Antarctic English
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
- The fry, fried > The accumulation of brain fry, mental fog, apathy etc that builds over time accumulated on ice especially during winter.
- The CRUD > a general cold everyone eventually gets and then is immune to on the base. Usually there’s a lot of congestion or ‘crud’. Probably exacerbated by the volcanic dust and dry climate.
- Ice Wife (or husband) A monogamous couple but only on the ice. May or may not be involved in other relationships off ice.
[1]: https://monoskop.org/images/8/8b/Hince_Bernadette_Antarctic_...
Also as a non-American it's quite hard to judge if there's a change in accent. We have people summering/wintering from across the country so it's a melting pot of pronunciation to start with. I think you'd be able to make a better observation from one of the bases with a much smaller population of neutral-accented people.
Skua (bin) is in that dictionary though, and that's still widely used in the US. As is toast(ed). Interestingly ice widow is referenced, though I've never heard that used.
> This was primarily used by those who could not stay at home with their wife and traveled a lot. For example, a traveling merchant might arrive at a town and stay for a few months, in that period he may marry a divorced widow, and they would take care of each other. When he has to leave to the next town, the marriage is over, and he might sign a mut'ah contract at his next place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
https://www.kexp.org/read/2017/11/15/kexp-exclusive-intervie...
At least some people thought it was.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-made-a-linguistics-p...
What does “tight and messy” mean here?
In music terms, playing tight means being exact. But I think in this context tight would be length of the song and how succinct it is. 70s rock could be power ballad-y with long solos. As for messy, in context, I'd argue it means the songs are less structured compared to 70s arena rock that are extremely formulaic (think of any AC/DC song and how it sounds just like every other AC/DC song).
They don't know why, but they do. It's hilarious to me for some reason.
So there likely is enough overlap between people that have been there for longer and new people to pick up on the accent. The latter is something that people subconsciously do fairly easily.
https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2024/human1011_antarctic_acce...
[edit] having worked there, seeing “Shadock” being used for “Personnel du Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives” really made my day. Now I know how to call former colleagues!
In that respect it's no different than any (big) corporation in the country. At least one team I've been maintained an internal lexicon but elsewhere it's just an acronym soup everywhere.
It might be due to the strongly centralised languages policies of France and the weight of France relative to the rest of French-speaking countries, I don't know, but basically the only accents that can actually be a bit complicated to understand are those of Québec and Louisiana, which have spent several centuries with basically no communication with France.
There's also Africa but I can't speak about the varieties within Africa though, other than the obvious accent difference between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's not the same scale as Swiss German accents that are sometimes completely unintelligible for German speakers, but I have to admit there have been a few times I've been unable to fully understand someone speaking a thick Swiss French accent
IIRC "Disker" (the head of the district) sounds like a slang word for DJ, so his official residence is the "discothèque".
I went on one of those and never realized I was supposed to feel bad about that. Am I a terrible person?
or as the highly experienced Mr. Tyson put a not too dissimilar situation so eloquently - “everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face”
That is, simply put, wrong and dangerous.
My SO seems to be fascinated by those horror stories and how crimes are solved that leave me wondering sometimes if she isn't just documenting herself on how to do the perfect crime that wouldn't lead to her being caught.
You must've derived your username from those trip(s) too I bet.
Grief might be too strong a word.
Antarctic English might be a bit overhyped because of how much of a curiosity it seems (and definitely it's unfair to call it a separate language), but the point is that people tend to pick up some speaking patterns from other people they spent last 3 months with. It deosn't seem very surprising to me, but it is ridiculous to explain that on basis of an accent of a country, which although might have been artificially created very recently on the global timescale, still exists longer than most its inhabitants live.
Of course it will be the same in Israel. Even though you might have to make some discount to more fragmented community. (Which really isn't that special with Israel either: you know that some small European countries have up to 4 official languages, right? Rest assured, not all the people in these countries speak all 3 or 4 of these languages equally well.)
"I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys-R-Us kid..."
But then it turned out that it sort of made sense. Especially since some services in Israel can also be provided in English, they need a locale to deal with stuff like calendar, currency etc.
I don't think though anyone recognizes the language spoken by English speakers in Israel as a separate language. Even though it's usually augmented with hard-to-translate Hebrew words that relate to local realities (eg. "oleh" which is usually translated as "repatriate" (noun), but it only applies to those who repatriate to Israel, not any other country, or "ascent" (a pilgrim, only in religious context) again, only in the context of coming to Israel or more specifically, Jerusalem).
There are also plenty of second and third generation English speakers who depart very far from the dialect of English their parents came with. Usually, the drift is towards American English, with a lot of borrowings from Hebrew (and by proxy, from Arabic). So, I don't know, maybe at some point there will be an actual Israeli dialect in the same way.
While there definitely is jargon in the US Antarctic program (and presumably overlapping-but-distinct sets of jargon for the New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain programs), it seems a stretch to call it "Antarctic English." Pronunciation varies a lot more from program to program and even from participant-to-participant (scientists tend to be a fairly international bunch) than the subtle single-station per-season continental drift cited in the papers referenced in the Wikipedia article.
That said, I still find the jargon entertaining:
- Skua - discarded items that can be usefully repurposed by someone else
- Toast / toasty - burnt out, irritable, need to go home...
- Beaker - scientist/engineer working as a "grantee" (funded by NSF scientific grant) rather than by the contracting company which handles most day-to-day operations
- Freshies - precious, sometimes rare (especially at places like Pole) fresh fruits and vegetables
and finally
- Pole - The South Pole. Because those two extra words are so much work to actually say out loud....
