The vocabulary of a given language is constantly changing: new words emerge, old words “die,” i.e., they are no longer actively used and eventually no longer understood. This process varies according to the type of word: new nouns, adjectives and verbs emerge quickly and spontaneously. Other types of words, such as articles or numeral words,…
When I wrote the blog post “Linguistics and Linguists in Film” over a year ago, I thought that for a brief period we would have to confine our lives to the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. Now we still can’t travel without restrictions, and those of us who wanted to do projects on the ground…
Once upon a time, there was a merchant in Baghdad. There came a year when trade was stagnant. The next year was the same, there was no rain and so there were no goods for people to buy. Many people went out of business and he feared he would too. “What am I still doing…
Once in a while, we get requests to translate from English or French into North African dialects. For historical and political reasons, these languages are often referred to as dialects. But according to Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com, see below) and other sources, these Arabic varieties are languages in their own right. Colloquial Arabic in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria,…
Last Sunday, our tale was about fear and the gallows (God forbid). We said those who are hanged are taken down at sunset to spend the night at “Beb Souika”‘s oil mill to be buried the following day. Today’s tale deals with the same subject. However, this time, events take place in an earlier period.…
(see here Introduction to the Tunisian Stories and Overview) A certain woman was divorced from her husband. At that time divorce was a shameful thing and it wasn’t something that people of nobility would even recognize or admit to. If someone was pushed to divorce because of irreconcilable differences, they would hide it for fear…
(see here Introduction to the Tunisian Stories and Overview) Once upon a time, there was a tailor sewing in his shop. A woman selling jam passed him by, so he bought an ounce from her. He had some bread in his shop that he cut in two and spread the jam on one half to…
Every culture and every society has its stories. The Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault, Božena Němcová and others have collected and written down the fairy tales and stories of their countries. These often somehow have some things in common and also differ in interesting nuances. This also applies to Tunisia but with the exception that these…
In part one of this series, I introduced you to constructed languages (conlang) and in part two, planned languages. Now I’ll conclude with languages games, also called ludling in English: In a playful way, children, but also adults change an existing language according to predefined rules. The result is a kind of secret language that…
In the first part of this short series on artistic languages we focussed on constructed languages (conlangs). Planned languages, previously also called international auxiliary languages, represent another large section. Their history goes back to the seventeenth century when scholars and philosophers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed so-called a priori languages. These were strictly logical…