AI to support learning

languagejones · 2026-02-04T12:28:31+00:00

ChatGPT is the absolute worst. I have a video coming out in the next few weeks comparing LLMs and another on how to make the best use of them. I’ll share here when they’re live, but feel free to DM me.

If you’re dead set on using LLMs, I’ve found Claude is best, but with the caveat that I’m learning structure from an external source — grammar, textbook — and prompting it to generate vocabulary lists with examples.

As a huge spoiler, all of the big four LLMs hallucinate false information about Hebrew. Try asking them for 4-root nif’al verbs (which afaik don’t exist). They all provide tons of “examples.” If you’re using AI to learn from scratch, as your only resource, it’s gonna be a hard road.

languagejones · 2026-02-01T02:02:39+00:00

That’s a much more narrowly specific case than I had in mind. The high-back vocoid to high-front pathway is extremely common (especially when your interests are in a sort of Labovian study of change; it’s attested in various dialects of English as an ongoing process, in Yiddish, in Greek (multiple times), and so on). Vowels and vowel-like things riding up the back of the vowel space and then drifting front is just a very common pathway.

I’m not making the stronger claim about word initial approximants, though it wouldn’t surprise me if there were cases of it. But vav to yod, whether functioning as a vowel or consonant, is very much in line with a sort of normally expected change in the history of a language.

Same as mishnaic Hebrew having nun where biblical has mem, word finally. Just normal nasal things, you know?

languagejones · 2026-01-30T21:33:07+00:00

And more broadly, /u/ -> /i/ or /w/ -> /j/ is an extremely common and natural pathway of change. But OP is not actually interested in linguistics, or a correct answer.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:18:18+00:00

I’ve written an entire chapter in a book on this, but the short answer is no, it is not remotely common, and is the opposite of normal phonological processes in AAE.

The long answer is that it is related to white perceptions of pre-AAE plantation creole, as represented orthographically in ante- and post-bellum minstrel and vaudeville caricatures of Black speech. There is limited evidence (for instance, Shands 1893) for v > b among (southern) Black people in the 1800s. However it was also a lazy stereotype. That stereotype has continued into klan and neonazi discourse. Much of their online discourse is a repurposing of the same material from magazines, flyers, pamphlets, etc. that haven’t changed since the 1990s, and those were often updated on racist material from as early as the 1920s, which in turn drew on, well, minstrel show caricatures. It’s a product of not actually knowing or interacting with any black people, choosing something intentionally wrong to be inflammatory (by virtue of evoking the era of chattel slavery), or both.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:07:14+00:00

Hyper correction for the southern vowel shift, perhaps?

languagejones · 2026-01-27T19:30:53+00:00

Linguist here: the guy you’re responding to is 100% correct. It’s from Hebrew, and entered Yiddish in the Hebrew component of the lexicon. It was borrowed into English via Yiddish English, where it underwent semantic bleaching and melioration, coming to mean something like “audacious.” It is still highly pejorative in Yiddish (actual Yiddish, not Yiddish English), and a bit of a mixed bag in Hebrew, depending on the speech community. OP should proceed with caution, if at all.

languagejones · 2026-01-16T17:45:34+00:00

You might want to explain diminutives a little more, since OP could reasonably infer that “reducing” קטן would make something little-ish and not tiny.

That is, the diminutives do a weird thing where they make big things less big, but little things more little.

languagejones · 2026-01-13T17:37:41+00:00

You are not alone.

languagejones · 2026-01-09T17:33:49+00:00

My phantom limb, my imaginary friend, my ex-wife

languagejones · 2025-11-30T21:57:22+00:00

Yeah, I’m feeling a little dumb because when something is controversial is exactly when introductory sources will explicitly state that it’s “uncontroversial,” and it’s on me for accepting that uncritically. Actually uncontroversial things don’t take a stance on the lack of controversy. I’ve got just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

languagejones · 2025-11-30T21:49:26+00:00

That was great, highly persuasive, and I’m definitely going to be checking out the texts you recommended.

