My collection of (increasingly obscure) older Thai language-teaching materials keeps growing with the help of ILL. Comparing them gives all kinds of interesting info, from discussions of tone to evolving pronoun connotations. > The ones above are from 1940, 1944, 1961, and 1962. Here are some older language books about Thai from 1894, 1895, 1900, and 1902. >

Maybe my favorite quirk of Thai spelling is that the doubled r <รร> is pronounced as a short /a/ vowel. How on earth do two r’s make an a? It goes back to one of the earliest conventions of Thai writing. Read on. (Note: // indicates pronunciation, and <> indicates spelling.) 1/ We talk informally about the Thai “alphabet”, but it’s actually an abugida (aka an alphasyllabary), a type of writing system where consonants have primary status and vowels are modifiers on them. And like all Southeast Asian abugidas, it ultimately comes from India. 2/

Thai has 5 tones. It's quite reasonable to think every tone should be possible on every (mono)syllable. But sound change reveals exactly why we basically never see this!

(A comically long thread in my drafts for ages, because I was procrastinating revising the manuscript.) 1/ As it turns out, the distribution of tones in a given tonal language of (South)East Asia has been directly constrained by past segmental sound change, especially syllable shape. 2/

Hey linguists: does anyone know of a use before 1937 of "complementary distribution" (the term, not the concept) referring to allophones and phonemes? The earliest use I've found is in "The Origin of Aztec TL" by Whorf (1937). Wondering if he was first to use it that way. The term existed infrequently in the natural sciences before it was used in linguistics, but only became frequent around the same time that Whorf coined "allophone" (see graphs).

I did a thread before on wug trademark filings. I’m going to revisit copyright now. With the April and July demand letters from JBG’s lawyer (which she chose not to disclose in her tweets), the problematic logic of the claim on wug copyright becomes clear. Read on: 1/ Copyright in the US is complex because it’s been extended so many times. The first law in 1790 gave creators just 14 years of control, renewable for 14 more. Extensions happened in 1831, 1909, 1976, 1992, and 1998, with various amendments in between. 2/

This is true! Something that I, as an academic linguist, wish everyone knew: linguists use ‘grammar’ in a different meaning than what they told you ‘grammar’ meant in school. Here is why this should matter to you, a thoughtful person who believes in Truth and Science: 1/

https://twitter.com/megandfigueroa/status/1277718258972385280

What students are taught in school is a particular form of a language. Most of the time, that’s the variety that has the most social prestige. It most closely resembles the way that the more wealthy, educated, socially dominant class uses language (or wants to think they do). 2/