the linguistic appropriation cycle

ID: an image depicting a cycle with arrows between each stage that says: “community creates new term for their experiences -> term becomes popular -> people outside community learn and start using it -> term becomes misused and loses its meaning” and continues on from the beginning. end ID

(If you learned more than one, pick the one you learned the most or took for the longest time or enjoyed the most or whatever. Pick the one most meaningful to you.)

Hiraeth (n.)

a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

Ok this is kind of it, yes, but it’s not really the full story. People usually translate hiraeth as homesickness, longing, melancholy or some other similar word, and while these do get across some of the word’s uses, they fail to convey the expanse of it.

To be honest, that’s something that really can’t be done. There will never be an adequate English translation of hiraeth, because it’s about far more than just a conveyance of feeling. Hiraeth is a longing, yes, but it’s also a grief. It’s not melancholy or nostalgia - it isn’t something so fleeting as that, which can be brought up by a smell or a sight. Hiraeth is more of a state of being. It’s the seafoam to an entire people. It means longing, yes, and grief - for something lost. Something we forgot, and have forgotten we needed. A connection to the land, perhaps, and to each-other, which we can never be whole without. Which nobody alive remembers, and yet its absence seeps between the veins of the culture and ballasts the very soul.

It’s frustrating to me, to be honest, to see such an integral part of my culture - a concept so baked into the Welsh subconscious that it completely colours everything from our art to our conversations with friends - be misunderstood and reduces to just ‘homesickness’ or whatever. For it to be used not for its meaning, its true meaning, but because it’s an exotic-sounding word that can be vaguely slapped onto concepts it does not describe, without anything but a superficial aesthetic interest in the culture with which it’s entwined. Worst of all, to see it used as fucking marketing, as if a large part of what it describes isn’t a mourning for the industrial exploitation of the Welsh land and people.

I don’t really have a conclusion I guess. It’s just frustrating to me. I’m not attacking OP, I’m sure they had no ill intentions, but not thinking about stuff like this kind of perpetuates a fetishistic idea of our culture.

Would anyone be interested in helping me with an entirely informal study related to my MA thesis?

(the study is unpaid, in no way affiliated with my university and exists purely to satisfy my curiosity about one aspect of my topic but it might lead to a real study later on)

• Are you a German native speaker?
• Unfamiliar with the TV show M*A*S*H (familiarity with the film is allowed) and agree to not do any research beforehand?
• Willing to watch a 2h long movie entirely for free and then answer some questions about it?

Language is FILLED with redundancy, because languages have evolved to be expressive, not logical. Redundancy is a design feature, not a flaw.

ALT

Saying something more than once amplifies its meaning. Everywhere you look in language you find redundancy:

• French & Spanish negation (“je ne sais pas”, “no se nada”)
• prefix stacking (“pre-prepared”, “entitled” vs. “titled”, “irregardless”)
• redundant adverbs (“she returned back home”)
• reduplication (“I don’t want pizza, I want pizza pizza—Chicago style“).

Redundancies make it easier for listeners to process speech also.

Embrace the redundant expressivity of language!

“That sounds like a good idea…….”-“Is there something bothering you with the idea?”-“No, the idea is GOOD…..🙂”

Can someone explain this to me?

Old people use quotation marks to indicate emphasis, as a substitute for italics (which many of them could not produce on the old typewriters they learned to write on), whereas young people use them to indicate sarcasm or falseness. They’re used as “scare quotes”.

And old people use ellipses simply to indicate a pause, or for some other incomprehensible reason I’m not aware of. But young people use ellipses to indicate passive-aggression.

So an old person could type something like:

how are things going with your “boyfriend”….

and what they mean is

How are things going with your boyfriend? [Im so excited for you, sweetie, and I wanna hear about it]

But a young person would interpret that sentence as

How are things going with your so-called boyfriend…. [I say, while seething with contempt for him and possibly for you too]

The linguistic difference across generations is beautifully explained here thank you

[ID: A tweet by (@)pervocracy. It reads “Emailing older less-internetty people is nervewracking because they’ll write “‘THANK YOU’ for your ‘HELP’ … Cliff …” and mean nothing by it and it’s very hard to politely explain that in my language that would be a declaration of war”. End ID.]

Miíyu miíyu. It is Speak Your Language day. However, thanks to Colonization and “extermination” and other genocide methods, I only speak a few words of what should have been my first language.

When we think about languages it is important to know of and support the ones that Colonial Imperialism has done its best to eradicate.

This includes not mocking them as silly,

not saying they sound like nonsense,

not joking about their spelling, the look of their alphabet,

not joking about how they sound

as “making no sense” to you just because you speak a Majority language. You are not more comprehensible or correct than their words are just because you can’t understand them.

That is Colonizer rhetoric.

Respecting a language actual people speak is part of not being bigoted.

 Yes, this includes languages spoken by “white” people, like Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots dialect, Breton, Welsh, Cornish, and so on.

These few words you see me use are Chamteéla, one of the languages formerly common in what is now called California, USA.

Noó$un Loóviq

All of this

And also, please, if a minority language is really close to a dominant language, don’t dismiss it as an “improper/incorrect” version of that language

Scots isn’t “improper English”

Occitan isn’t “improper French”

Corsican isn’t “improper Italian”

Frisian isn’t “improper Dutch”

and so on

@mogai-sunflowers

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRWjUxfJ/

-fae

Because people keep reblogging my shit and tagging it "Irish"

Íf thé áccénts gó thís wáy ít's Írísh

Ìf thèy gò thìs wày ìt's Scòttìsh Gàèlìc

Also Irish underwent spelling reforms a while back which removed a lot of silent consonants, while Gaelic did not

Eg: oíche vs oidhche (night), rí vs rìgh (King), sú vs sùgh (juice)

A bit of nuance on the accents thing:

Scots Gaelic actually does have acute accents, the reason a lot of Gàidhlig you’ll see only has grave accents is because of spelling reforms that happened in the 90s. But older texts and text from Nova Scotia still have the acute accent, and there’s also people like me who use it regardless :) here’s a few examples:

Old/New - Meaning

mór/mòr - “big”

éisd/èist - “listen!”

ás déidh/an dèidh - “after”

The acute accent serves an important purpose in Scottish Gaelic, which is to distinguish the two O sounds and the two E sounds.

mór - /mo:r/, but òl - /ɔːL/

céilidh - /kʲeːli/, but gnè - /grɛ̃ː/