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The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression. Few in academia, or in...

While Lithuanian has changed, it changed more slowly than other Indo-European languages and so the contemporary language has features similar to those of such ancient ones as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Traditional Lithuanian houses are often adorned with a horse motif. The twin horse heads are known as ‘Ašvieniai’. In Lithuanian mythology, the Ašvieniai are divine twins portrayed as pulling the carriage of the sun god (Saule) through the sky. That their name sounds uncannily familiar to Indians is on account of the fact that the term and other details pertaining to their portrayal are akin to the Ashwin twins...

The Uralic language family and languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian began to spread west approximately 4,200–3,900 years ago, first to the central Volga region and later to the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic. The Uralic language family is a few hundred years younger than the Indo-European one, and its spread led to contacts with Indo-Iranian language variants and the creation of a long contact zone in the area currently known as central Russia. Early loan words originating from this contact made their way into the Uralic languages that were beginning to emerge, including Sami, the Balto-Finnic languages,...

A Capitol Police officer has been suspended after they fired their service weapon inside a congressional office building early Tuesday, authorities said. The officer, who was not immediately identified, fired the weapon in the break room of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC, US Capitol Police confirmed to The Post. “The Capitol Police’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is investigating the discharge of a USCP weapon inside a break room in the Cannon Office Building,” the agency said in a statement. “The officer has been suspended while OPR investigates the incident.” A Capitol Police spokesperson declined to indicate...

Of course the Chinese didn't discover America. But then nor did Columbus A map supporting claims that the admiral Zheng He reached the New World in the early 15th century is plainly a hoax Simon Jenkins Friday January 20, 2006 The Guardian (UK) We all know that a lie goes halfway round the world while truth is putting on its boots. But what if the lie goes the whole way? What if it claims to circumnavigate the globe? Last week came purported evidence that the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his great fleet of junks round the world a century...

The American Dialect Society has named “they” as the word of the decade, recognizing the plural pronoun’s growing use as a singular form to refer to people with a non-binary gender identity.The winner was decided in a vote by the body’s 350 members at an annual gathering on Friday. “People want to choose something that stands the test of time and sums up the decade as a whole,” said linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer. […] Other words on the list for word of the decade included “meme,” which came in second place, followed by “climate,” “#BlackLivesMatter,” “woke” and “MeToo.” …

A Haverford College student who used a campus computer to attempt to hack into an IRS database to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns days before the 2016 presidential election pleaded guilty Tuesday to two misdemeanor crimes in federal court. Justin Hiemstra, 22, who finished his studies in May but will not get his degree until he completes a study-abroad program next May, told Judge Cynthia Rufe that he did not know what he would have done with the tax returns if he and classmate Andrew Harris had succeeded in obtaining them on Nov. 2, 2016. “It was a time when...

There are today eight living Muskogean languages, Alabama, Apalachee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Florida Seminole, Koasati, Miccosukee and Oklahoma Muskogee (Mvskoke). In the past, there were at least seven more Muskogean languages, but they are now extinct. Ironically, of all these surviving Muskogean languages, Muskogee is the most aberrant. In plain English, that means that Muskogee, the language for which the Muskogean Language Family was named, is the least similar to the other languages. The origin of Muskogee’s uniqueness is a Sherlock Holmes mystery that has yet to be solved.

A growing body of evidence shows that language doesn’t just give people a set of words to express their thoughts. It actually can have a heavy influence on those thoughts and on the behaviors they lead to. What would this mean for the thinking and behavior of a person who learns a “pure language”?

There is wide consensus among scholars that Aramaic was the primary language spoken by the Jews of first century Palestine. The vast majority of Jews spoke it. Jesus spoke it. This has been the commonly accepted view since 1845, when Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi, showed that even Jewish rabbis from the first century would have spoken Aramaic. He convincingly argued that the Hebrew from the first century (Mishnaic Hebrew) only functioned as a written language, not as a living, spoken language. There are two reasons most scholars believe Aramaic was the primary language of Jesus’s time—and the language Jesus...

