Linguistics
- Researchers fear the British spoken 'r' is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticityphys.org Researchers fear the spoken 'r' is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity in England
How do you pronounce your "r"s towards the ends of words like Shearer, purr, nerd and pore? And what about those in car, bird and her?
- The etymology of fencing was a trade
An interesting bit of etymology that I learnt recently.
The English word "fencing" (as in sword fighting) comes from English "defence", from Old French "defens", from Latin "defendere", meaning "to ward off, defend".
The French word for fencing is "escrime". The Italian and Spanish words are also close cognates with French. "Escrime" comes from Old French "escremir", from Frankish "*skirmjan".
That means English, a Germanic language, gets its word from Latin, a Romance language.
And the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian get their word from Frankish, a Germanic language.
Essentially, the Romance and Germanic language families did a trade.
- Isogloss of European French speaking regions
This map shows the different French accents across western Europe (France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Swiss, and smaller countries/city states)
Similar color means similar accents, different colors means more distinct dialects
- Bird language
Very interesting take on a language made of only whistles.
- Prefixing and suffixing in world's languageswww.tumblr.com Prefixing and suffixing languages
Mostly prefixing - Most Berber languages, Bantu languages, Guarani, many Macro-Ge languages, Mayan languages, Oto-Manguean, Mixtec, Siouan, Navajo and many Na-Dene languages, some languages in northw…
