/r/linguisticshumor
Linguistics Humor: a sub for humor relating to linguistics
Welcome to /r/linguisticshumor! This is the home for jokes about linguistics, i.e., the study of human language.
Linguistics memes, funny textbook illustrations, crackpot theories, rude drawings made up of IPA symbols, and other linguological ludicrousness goes here. If you've got something that you'd like to share with the class that isn't scientifically rigorous enough for /r/linguistics, post it in this sub.
For more serious linguistics, check out /r/linguistics and /r/asklinguistics.
For humor and discussion about modern foreign languages, check out /r/languagelearning.
For examples of bad linguistics, check out /r/badlinguistics.
For linguistics shit-posting, check out /r/shittylinguistics.
For goofy linguistics thoughts, check out /r/showerlinguistics.
/r/linguisticshumor
The best one I ever thought of, I think, was "the radio set the time", rather aping the famous, and my favourite, "the old man the boat". But I feel like that type of brevity makes for the best and most jarring garden-path sentence. What are your favourites?
Mine doesn’t have it because it’s not a gendered language.
X = hour indicated by clock, Y= next hour after X, Z = minutes
In English it's very simple, just the first number that the second (so 4:34 us "four thirty four"), but might use "quarter after X" for X:15 and " quarter to Y: for X:45, and "X o'clock" for X:00, and that's really it
In Plautdietsch though, it's a little more complicated.
X:00 is "clock X"
X:01 to X:14 is "Z after X"
X:15 is "quarter after X"
X:16 to X:29 is "Z before half Y"
X:30 is "half Y"
X:31 to X:44 is "Z after half Y"
X45: is "quarter to Y"
X:46 to X:59 is "Z before Y"
So something like 8:27 would be "three before half nine"
We have been unfairly robbed of the two best letters ever created. In their place, we use the pathetic, undifferentiated, characterless digraph th. The je ne sais quoi of Old English orthography is gone. Actually, that's a dumb statement, because je very fucking much sais quoi. Bring them back.
who wrote this 😭 🙏
Yes, this was made in the apple notes app, don’t ask