“Gilbert employed the Latin electricus to describe the observation that when you rub amber against some substances like wool or a cat’s fur, it sticks to the amber. We now that this clinging—and the zaps that appear between the amber and the substance rubbed against it—is due to static, but at the time, Gilbert supposed amber to be magnetic.”
@bibliolater@linguistics
It was through Gilbert's work that I learned of Petrus Peregrinus, whom Gilbert praised for actually experimenting. Petrus never managed to perfect his magnet-driven perpetual motion machine, however. https://archive.org/details/b24876859
“In this video, I run through 10 aspects of English that make it bizarre in comparison with other languages. These include its “meaningless do”, dreadful spellings, odd use of tenses, missing pronouns and the strange array of sounds in English.”
#Video length: twenty one minutes and thirty seven seconds.
@PeterMotte@eleder@bibliolater@linguistics Sure, English originally came from Old German, actually Old Saxon, through the Angels, Saxons and Jutes, had Roman influences, then the French and the Vikings came, making the English language so diverse
I find I can't stomach most fiction anymore, especially anything written since about 1990. But Vanessa Chan's "The Storm We Made" is a powerful exception. Minutely and lovingly observed and the emotional punches it delivers are all earned and deserved.
It's set in #Malaysia in the 1930s during the British colonial period (when it was still called "Malaya") and the #Japanese wartime occupation of the 1940s, and its principal characters are Malay and Japanese. So right away that sets it apart from anything I've ever read before.
What's more, most of the principal characters from whose points of view we see the story are women and girls.
It is so rare, in #English language fiction, to have a glimpse into the dynamics of #Colonization when it's not practiced by a Western state.
The #Audiobook is beautifully narrated by Samantha Tan, a woman of #Asian ancestry.
Would love to hear #TootSEA thoughts on this book.
@rabia_elizabeth@bookstodon yes a very dark story, Hadji Murat is a shorter work that would be up your street. His last writings are a collection of shorter stories and much deeper in quality.
War and Peace took me months to read lol
“Gilbert employed the Latin electricus to describe the observation that when you rub amber against some substances like wool or a cat’s fur, it sticks to the amber. We now that this clinging—and the zaps that appear between the amber and the substance rubbed against it—is due to static, but at the time, Gilbert supposed amber to be magnetic.”
“Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English.”
Dabouis, Q. and Fournier, P. (2024) ‘Stress in French loanwords in British and American English’, Journal of Linguistics, pp. 1–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000136.
"In this episode, we look at how distant cultures were contributing to the growth of English and how Shakespeare’s acting company built a world-famous theater in the late 1500s."