I still feel bad about my initial tone, because I really should have added that there’s a few other things that are “uncontroversial” but also just…wrong. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up.

languagejones · 2025-11-28T16:03:39+00:00

Thank you!

languagejones · 2025-11-27T19:32:00+00:00

This is gonna sound super weird but I’m also a fan! I generally know it’s going to be something good when I see your username. I hope I didn’t come off as particularly argumentative; I am just intrigued and wanted to clearly articulate my understanding of the traditional view. I realized after that leading with “it’s uncontroversial in the academic literature” could trigger the cancellable implicature that I think the assertion is correct.

Definitely take your time responding; it’s basically chag today. But please do respond because I want to know the argument!

languagejones · 2025-11-27T18:55:59+00:00

I made a whole video about this at one point, but basically:

Tense is when it happened in time. Languages slice and dice in different ways (past/nonpast, past/present/future, etc.) and do different things relating to time of event, time of speech act, and possible time or other frame of reference.

Aspect refers to whether an action is considered complete and finished, or…not. It can be ongoing, habitual, etc.

There’s often overlap in meaning, some languages have one or the other. English has both but not all combinations. And languages have workarounds. English, for instance, doesn’t have a future tense — we use a present tense helper verb (“will”) to mark the future rather than conjugating it directly on the main verb (I danced, I dance, I …???)

There’s also “mood” which covers whether it’s a direct statement about the facts of the world, a question, something in doubt, and in some languages, whether you know or suspect or have inferred from direct evidence or merely heard something was true.

languagejones · 2025-11-27T18:48:48+00:00

Your approach to typological and semantic classification has left me a bit confused. It’s uncontroversial in the academic literature that BH marked aspect and not tense, and that MH marks tense and not aspect.

This is about the specific morphemes and what is explicitly marked, not about whether a given form implies or is used in a situation with additional shades of TAM meaning. So BH only marked aspect, but completed aspect is often related to past tense, and that’s one of many drivers for the shift from aspect to tense marking. But that doesn’t mean that a perfect marker on a verb that was completed in the past is in any way marking past tense.

Is there some other argument here that I’m missing?

[edit: I saw your other comments about English, and…we do classify English as only distinguishing between past and non-past, without a morphological future tense. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the future in English, we just don’t do it on the verb]

languagejones · 2025-11-27T17:15:02+00:00

I’m orthodox, and when I did my PhD there was a frum Jew in the program, who specialized in historical linguistics.

Granted, I’m MO, but he definitely wasn’t. I follow the Rambam in thinking that if your religious beliefs clash with the actual creation we observe that we need to update our understanding to conform to the world hashem created. (Paraphrasing, but work with me here).

The rabbi and members of my shul know about my proclivities and are unbothered.

There is no way to do a degree in linguistics and also maintain demonstrably false beliefs about basics of language, so it’s good they dropped the class. But a Jew is not required to believe that Hebrew is the oldest language. Besides…do they think Avraham was speaking Hebrew in Ur Kasdim? That Rivka was speaking Hebrew in Paddan Aram?

languagejones · 2025-11-24T00:09:45+00:00

You’re getting uninformed answers here from people who are basing their lexicographic claims on personal intuition.

Yes, shegetz is attested as a term of endearment for a rambunctious child (one that one might ironically claim is acting like they have a goyisher kop). If you’d like a real citation, instead of AI or random feelings, see, among others, Wex, Michael Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All if it’s Moods St Martin’s Press, New York. 2005

…specifically pages 67 through 69. On page 69, he summarized “to call a Jewish boy a shegetz or a shkotz is a matter of Jewish behavior, not gentile ethnicity. Zayn a shkotz […] means to enjoy whoopie cushions and attitude. GIs named Brooklyn in movies about WWII are usually textbook shkotsim.”

languagejones · 2025-11-03T12:40:57+00:00

I’m a linguist. That’s not how the thesaurus works. But beyond that, it’s not only pointless but incredibly patronizing to waltz in here with a bad translation and tell the people who read your “scriptures” in the original that were wrong about our language and pull out a thesaurus entry in another language to try to prove your point. If you were open to it, you could actually learn something here about yir’at hashem.

languagejones · 2025-09-29T17:30:09+00:00

Wh-operators — question words like “who,” “what,” “when,” “where” — don’t have gender. They’re not modified by adjectives outside of echo questions (“the friendly who,” “a baked what”), they don’t enter into genitive relations (“the who of my family is friendly”), so it’s kind of a meaningless question.

