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pauammaIn Google Ngrams aggregate English use of "lavender marriage(s)", the small bump between 1880 and 1890 in an otherwise all-zero graph until use takes off in 1988, which isn't present in American English but wholly due to British English and is attested in the British press in 1895 (although that year may be a typo for 1995 so what meaning it had in the 1880s is unclear to me).
Note the complete lack of "lavender marriages" as a plural in British English, which hints that it mostly refers to the custom, not to specific marriages. I don't know what the lack of a bump in 1880s English fiction indicates. (There's no region-specific English fiction corpus in Google Ngrams, unfortunately, and I'm not sure whether the lack of the plural form there means it's because of the genre, because of the region, or both.) Then there's that perplexing sharp trough hitting the bottom in 2001 for English fiction. (Is it corpus sampling bias?)
Note the complete lack of "lavender marriages" as a plural in British English, which hints that it mostly refers to the custom, not to specific marriages. I don't know what the lack of a bump in 1880s English fiction indicates. (There's no region-specific English fiction corpus in Google Ngrams, unfortunately, and I'm not sure whether the lack of the plural form there means it's because of the genre, because of the region, or both.) Then there's that perplexing sharp trough hitting the bottom in 2001 for English fiction. (Is it corpus sampling bias?)
pauammaIn (at least some) English-speaking countries, it's said to make you go blind. In France (and maybe in other French-speaking countries), it's said to make you go deaf. What about other countries or languages?
pauammaWhy is it *checks toothpaste tube label* -ide in English, Dutch, and Spanish, but -ure/-uro in French and Italian? (At least for fluoride, but chloride uses the -ure suffix in French at least.)
Linguistics and anatomy
Jul. 17th, 2021 11:49 ampauammaOne thing I'd like to do, if I had enough spoons and enough access to anatomists or health professionals across the world, is find out the unmarked order for merging "urinary" and "genital" into a single word, or if they do. (Eg, English "urogenital", French "génito-urinaire".)
Native speaker valorization?
Feb. 21st, 2020 09:22 pmpauammaI came across https://twitter.com/ervinmalakaj/status/1230855895179022338 and I'm wondering: is that tweet referring to the same principle that says (paraphrased) "for questions of language usage correctness, always defer to native speakers' knowledge of their language"? If so, how does that critique deal with the opposite tendency (I'm not sure whether to call it neocolonialism or cultural imperialism) to mock native speakers of non-Western cultures based on misunderstandings of how their language works, saying in effect "they're not even able to speak their own language properly"?
steorraFrom The Economist: Daily chart: Speaking in tongues: Language diversity around the world
Briefly explains an interesting quantification of a country's linguistic diversity, based on the probability of two people chosen at random from that country having the same native language. (If two people chosen at random had 100% chance of having the same native language (i.e., everyone has the same native language), the score would be 0 (North Korea apparently fits here); if two people chosen at random had no chance of having the same language (i.e. no two people share the same native language), the score would be 1 (not actually possible in practice, but Papua New Guinea comes rather close).)
It doesn't explain the scoring in enough detail for me to tell it's as simple as that a score of 0.9 means two people chosen at random would have a 90% chance of having different languages, or if there's a bit more involved in creating the score.
It's also not clear to me if it accounts for people having multiple native languages
Briefly explains an interesting quantification of a country's linguistic diversity, based on the probability of two people chosen at random from that country having the same native language. (If two people chosen at random had 100% chance of having the same native language (i.e., everyone has the same native language), the score would be 0 (North Korea apparently fits here); if two people chosen at random had no chance of having the same language (i.e. no two people share the same native language), the score would be 1 (not actually possible in practice, but Papua New Guinea comes rather close).)
It doesn't explain the scoring in enough detail for me to tell it's as simple as that a score of 0.9 means two people chosen at random would have a 90% chance of having different languages, or if there's a bit more involved in creating the score.
It's also not clear to me if it accounts for people having multiple native languages