Melissa Boiko @melissaboiko@scholar.social

organizing accounts:

this alt = linguistics, conlangs, academic life.

selfies, comments on books+comic books, transgender issues, politics, miscellanea = @elilla .

trying to keep this account’s public timeline more on-topic as per instance rules \o/

#introduction hallöchen! I’m a Brazilian trans woman living in Germany working on Japanese dialectal fieldwork (long story). Interests include fantasy fiction, imaginary languages, free software, comic books, intersectional veganism, cute cuddly things, and supporting anticapitalist revolutions to bring down the whole rotten edifice

#introductions #germany #bochum #nrw #linguistics #transgender #vegan

I would like to thank the entire field of applied #linguistics on second language acquisition for decades of data-based, scientific evidence that I must binge on a ton of Netflix shows, comic books and fantasy novels of my personal preference, for the sake of my future and career.

I’m not being hyperbolic, the preceding sentence is literally true (see: http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles.php?cat=6 )

Atlas of Everyday #German https://imgur.com/a/Zpfnkuo

some things learned:
- all that work to learn ‘10 vor halb 8’ and nobody uses it here (=bit north from Köln) https://i.imgur.com/n1ej0np.jpg

- why local supermarkets seem undecided between Heidelbeere und Blaubeere https://i.imgur.com/UzFN42a.jpg

- no Berliners in Berlin https://i.imgur.com/Ha2tKgA.jpg

- Köln ist brutal https://i.imgur.com/5HGGY28.jpg

- noar https://i.imgur.com/daRnkZq.jpg

> In any orthography using [long s] “ſ” at all, “s” marks the end of a word, or of a constituent of a compound.
> Thus, e. g.

> - “Wachstube” [ˈvakstuːbə] = “Wachs-Tube”, a tube containing wax

> - “Wachſtube“ [ˈvaxʃtuːbə] = “Wach-Stube”, guard room

(Otto Stolz, on the Unicode mailing list)

#german #ſ

consoling myself by thinking of every single ‹ ü › and ‹ ö › as emoticons when doing grammar drills. (‹ ɑ̈ › is an open-mouthed kirby)

#German

was kind of counting that our project would be renewed, which would give me 4 more years of Europe. it wasn't.

now I have 9 months or so to find a postdoc or something, or I'll be deported back to Brazil which, in the current circumstances, for a trans woman, would be.... well, downright terrifying.

so cool and intuitive that #Libras have specific pronouns for "us two, us three, us four" as well as "the 2/3/4 of them", "the 2/3/4 of you" (besides singular and plural) by simply adding the requisite amount of fingers to the basic pronoun sign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZkXAPsYkA0

I wonder if any spoken languages have that. I’ve heard of dual and paucal pronouns, but for sign it feels so natural to specify the number this way if you want to.

I'm grateful for support programs for female researchers. But if you're organising something like this, please consider making it for women plus non-binary people.

I know that at some point in my life I'll have to design a morphological conscript, probably for a custom conlang. I resist the call but it's basically inevitable.

maybe the most widespread misconception in my sub-sub-field is that 'tonal language' would be a mutually exclusive category with 'stress language', with 'pitch accent' somehow lying in-between.

this is despite ~the~ canonical example of 'tonal language', Mandarin, having both tone and stress; a number of European languages having both stress and pitch accent (e.g. Norwegian); and langs like Shanghainese, San Mateo Huave etc. having the tone and stress systems interact.

#linguistics

proposal: instead of white ppl trying to acquire indigenous languages to document or revitalise them, teach linguistics to natives to empower and protagonise their own linguistic situation.

things I like in #German:

compound adjectives from temporal adverbs:

diesjährig ‘thisyearly’ (diesjähriges Sommerfest → the summer festival of this year)

rechtzeitig ‘righttimely’

frühstmöglich ‘earliestmayly’

(I'm using downstep/upstep symbols here because mastodon currently doesn't seem to support Unicode variation selectors, and the intonation arrows show in emoji style ↗︎ ↘︎ even if you follow them by VS15.)

#mastodon #unicode #bug

gf tells me that I say "Guten Appetit!" with the same intonation as "itadakimasu!" and apparently German ppl don't actually do that but it feels weird saying it any other way x3 (something like ↓gu↑ten appetiːːt!)

#German #Japanese

David J. Peterson does a ‘Create a Language in Just One Hour’

https://youtu.be/StcSHmBZj2k

#linguistics #conlang

I admire the ability of my Tsugaru speaker’s stridents to overwhelm the amplitude detection algorithm of our professional-grade voice recorder.

#Japanese

academics a couple generations older than me: be very careful not to reveal your research anywhere before publication you gonna be plagiarized by thesis pirates what if they use ~your data~ this is your life's work

academics from my generation on: hmm I will put the git url in the cover so that everybody can find the full version history after I upload the pre-alpha draft pdf to 15 different open archives

> denn (conj)
> Etymology
> Old variant of dann. The functional split between denn and dann was prescribed only by the grammarians of the 18th century.

so it was you again, 18th century grammarians. *shakes fist*

#german

proud of Abralin for hosting these sessions with Labov, Haspelmath and others

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5tyw8_gT0

(and of my friend and tutor Lívia in this video!)

#linguistics #abralin