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Day: May 13, 2017
What exactly is the origin of the “ain’t no” kind of speech/dialect?
Ain’t – Wikipedia Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects. Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the […]
Regarding Australian states and territories, say you have a certain word in your state. Have you come across different words in other states that mean the same thing?
Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, […]
How long would it take linguists to decode a language like Lojban if no speakers or reference grammar existed, but several original texts did?
Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer. Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite […]