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[linguistcat]

Also, I'm not a doctor, but I used to get dizzy spells very easily due to my blood pressure being naturally low and my body not adjusting quickly enough when I changed positions. See if you can get some sports drinks, either the normal bottles or the powder you mix yourself. I'd suggest the powder as it tends to be more cost effective. Dilute it by half with water, and drink that throughout the day. Even if your blood pressure isn't low it'll help you stay hydrated and keep your electrolytes in balance, better than water or sports drinks alone.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Perhaps this is better suited for the venting thread, though it's more of a question than a vent so I'm putting it here. I've had some level of competency in Spanish since I was a kid, due to having many Spanish-speaking peers and by general exposure. People say that my pronunciation is near-native, but my grammar is... very bad. Plus, My vocabulary is tiny and mostly reserved for things that elementary schoolers are are prone to talk about, since that's the last time I really used the language. For a while I've wanted to study it seriously and reach a level that I'd consider genuinely competent, but I just can't motivate myself. Spanish is really quite similar to English, and the linguistics part of my brain that usually provides intrinsic motivation for language study by going "oooh, what a cool feature!" whenever I encounter something new just isn't activated much by it. Language learning is obviously the sort of thing that takes a lot of dedication, and in my experience extrinsic motivation just isn't sufficient for the sort of regularity that it requires.

So basically, my question is: does anyone here have a suggestion for activating that response with Spanish specifically? Like, perhaps a book or something that might help me get "linguistically excited" about learning the language? Or just ways it differed from English that I may not have encountered as a relative beginner?

[zompist]

So basically, my question is: does anyone here have a suggestion for activating that response with Spanish specifically? Like, perhaps a book or something that might help me get "linguistically excited" about learning the language? Or just ways it differed from English that I may not have encountered as a relative beginner?

For exciting your linguistic side, you might take a couple approaches:

• Concentrate on sound changes from Latin. Try to predict as many Spanish words as possible simply from these.
• Many Native American languages are only documented in Spanish. Learn one of them from texts in Spanish.

Other than that, a good motivator is experiences you can't get in English. For me, that's mostly been marrying a Latin American, but there are others.

• Some great comics, particularly Mafalda and Inodoro Pereyra.
• Lots of literature— reading Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez is of course better in Spanish.
• You could set it as a goal to understand a Cantínflas movie. This is way harder than it sounds.

[Yalensky]

• Concentrate on sound changes from Latin. Try to predict as many Spanish words as possible simply from these.

It helps to know Latin first. But, yes, I strongly second Zomp's suggestion. Knowing historical linguistics really made learning Spanish so much richer for me when I started learning it. It was pretty mind-blowing to my younger self that Spanish verbal endings were just the Latin endings I was already familiar with, and I could even begin to piece together in my mind sound changes I hadn't read about previously. Like a validation of the whole field of historical linguistics.

[Linguoboy]

Ralph Penny's A history of the Spanish language is what really made the language linguistically interesting to me. He gives a good overview of everything from the prehistory of the language to modern dialectal variation. It helped me understand a lot of features that I'd always found a bit baffling before, like ceceo, leísmo, and the use of the perfect vs the preterite. Zompist also had a book that was very similar but more focused just on contemporary variation; I hope he can remember the name of it because I can't.

I'm reading books by both García Márquez and Roberto Bolaño at the moment and I have to say I keep getting bogged down in the former and sailing through the latter. I like García Márquez' ornate style and his sense of humour, but sometimes he gets just too florid with his "crazy jungle Spanish" (as my bilingual sister-in-law calls it) and his prolix accounts of straight male sexual escapades can grow tiresome. Bolaño also has a terrific style and an impressive vocabulary, but he doesn't clobber you with them. On the other hand, he's a postmodernist who's not interested in presenting a traditional narrative, which might not be your thing at all. I guess the point is that you need to find a writer who really appeals to you and whose creative use of language will make you appreciate the sorts of constructions the Spanish language makes possible.

[Kereb]

Unrelatedly, I noticed that someone joined us under the name "Skookum" in January, who seems to often read the forum, but has never made a post. I'm kind of curious because "skookum" is of course NW Pacific word, and I wonder if it's someone from my neck in the woods, maybe even Berek/Kereb.

Nope.

[zompist]

Zompist also had a book that was very similar but more focused just on contemporary variation; I hope he can remember the name of it because I can't.

