they called R the littera canina, because it was rolled in a way that sounded like a dog's snarl

another latin dog fact

the dominican monks were like the hardcore vigilantes of the monk world, super duper mean

named for st dominic, in Latin Dominicanus

but they were often referred to as Domini canes - the hounds of the lord

medieval puns

latin is so heavily inflected that (for purposes of meaning) word order is completely unnecessary

i.e. the sentence "dog bites man" can be composed any of the following ways in latin and still mean "the dog bites the man"

dog bites man, man bites dog, dog man bites, man dog bites, bites man dog, bites dog man

there are of course conventions, & metrical considerations

speaking of scansion, latin uses mācrōns to indicate syllable length; its literal length, though. you spend longer saying that vowel

macrons are really only important for spoken latin, scansion, and very rarely for meaning; for example, malus = evil, but mālus = apple tree

so macrons arent typically given any notice in elementary latin

this is in stark contrast to, say, german diacritics, which function as completely separate letters & phonemes and are indispensable to meaning and pronunciation

and in slight contrast to greek, which i think is really charming because its accents mark every word's stressed syllable; its just a cute very helpful addition

and especially charming is the fact that people write the stress mark out in handwritten greek

i dont know what its called though, and im talking about modern greek, and im barely literate in even that

obviously the various ancient greeks have a ton of shit going on as far as metrical diacritics

another interesting greek... punctuation? diacritic?

the "breathing mark" (once again dont know the greek word), sometimes at the beginning of words that begin with vowels, to indicate a sort of breathy h sound

its super neat because when romanized it's just "h"

so words like sun, helios, are actually 'elios

blood, hema, 'ema

latin and greek are so different in terms of their orthography

latin is very very easy and straightforward, you basically just pronounce every single letter in a given word; the graphemes and phonemes correspond extremely simply, its basically 1:1

greek is massively difficult in that respect, especially with its diphthongs

it has three "i" letters in its alphabet, and more diphthongs that also make that sound

multiple o's (omega and omicron-- big O and little O

etc etc its baffling

one exasperating but cute letter is u, upsilon

it makes the "ee" sound-- but occasionally, when its placed after another vowel, it becomes an "f"!!

whaaaat

i know

bananas

so words like "auto" are actually pronounced "afto" in the greek

do you know a really terrible one? zeus

zeffs sounds stupid as hell

"television" and "homosexual" are both half greek, half latin, and made purist classicists so angry back in the day

speaking of which silly prescriptivism, i have a pet peeve along those lines

pluralizing -us into -i (syllabus, syllabi) is a latin convention; octopus is a greek word!

smfh at "octopi"!!!!!

im afraid its octopuses! but if you really want to be a smartass, adjust your pocket protector and say "octopodes"

but please dont, youll look like an asshole

what other wisdom can i impart

some languages have separate 1st person plural pronouns ("we") to indicate inclusion of the speaker or exclusion, i think thats really cool

oh heres a cute german thing!

in german, all nouns are gendered, masculine feminine or neuter

car is masculine - der Wagen

motorcycle is neuter - das Motorrad

so if someone were to refer to a vehicle as "the Honda," you would know if it's a bike or a car by which pronoun they used

der Honda, or das Honda

I HAVE MORE

children/people whose first language is tonal, e.g. mandarin or cantonese, are far more likely to have perfect pitch

lets move on to psycholinguistics, i know a couple cool things about that

there was a study where speakers of gendered languages (spanish and german, i believe) were asked to describe certain objects

the objects were grammatically feminine in one language, and masculine in the other

e.g. bridge: die Brücke, el puente

when the subjects were asked to describe or name the objects, they tended to use masculine/feminine language according to the grammatical gender

the german bridge was beautiful; the spanish bridge was sturdy

anthropomorphized objects in childrens books in gendered languages typically are gendered in accordance with their grammatical gender

https://kb.osu.edu/dspac... here's that study

this one is pretty well known i think, but its still super neat

when asked to name which object was "kiki" and which was "bouba," english & tamil speakers overwhelmingly named the pointy one kiki and the rounded one bouba

i do not have the cot/caught distinction; i pronounce them both the same way

hmmm

oh i can tell the story of how the english language got such a ridiculous amount of french in it

when william of normandy invaded & conquered england in 1066, he replaced the majority of the government officials & processes with his own

and, being from normandy, his people spoke old french, not old english

he was quite smart about not subjugating the english too extensively though, because they were his new infrastructure

anyway over the course of a century or two, england's state affairs were all conducted in french; when the english sort of assimilated them and regained their political clout

well, BY that time, english had become the language of talking about cows and shit

it just didnt have the vocab to talk about high falutin things like affairs of state

so it had to incorporate a huge amount of french, which did! and that is the story of how old english became middle english

and speaking of cows, this incidentally is why our livestock words (cow, chicken, etc) are germanic in origin, but the food equivalents (beef, poultry) are french

french was the language of nobility, so when the english became nobles again they had to adopt it too

i think thats all my anecdotes for now

/) w (\

my latin teacher in high school got his degree in iceland, because he really loved icelandic?? he was so fucking weird and great i loved him

the endonym for iceland is something like Island

"Is" meaning ice

but it also means ice cream in modern icelandic

so once my teacher in iceland was like "LOL ice cream land huh? ? sounds great "

and they were like "oh... no... its 'ice' in that context"

"ICEland"

"not ice cream land"

and he was like "plrbfb"

iceland: great at parties