I met a baby the other day who taught me that kids aren’t learning the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore. She puts her flat, open palm up to her ear and babbles into it, simulating a flat and rectangular smartphone.
It’s so interesting that a lot of seemingly obsolete hand motions still exist, though
very few people wear wristwatches, but tapping one’s wrist is still a nearly universal gesture for “what time is it?” or “hurry up”
I used classic corded phones for only a very brief time in my life (before we got those more rectangular-shaped cordless ones for my parents’ landline) and first saw a car without power windows when I was in college, and yet I’ve always used the pinky-and-thumb gesture for “call me” and the circling-fist gesture for “roll down your window.” I’m 24, so my childhood was the late 90s and early 2000s, but I still use gestures that indicate technology either gone or on its way out when I began forming reliable memories
it also makes me wonder how people indicated time or hurrying before wristwatches. did they somehow pantomime a pocket watch? what gestures have we lost as technology marches on? and since video didn’t exist for most of human history, how might we learn what they were? like the contents of the third Georgian spice jar or the location of Punt, nobody would think to write any of it down
I just love history so much
The ASL sign for phone is based on the pinky-and-thumb gesture. Presumably that will continue on for a while, with future generations seeing it as an arbitrary sign.
And then there are words like “rewind” that no longer make literal sense. Filmmakers still use “cut” long after actual physical film that can be cut fell out of use. We talk about cutting and pasting on computers and use a floppy disc icon for “save”.
Fossilized metaphors are the best.
So the cool thing about
skeuomorphisms (like the floppy disc icon) is that it’s entire basis is that, originally, the skeuomorph’s form had a resemblance to the literal processes it was referencing but that now they’re not referencing literal processes, but the abstract idea of those processes.
We’re not literally rewinding a tape when we hit rewind on our DVRs or DVD’s. Instead, we understand that to “rewind” is to reverse the playback of the video/audio, often at several times its normal speed. The word has changed from meaning the literal process which resulted in the desired effect to directly meaning the desired effect. This is something that just happens in language over time. I mean, shit, the British call flashlights “Torches” and that makes perfect sense.
Thing is, the only reason it seems weird to us is because we’ve seen and used the original things that the skeuomorphs and gestures are referencing. It’s not just a representation of an abstract idea like saving a file or cutting footage or making a call. We’ve used floppy discs and razors and corded telephone handsets. They were real, commonplace things in our lives and jobs.
It’s weird to us because we’re living in the transition period. It’ll stop being weird once we die and no one is around to remember the original thing.
Interestingly, “flashlight” is similar to “torch” in preserving a vestige of old technology. The first batteries had very little capacity. As a result, when using a flashlight, you didn’t keep it on continuously, since that would kill the batteries in no time flat. Instead, you’d turn it on for just brief flashes to preserve power. Hence, “flash-light”
Wanted to build a little on @sonic‘s comment about words like “rewind” has moved from meaning the literal process. As an ESL-person, there are so many English words we learn as children to mean just the one (often very specific) action. Like the word “play” which is a verb with a wide arrange of meanings in English. You can play music, sports, theatre, games, and so on. It can even be a noun. (And you can play a play, because English sucks and hates everyone.)
In Swedish “play” means “to make any type of recorded media start”. I’m not going to bother looking up if we have fully adopted this word as a Swedish, but seeing how I learned it 30 years ago I’d say yeah. “Shuffle” is even more narrow. It means “having the music player put songs in a random order”. “Shuffle” has become a verb, but “play” often needs help from the Swedish verb for “press”.
(Also, I asked a 19 yo what she thought the figure on the save button was, she said she thought it was an old filing cabinet, which I thought was fair enough.)
Wondered today what the etymologically appropriate general term for a sentient being would be. The word ‘person’ comes from persona, the Latin for ‘character in a play / their mask’. I thought: might not the word ‘human’ be better? It comes from homo, as in homo sapiens, and we say homo– to also mean same. “You who are the same as me”. That seemed fitting for a general term, with a measure of optimism/friendliness hidden inside it –
It turns out that homo– to indicate sameness comes from the Greek (homos), and homo (-> homme, hombre) meaning human is from Latin. TIL!
hombrero
human comes from Latin humanus by way of French humain. The root comes from PIE *dhghem- and means ‘earth’. the original sense was probably ‘earthly being’ (in contrast to gods which are not of the earth). So you could say human refers to a ‘non-divine person’
The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
I’ve been loosely following developments in research about khipus since reading about them in an obscure paragraph in the back of my high school history textbook and every time I read more about them, it’s more and more exciting.
The full article is fascinating. Here’s another excerpt:
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
She took a gamble and assumed that the ribbons referred to a person known as Alluka, pronounced “Ay-ew-ka”. She also guessed that the writer of this letter might have signed their name at the end, meaning that the last three pendant cords could well represent the syllables “ay”, “ew” and “ka”.
Assuming that was true, she looked for cords on the second khipu that had the same colour and were tied with the same knot as the ones she had tentatively identified on the first khipu. It turned out that the first two of the last three cords matched, which gave “A-ka”. The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an alpaca-like animal. Hyland realised that the term for this hue in the local Quechua language is “paru”. And trying this alongside the other syllables gave, with a little wiggle room, “Yakapar”. That, it turned out, was the name of another of the lineages involved in the revolt that these khipus recorded.
“We know from the written testimony that one of the khipus was made by a member of the Yakapar clan and sent to Collata, and we think this is it,” she says. Hyland claims that the Collata khipus show that the cords really do hold narratives.
Yet even if she is right, it is possible these later khipus were influenced by contact with Spanish writing. “My feeling is that the phoneticisation, if it’s there, is a reinvention of khipus,” says Urton. Equally, the Collata khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly even a one-off.
Hyland is the first to admit that we don’t understand the link between these khipus and those dating from before the Spanish arrived. That doesn’t make them any less interesting though. “Even if these later khipus were influenced by the alphabet, I still think it’s mind-blowing that these people developed this tactile system of writing,” she says.
She will spend the next two years doing more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to decipher the Collata khipus and looking for similar examples elsewhere.
I first learnt about khipus in the 1980s. They’re used as a written record in the kids series The Mysterious Cities Of Gold which is from the early to mid eighties.
It’s a search of Google books, but the question still stands, what the Fuck happened in 1870
I CAN ANSWER THIS!!
In the Cornish dialect of English, Pokemon meant ‘clumsy’ (pure coincidence).
In the mid 1800s there was a surge of writing about the Cornish language and dialect in an attempt to preserve them with glossaries and dictionaries being written. I wrote about it HERE.
I just love that this post happened to find the ONE HUMAN ON THE INTERNET who had the answer to this question
Person A: You know… the thing Person B: The “thing”? Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING ROD
As someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:
Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.
Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”
Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.
Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.
Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.
Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.
Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”
Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”
May I add: “Dammit, there’s a really good expression for this in [native language], how do I translate this….”
Usually followed by an expression that makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE when translated to another language, and then an explanation that also doesn’t really help
If you don’t love languages, hear me out: my telugu friend had been affectionately calling me, a hindi speaker, “gundi” for 7 months. We didn’t realize until recently that the word has two completely different meanings in Telugu and Hindi, and that we both had completely different interpretations of her affection.
In Telugu, “gundi” means “smol/button/round/cute”.
I reblogged one of these but this one is even better.
It’s depressing that the most common Native American language spoken in New Jersey is a language native to what is now Oregon, rather than any of the Delaware languages spoken by the tribes who lived here before Europeans showed up.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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