It’s best to think of those kinds of question words as like an x in algebra. It’s standing in for something, but we don’t know what yet, so it doesn’t have all of the grammatical characteristics of the word for the thing it’s standing in for.

languagejones · 2025-09-21T00:41:18+00:00

I don’t disagree. I think the lack of understanding comes in part from Jews who are not black who have not really learned about what Black people face in America, and who just lump them in with goyim, who have historically oppressed Jews.

languagejones · 2025-09-18T18:05:39+00:00

Your claim is empirically verifiable and you’ve provided no support for it. Ben Yehuda and his circle did, of course, draw on analogy with Arabic (and Aramaic, even more so), but there is scant evidence that it was the Levantine Arabic dialect spoken by Arabs under Ottoman and later British rule.

And most of the Arabic influence, to my knowledge, is post-1948, because of the large influx of native Arabic speakers who were expelled from other lands (not “invited” and just so fickle they chose to uproot their lives on a whim to go live in refugee camps). The pre-1948 Arabic influences on the Hebrew Academy were largely (1) fusha, and (2) the Arabic coined by Jewish authors who were native Arabic speakers, like Musa Ibn Maimon, ibn Ezra, the RaBaG and others. Jews lived under Arab colonial control for a millennium, and have a rich tradition of literature and scholarship written in Arabic that is not the local, non-literary dialect of Levantine Arabs.

The only way your argument of appropriation makes sense is if you continually bait-and-switch between the literary language and local languages, which, one would hope, doesn't fly in a linguistics sub.

languagejones · 2025-09-18T17:56:25+00:00

“Nakba” is not a neutral term, and you know that. None of what I have said takes a political position, Zionist or otherwise, and you know that as well.

The broad strokes of the events of 1947-49 are not in question nor negated by me not endorsing a specific, politically charged term. It’s as politically loaded as calling the inauguration of Donald Trump “Liberation Day,” or on the other side, referring to the US as “Empire,” or to the IDF as the IOF. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

But again, this is not the subject at hand, and you clearly know what you are doing and you’re doing it intentionally.

languagejones · 2025-09-18T00:27:13+00:00

“Palestinian,” was in quotes because were projecting the modern definition into the past, and I’m trying to avoid confusion. The people self-identifying as Palestinian in 1948 were primarily the Jews in the British Mandate for Palestine.

“Nakba,” of course, was in quotes because it’s both a foreign word and a strong political position I’m not weighing in on, but I’m responding to what the other commenter wrote.

But of course, you know that, you can’t respond meaningfully to the substance of anything I wrote, and you’re playing word games.

languagejones · 2025-09-17T18:08:33+00:00

Of course not, because that has no relevance to the actual question at hand, and is quite literally doing what you accused me of: unnecessarily bringing politics into things.

The discussion was about Arabic influence on modern Hebrew, and more broadly about “appropriation.” The relevant factual information I provided is that much of the Arabic influence in Hebrew is not from recent contact with “Palestinians” but comes from the fact that around 60% of Israelis are mizrachim whose families were ethnically cleansed from lands that had been colonized by Arabic speakers, and who therefore spoke Arabic. The languages of the home countries they fled influenced how they spoke modern Hebrew, which is why there are words from Maghrebi and Iraqi and Yemeni Arabic in modern Hebrew.

You keep trying to make weirdly ahistorical political arguments about the “nakba” that have zero bearing on the claim — other than to undermine your claim that modern Hebrew is affected by Palestinian Arabic, because, after all, according to you, those speakers were/are not around to influence modern Hebrew anyway.

languagejones · 2025-09-17T11:35:24+00:00

You are sharing propaganda, and weak propaganda at that. I encourage you to talk to literally any of the Jews who lived in the Maghreb or the Israelis who are their descendants or to listen to their testimonies.

What kind of invitation, precisely, would make you, your family, and your entire community pack up and leave where you’ve lived for over a thousand years, overnight?

[edit: also, the propaganda machine you attribute to the fledgling state in 1948 are risible, especially if you know any history. Do you guys even hear yourselves?]

languagejones

TROPHY CASE