I hope it's this one from my bookshelf: Latin American Spanish, by John M. Lipski.

[Linguoboy]

Zompist also had a book that was very similar but more focused just on contemporary variation; I hope he can remember the name of it because I can't.

I hope it's this one from my bookshelf: Latin American Spanish, by John M. Lipski.

That's the fella! I knew it was the author of something else on my shelves, I just forgot what. (He also wrote The language of the Isleños: vestigial Spanish in Louisiana, a study of language death which also touches on geographical variation in Spanish.)

[mèþru]

Hi everyone. It's hard for me to return here because I get anxiety when I try to return to a space I haven't been in for a long time. I really want to be active here again though.

[Ares Land]

Hi everyone. It's hard for me to return here because I get anxiety when I try to return to a space I haven't been in for a long time. I really want to be active here again though.

Hi! It's good to see you back.

[mèþru]

thanks
my main communication these days is Discord, and I miss the slower pace of a forum

[dɮ the phoneme]

Welcome back! The pace of things around here has been little slower than usual recently, actually. It seems that quite a few people who used ot be frequent posters aren't around much anymore. Of course, I think these things tend to go in cycles. I often have long breaks where I'm not posting much, and then periods where I'm more active, and I think that's true of most people. So I can empathize with the anxiety about coming back: it's understandable, but it's not warranted!

[Kuchigakatai]

Perhaps this is better suited for the venting thread, though it's more of a question than a vent so I'm putting it here. I've had some level of competency in Spanish since I was a kid, due to having many Spanish-speaking peers and by general exposure. People say that my pronunciation is near-native, but my grammar is... very bad. Plus, My vocabulary is tiny and mostly reserved for things that elementary schoolers are are prone to talk about, since that's the last time I really used the language. For a while I've wanted to study it seriously and reach a level that I'd consider genuinely competent, but I just can't motivate myself. Spanish is really quite similar to English, and the linguistics part of my brain that usually provides intrinsic motivation for language study by going "oooh, what a cool feature!" whenever I encounter something new just isn't activated much by it. Language learning is obviously the sort of thing that takes a lot of dedication, and in my experience extrinsic motivation just isn't sufficient for the sort of regularity that it requires.

So basically, my question is: does anyone here have a suggestion for activating that response with Spanish specifically? Like, perhaps a book or something that might help me get "linguistically excited" about learning the language? Or just ways it differed from English that I may not have encountered as a relative beginner?

Maybe the ease of learning and theoretical usefulness seem a bit motivating, but it's not enough. Honestly I think it's fine to learn a language slowly in pieces in such cases when the motivation is lacking. Although it seems knowing Spanish would be useful, maybe you feel the costs outweigh the gains, on top of the language feeling boring.

I had this problem with Mandarin for the longest time. I started trying to learn it in 2007 while still a teenager (in fact, I joined my first language forum at the time to ask questions about it), but had this problem for over 10 years. In theory I liked the idea of knowing it but I never liked the process of learning it much. I remember being dismayed of how much faster my progress was in Arabic when I got into it in 2008-2010, simply because I liked Arabic so much more, which meant I'd study Arabic a lot more often in bouts.

Things have gotten better in the last couple years, but I'm still some low-intermediate speaker (~B1 in CEFR) when it comes down to it. I found it useful to attend in-person classes (I hadn't attended classes since the first one in 2007, but just reluctantly studied it on my own). Trying to fully understand a class 3.5 hours long where the teacher (along with people asked to participate) speaks Mandarin 98% of the time added some useful pressure and motivation for me. If I'm passing by a restaurant and it has English and Chinese text for all options, I just ignore the Chinese, but there is more of an element of interest when I've paid to be forced to face and struggle with a barrage of speech and things in the language. The famous and infamous Krashen in his Input Hypothesis thought the best input was "i + 1", or just above your current level. I'd say those classes were more like i + 2 (if not i + 3 when some of the better students, often native Cantonese or Malaysian/Indonesian Hakka speakers, talked with the teacher), and probably all the better for it.

I hope it's this one from my bookshelf: Latin American Spanish, by John M. Lipski.

That's the fella! I knew it was the author of something else on my shelves, I just forgot what. (He also wrote The language of the Isleños: vestigial Spanish in Louisiana, a study of language death which also touches on geographical variation in Spanish.)

