule and not a Latinate peeve, despite the fact that More himself gets it wrong in his explanation at least once. :P

Usually the “you can be ineffable but can you be EFFABLE??” posts are pretty boring because people have a laser-like ability to find the words whose non-negative partners are just, you know, archaic. But this is kind of cool:

5. DISAPPOINT

Disappoint was once was the negative ofappoint.It meant “to undo the appointment of; to deprive of an appointment, office, or possession; to dispossess, deprive.” It was used that way in 1489, but by 1513, it was stretched to its present meaning: “to frustrate the expectation or desire of (a person).” You wouldn’t know the two words were once partners.

TY, Mental Floss!

bronycurious:

sleeeeeepyhead:

peacelovelesbian:

libby-on-the-label:

busterposeys:

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents

Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.

JESUS CHRIST

Lmao, no, that’s not how linguistics works. Both countries’ received accents diverged; American accents are no closer to Elizabethan English accents than British ones. However, American English is rhotic, like the English of the past, while RP is not. (And to just cut this off at the pass: no, we don’t think any particular isolated or nonstandard dialect of English is secretly an Elizabethan enclave, not even Appalachian. That’s a busted myth.)

Here’s David Crystal’s site where you can listen to Shakespearean pronunciations— I really trust him as a linguist, but I’m not one myself so keep that in mind :)

etymologic:

Cardinal comes from Latin ‘cardinalis’, which means ‘principal, essential, foremost’. But it’s also a noun, meaning ‘that guy who wears red in the church’, or ‘that bird who wears red in a tree’. Being that they’re both bright red, one is clearly named after the other. Which came first?

The answer is— ding, ding— the liturgical meaning. The bird, being a New World animal, was named so around 1670, presumably when some smallpox-infested weirdo exclaimed, “fuck, does that bird look Catholic!”

etymologic:

Long ago, when something was yours and it started with a consonant (let’s say a boat), you called it ‘my boat’. When something started with a vowel and was yours (let’s say an elephant), you’d say… not ‘my elephant’, but ‘mine elephant’. This is fairly archaic language that only really exists in a few places anymore, but it’s very similar to the difference between ‘a’ and ‘an’.

The my/mine rule does have evidence scattered around history, though, particularly in naming patterns: You know the name ‘Nancy’? It comes from ‘Ann(e)’. Because parents would call their baby Anns ‘mine Ann’, which became ‘my Nan’, and then ‘Nan’ and ‘Nanny’ (the sense of ‘nanny’ meaning aunt or caretaker comes from the Greek word for ‘aunt’, ‘nanna’, but the sense of ‘nanny-goat’  comes from the nickname for ‘Ann’) and eventually ‘Nancy’.

Another name that got a similar treatment, though with much less permanence, was ‘Ambrose’. Ambrose became ‘Amb’, became ‘my Amb’, became ‘my Amby’, became ‘mine Namby’. Thus, the ‘Namby’ in ‘Namby-Pamby’ is referring specifically to someone named Ambrose.

But who? Well, a guy named Ambrose Phillip. He was a fairly well-known poet in the early 1700s, and also a politician. I can’t really tell you if he deserved the name ‘namby-pamby’, I mean, I didn’t know him myself, but what I do know is that a man named Henry Carey didn’t like him much, and instead of going up to his house and trying to beat him senseless like Americans do, Carey wrote a poem about it:

“All ye Poets of the Age!
All ye Witlings of the Stage!
Learn your Jingles to reform!
Crop your Numbers and Conform:
Let your little Verses flow
Gently, Sweetly, Row by Row:
Let the Verse the Subject fit;
Little Subject, Little Wit.
Namby-Pamby is your Guide;
Albion’s Joy, Hibernia’s Pride.”

The poem proceeded to become very popular, and, because it was critiquing Phillips’ penchant for florid prose, the nickname became associated with everything sentimental and insipid, frivolous, weak or silly.

The ‘pamby’ part of the equation, as far as I can tell, is fairly similar to rhyming things with words beginning with ‘schm-‘. So ‘namby-pamby’ is kind of like saying ‘Billy-Schmilly’, except with a lot more history.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, AWESOME: Sound change: who are the culprits? on zompist.com (via languagehat)

One hypothesis we can immediately reject: that people imitate the leaders of society.  Bluntly, people don’t come to talk like the king, or Congress.  All of the ongoing sound changes that have been identified are divergences from the standard.  Labov calls this change from below; other sociolinguists speak of covert prestige.  One obvious example is AAVE, the speech of urban American blacks, which more or less completely ignores both standard General American and the local dialects of northern whites.  Blacks and whites in the US don’t want to sound like each other.  (This isn’t a universal– Jamaican Londoners talk like everyone else, which Labov confirmed by playing recordings of them to white folks; they couldn’t tell that the speakers were black.)

In order to address how sounds change, Labov focussed on whose speech is changing.  The community doesn’t advance uniformly.  His findings:

• The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men.
• Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise.  The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers.
• There’s a typical curvilinear function of class: neither the lower class nor the upper class are in the forefront of change, but those in the middle– even more specifically, the upper working class.
• Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence.  So older speakers may retreat from a change.
• There’s only a very small contribution from ethnicity or neighborhood (except to the degree that these correlate with class).
• A phoneme doesn’t change all at once; some words are leaders, some laggards.  For some reason, the tensing of short a in Philadelphia strongly affected the word planet, while Janet remained lax.  (This is reminiscent of the effect of Trojan horse words in gender change.)

WOW.

Beyond this, Labov was able to identify individuals who were in the forefront of sound changes in Philadelphia.  Interestingly, they shared several characteristics.  They were upper working class women, with a strong nonconformist streak.  Perhaps most interestingly, they were what Malcolm Gladwell calls Connectors, people who were not only intensely involved with their neighborhoods, but had strong connections to other areas as well– the perfect people to spread ideas.

WOW.

Anonymous asked: The joke is twice as hilarious read in its original form, because no matter how well one intellectually knows that humor and language change are ever-present, it's still incongruous enough to the instinct that seeing such a storylet done up in Middle English with fancy type and all just tickles the funnybone. That, or I need a new sense of humor.

For we Englysshe men ben borne under the domynacyon of the mone, whiche is never stedfaste but ever waverynge, wexynge one season and waneth and dyscreaseth another season. And that comyn Englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a-nother, in so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a ship in Tamyse for to have sayled over the see into Zelande, and, for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte Forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys, and the goode wyf answerde that she could speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a-nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.

Or in other words: your sense of humor coincides 100% with mine!