Top products from r/badlinguistics

I've found the Dictionaries of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar to be the one of, if not the most useful thing, I've found to help with learning Japanese.

Sam Martin's Reference Grammar of Japanese is also excellent, but good luck finding a copy.

Analyzing languagejones

• comments per month: 51.4 ^I ^have ^an ^opinion ^on ^everything
  
• posts per month: 1.5 ^lurker
  
• favorite sub linguistics
  
• favorite words: you're, really, speakers
  
• age 0 years 11 months
  
• profanity score 0.6% ^Gosh ^darnet ^gee ^wiz
  
• trust score 77.3%
  
  
• Fun facts about languagejones
  
  • "I'm a native speaker of AAVE because of my childhood speech community."
    
  • "I've studied that has a written tradition."
    
  • "I've only ever heard people claim "two negatives make a positive" and then give an example of multiplying negatives."
    
  • "I am very careful to separate out of my data."
    
  • "I've seen look like they were made in R, using the R Color Brewer package."
    
  • "I'm a geospatial n00b, so I started with this book)."
    
  • "I've never seen it as "linalg." I like that, but I'm uncertain how to pronounce it."
    
  • "I am just in the process of learning some French equivalents."
    
  • "I am not familiar with the concept of unconscious bias."
    
  • "I've got a speaker who has just a long nasalized schwa for "I don't know." There is, however, a nice pitch contour."
    
  • "I've been talking with Dr."
    

A good book which proves this beyond any reasonable doubt is Behold!!! the Protong. It was written and illustrated by a remarkable individual named Stanislav Szukalski.

Honestly, Language Myths covers most of this, and a decent amount of the book is available through the Amazon Preview here. At the very least, the myth names in the table of contents- "Myth 1: Languages should not be allowed to vary or change" are visible- and fairly straight forward.

A good book on the subject I think you would like is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, It's where I got the info on the Sintashta culture I mentioned above.

It's fascinating how speakers of vastly different languages can employ the exact same methods to "demonstrate" that it is their language from which all other languages are derived.

Here's a short list of languages for which people have made such a claim. Feel free to add to it:

German/Old High German (see comment below for info. it's all in German though)

Albanian (this was posted on here some while back and has become somewhat of a legend.)

Tamil (obviously)

Greek

Sanskrit

Arabic (this guy is crazy. i'm not sure he's been featured on here. badling galore, and even in a pseudo scientific way.)

Edit:

Hebrew (thanks to the post that was posted here recently)

Romanian (a discussion on this sub from a few weeks ago)

Edit:

Frogs

I feel similarly whenever I see a popular science/philosophy/crackpottery book with "Dr. Archibald Cornelius, PhD" or whatever on it. It makes me feel that their argument is weak enough that "hey, I have a degree!" is the best way to support it.

Serious scientists do this too sometimes, but not very often.

Hungarian linguistics is frequently bad linguistics. One of my most treasured possessions is this thing, claiming Hungarian is related to both the Altaic languages and Sumerian.

This book https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568 written by a defector has a part where he mentions that the common speech of Chinese Koreans is pretty much the same dialect as that of the northern North Hamyong province of DPRK.

I'm imagining The Truman Show meets Fight Club meets Hogs Gone Wild. So I'm in.

This

According to this, it seems to be -og for living organisms. So moosog?

The Language Hoax by John H. McWhorter.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Turkish-Language-Reform-Catastrophic/dp/0199256691

Ataturk has implemented a policy that attempted to purify the language from arabic, persian and to some extent western words.

I recently read This Book written by a mixed-race Cheyenne warrior about his life during the late-19th century Indian Wars, and the majority of his communication with anyone not of his tribe is done through Indian Sign or Plains Sign as he calls it. It's really interesting but it's only mentioned in passing.

Did your professor buy into Wars of the Anunnaki: Nuclear Self-Destruction in Ancient Sumer?

> The author explains how the Anunnaki came to Earth from the planet Nibiru seeking gold to repair their ozone layer. Using genetic engineering, they created modern humanity to do their mining work and installed themselves as our kings and our gods. Anunnaki god Enki had a fatherly relationship with the first two humans. Then Enlil, Enki’s brother, took over as Commander of Earth, instating a sole-god theocracy and a war against the clan of Enki and humanity for spoiling the Anunnaki bloodlines through interbreeding. This shift imposed a blackout not only of the very human nature of the Anunnaki “gods” but also of humanity’s own ancient past on Earth.
>
> Two of Enlil’s attacks against the Enki clan and humanity are described in the stories of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. His final attempt, after coercing the Assembly of the Gods into voting yes, was the nuclear bombing of 5 cities of the Jordan plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, which resulted in the destruction of the Sumerian civilization and the Anunnakis’ own civilization on Earth, including their space port in the Sinai. The author reveals how, after each attempt, humanity was saved by Enki, chief scientist Ninmah, and Enki’s son Hermes.
>

It is a jump, but people do think that, and they do say "no problemo" informally (even though it's not even how Spanish-speakers would say it; most would say "no hay problema," and some who are bilingual and have picked up on "no problem" might just say "no problema," but it ends with an a in Spanish).

What I'm saying is that our language uses reinforce unconscious beliefs and social structures. This book explains it better than I can. I'm sorry I don't have a free resource more eloquent than myself. If I did, I'd share it.