this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
25 points (93.1% liked)
Linguistics
683 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!
Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.
Rules:
- Instance rules apply.
- Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
- Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
- Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
- Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
- Have fun!
Related communities:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A British-Israeli linguist, Guy Deutscher, wrote a book a decade or so ago titled The Unfolding Of Language, where he explained this with a made-up Aramaic root, S-N-G, meaning in this example “to snog”. Using the grammar of Aramaic, he derived words that any speaker whom knew this root would understand as meaning things like “one who snogs” and “I was made to snog myself”
I think the first would be "Snagaag" but not sure about the latter. He was right though, lmao
It may or may not have been “musnig”, if “Muslim” can be read as “I was made to be at peace with myself”.
That makes more sense. Snagaag might only work in common speech, but مسنغ makes more sense anywhere else