Just a few decades ago, there were no living speakers of Wampanoag, the native tongue of the Cape Cod–based Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. (Their ancestors famously shared a meal with the Pilgrims, 400 years ago.) Then, in 1993, Jessie Little Doe Baird, who was then in her 20s, had a series of dreams about her ancestors, she told Yankee magazine. They were speaking to her, but she couldn’t understand them. A prophecy known to the tribe said that their lost language would come back when they were ready for it, revived by the children of those who had broken the language...

The media should stop saying that Islamic terrorists “were radicalized” This Washington Post headline states:“Suspect in Berlin market attack was radicalized in an Italian jail.”This USA today article is titled:“London attack: More arrests as detectives probe how killer was radicalized.”This Wall St. Journal article is called:“Minnesota Mall Attacker Likely Was Radicalized, Officials Say.”This New York Post article has the headline:“Mosque members warned feds that accused killer was radicalized.”This article form the Local is called:“Isis suspect was radicalized in Germany, brother claims.”This article from the Guardian is named:“FBI and Obama confirm Omar Mateen was radicalized on the internet.”This Breitbart headline says:“Spanish...

Has any body read Abus of Language Abuse of Power by Josef Pieper or any other books by Pieper? Would you comment on them please? Good? Recommended? Thanks.

Benjamin Bergen is the author of the book: “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves.” “It turns out that there are amazing things you can find out about how the mind works, how the brain works, people’s human sociality just by looking at profanity,” he explained. The professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego said cursing could be linked to higher intelligence. “It turns out that on average, the ones who swear the most also have the biggest vocabulary overall,” Bergen added.

David Peterson has so far created 4,000 Dothraki words When the misogynistic, male Dothraki characters launch into curse-laden tirades on "Game of Thrones," viewers have a 35-year-old Southern California father and a University of California Berkeley graduate to thank for what they hear. David J. Peterson invented Dothraki, the language spoken by the crass race of nomadic horse warriors first described in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice," on which the HBO series is based. "It's a lot of fun," he said Tuesday, in his first, interactive Facetime Live interview. Especially coming up with the curse...

The Not-so-Nice Origins and Meanings of the Word "Nice" Msgr. Charles Pope • November 24, 2015 • Words can change meaning over time—sometimes dramatically. For example, "manufactured" originally meant "handmade" (manu (hand) + facere (make)). The word "decimate" used to mean "to reduce by a tenth" (decem = ten); now people usually use it mean "to wipe out completely." The list of examples could go on and on. Yes, words do change meaning over time.One word that has changed meaning dramatically over time is "nice." Today it is an overused word that usually means pleasant, kind, or easygoing. In our...

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not—to the French, a dog is a chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that...

Out with “oot.” No more “aboot.” Canada is talking with a New Speak. In a linguistic pivot called the Canadian Vowel Shift, we are pronouncing “God” more like “gawd,” “bagel” like “bahgel,” “pillow” like “pellow,” and “sorry” less like “sore-y.” The word “Timbit” is becoming “Tembet,” and “Dan slipped on the staircase” now sounds more like “Don” “slept” on it. First discovered in 1995, the new vowels are contagious, spreading rapidly from Victoria to St. John’s, where linguists are mapping the frequency of people’s voices and using ultrasounds to track their tongue and lip placement. “We’re in the middle of...

You may have seen a poem by Gerard Nolst Trinité called The Chaos. It starts like this:Dearest creature in creationStudying English pronunciation,I will teach you in my verseSounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.In its fullest version, the poem runs through about 800 of the most vexing spelling inconsistencies in English. Eight hundred.Attempting to spell in English is like playing one of those computer games where, no matter what, you will lose eventually. If some evil mage has performed vile magic on our tongue, he should be bunged into gaol for his nefarious goal (and if you still need convincing...

Let's start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism. The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there...