I was a bit saddened to see the section on the Spanish of El Salvador had a fair bit of obsolete colloquial vocabulary. I'm confident it was perfectly fine in 1991 when he wrote the book, but it's unfortunate to see what is otherwise a nice presentation becoming old purely due to slang rot. His phonological observations remain true of course (although I disagree that -ado can become [ao], even though I grant we often drop /d/ in various other grammatical morphemes, notably in the preposition de after a vowel).

The one thing I didn't like was his comment that sentence-final "vos" is a colloquial term of address similar to English "dude". I'd say it expresses a notion of ", ...could you believe it?" ~ ", believe it or not", as if asserting the truth of the statement while acknowledging the listener is probably not fully believing it. It can also be switched for "usted", "tú" or "ustedes", so it's not a colloquial thing either, but a syntactic construction of the 2nd person pronouns. I think he's also responsible for the misunderstanding that "caliche" (masc., uncountable) refers to the Salvadoran dialect, which I see now and then, when in reality it's a dialectal word meaning "slang", as in "el caliche inglés" 'English slang'.

One fun thing the book helped me with was one time when I met a woman from Peru, and she said she was from Lima. She spoke with lots of uvular [X] for <j ge gi> /x/, which Lipski says it's a characteristic of northern coastal Peruvian dialects, unlike the dialect of Lima which mostly uses [h]. And so I was able to detect she was lying. (Years later I met someone from Lima, and I was able to confirm they do have [h]. It's not a dialect I come across much.)

[MacAnDàil]

RE Scots Wikipedia: I've gotten back into the habit of modifying the Scots Wikipedia. I am also part of a Facebook group for Scots Wikipedia editors with more than a hundred members, with monthly edit-a-thons.

[mèþru]

That's great. It really could use all the Scots speakers it can get (I don't know Scots myself, r else I would join too)

[quinterbeck]

I'm making a linguistics quiz for some friends (who have a normal-person amount of linguistics knowledge) and trying to come up with some questions about conlangs suitable for absolute noobs, but I'm stumped. Any ideas?

There are a few LotR fans in the group but I don't want them to have unfair advantage, so one Tolkien question max, I'm thinking.

[Man in Space]

- For the major motion picture The Interpreter, this language was invented based on a mixture of local languages. (Answer: Ku)
- This fictitious language, from a major multimedia franchise, clings to a word order opposite that of English (namely, object-verb-subject). (Answer: Klingon)
- Khal Drogo speaks Dothraki, a language invented for Game of Thrones. For the HBO television series, this consultant was hired to expand it. (Answer: David J. Peterson)
- Sindarin and Noldorin are languages of the elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Who in this setting spoke Khuzdul? (Answer: Dwarves)
- This movie in the Disney Animated Canon features a constructed language aimed at evoking historical, now-extinct, languages. (Answer: Atlantis: The Lost Empire)
- Michelle Fromkin created Pakuni, a constructed language from this 1970s time-travel television series. (Answer: Land of the Lost)

[bradrn]

One more: ‘Name two conlangs with at least one native speaker’ (Esperanto and Klingon)

- For the major motion picture The Interpreter, this language was invented based on a mixture of local languages. (Answer: Ku)
…

Maybe take out the last question please… it gives me painful memories, and I wouldn’t expect anyone outside certain conlanging communities to know the answer…

EDIT: Oops, nevermind, I misread the question. I thought you had asked, ‘Which language is Bob an expert on?’, but you were actually asking, ‘What TV show was Pakuni from?’. Still, it may be a good idea to take out the reference to Bob… he’s not particularly well-known outside the conlanging community.

[Man in Space]

Maybe take out the last question please… it gives me painful memories, and I wouldn’t expect anyone outside certain conlanging communities to know the answer…

EDIT: Oops, nevermind, I misread the question. I thought you had asked, ‘Which language is Bob an expert on?’, but you were actually asking, ‘What TV show was Pakuni from?’. Still, it may be a good idea to take out the reference to Bob… he’s not particularly well-known outside the conlanging community.

That part was more a joke for the audience on the board than as a serious element to include within the question when it would be actually asked. Nonetheless, it appears not to be having its desired effect, so I have removed it.

[malloc]

What exactly distinguishes an effective lawyer from one considered less competent? If the law prohibits theft, it seems like anyone caught stealing (assuming the same item and circumstances) would face the same consequences regardless of who represents them in court. Yet popular culture and the news make it clear that the right lawyer can somehow make an enormous difference. What are the good lawyers doing differently that makes them so valuable?