[edit: fix typos]
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-23/origin-of-word-donga-...
"Inhibition of this enzyme by Valproate allows the reopening of pathways in the brain, increasing neuroplasticity, thus reopening the critical period."
I hear the side effects are pretty severe, though.
No idea why, it appears to me to be a personality facet that is there from birth.
I wanted to respond to both.
It's not a stretch to argue that in certain cases the person is mirroring because they're insecure. Empathy as a defense mechanism?
I mention it because back in college there were a few times where I witnessed a person mimicking an exchange student's accent almost immediately, and later claiming this always happened to them. Both were painfully insecure.
Sharing inflection, accent, and mannerisms yields a wealth of context that aids both the listener and the speaker in acquiring detailed insight about one another's culture, language, and meaning.
I suspect that people who don't mirror might sadly be unaware of these subtle but rich details, even in their own communication.
I have no claims about the scientific validity of this, but it sounds nice.
Maybe it's a hereditary disposition. Are other family members good at learning languages? Music?
I think "bedchamber" is probably what was meant. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bedchamber
“Donga” is used commonly within Australian mining and construction industries (and presumably also overseas) to refer to a demountable/transportable structure like you might see on a commercial construction site. Sometimes in FIFO mine sites they’re used to house the workers. I’m guessing the same things are used in Antarctic research stations to house the personnel.
These things: https://dostonhouse.com/office-donga/
I wish the antarctic was accessible to common people. Why migrate to Mars outer space when we have antarctica.
I imagine a giant dome city architected from the ground up to not disturb what's outside of it too much. Complete with farms and ecosystems and a fixed human population limit and powered by a nuclear power plant.
Argentina has even stopped trying to make human settlement on the continent a thing a while back.
Basically schools marking down your work for mistakes can't refer to anything as the source of truth other than "this private entity, sometimes in a foreign country, published a book that says so" or just "it's common knowledge".
There's also quite some benefit for a org with official capacity to declare, against the wishes of some individuals, that say "santorum", "bromance" or "trumpgret" are not in fact English words.
Do other languages remain static? What happens when actually new things happen? Does "CD-ROM" just get integrated in whole? Translated? Rejected?
While I find many "new" english words unacceptable for my use, I wouldn't personally declare them "not English words". Moreover, if there were an authority over authentic english (especially American english) word existence and usage, I get the feeling that most would laugh said authority out of the room.
Until then, use them in an essay at school and you'll lose marks.
Where in Dutch we use computer, computernetwerk or lift, in Afrikaans it is rekenaar, rekenaarstelsel and hijsbakkie.
And in many languages, most famous in Dutch and German, one can make up words by putting other words together. Those aren't official untill some officials put it in some list. But that way, we can have koekiewet or Wutbürgerin or Nachtshoppen.
Sure, I know some countries where these "regulators" perceive themselves as having an important political function: keeping (mostly dying) language "pure". But this really is pretty laughable, teenagers will still speak some kind of pidgin, borrowing half of vocabulary from some other language with larger (and more importantly, perceived as "cool") community. I've seen this happen a lot. Maybe this does slow down language transformation to some extent, but I really doubt it is significant on the historic scale. In fact, I strongly suspect that English is changing much slower today, just because of how much content there is in it. Other languages borrow more from English, than English does from other languages today.
Second, Americans, I think, would be really uncomfortable with the idea of a government entity controlling how people are supposed to speak and write. That lives too close to controlling what we say and think. Not that such an entity necessarily leads to 1984-style propaganda and thought-control, but we take First Amendment concerns very seriously here.
Lastly, if you attend a specific school, you are subscribing to the instruction of that curriculum and those teachers. To have all students everywhere subscribe to the same authority of what they should know and how they should think... that can be pretty scary for an American.
If this were true, there would have been no Scopes Monkey Trial. Neither is a school free to teach you that 2+2=5 or that pi is 3.2, even in Indiana. How's that for 1st amendment?
If you'd like to get as good as you're giving, how about you tell us what country you're from, so we can provide an opinion about choice episodes in its history in return? Fair is fair, no?
Sure we do. It's the people, culture, elites, etc. It's survival of the fittest.
> Basically schools marking down your work for mistakes can't refer to anything as the source of truth other than "this private entity, sometimes in a foreign country, published a book that says so" or just "it's common knowledge".
You can't be serious. Don't want to get philosophical, but what is the source of 'truth'?
What should really be mindboggling to you is that more than 80% of the top 100 universities in the world are in the US alone. The majority of the rest are in UK, canada, etc. Almost all science, business, diplomacy, etc is done in the english language. Now that is mindboggling.
So my naive couch potato thinking is... Nicknames? Sure, The Ice, Big Eye. I can believe it.
Different pronunciation? Well, likely the international English, same as in your big mega corp HQ.
[1] "Language of the Vikings" by Faarlund
> „Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.“ == [People from Baden-Württemberg] can do anything. Except speak German.
That’s all background though, not really relevant. In fact it might even be a distraction, but it’s what I lead with. What I’m really getting at though is that the parent said he was a proponent of Professor Faarlund’s theory that English should be categorized as North Germanic rather than West Germanic. If true, it would seem to me given that given that one of the closest cousins to the English language is the Anglo-Frisian language family, why would you stop at reclassifying just English? Why not Frisian and Low German languages? I’m not sure you can address reclassifying English without also addressing these language groups, either to sever English from them or else to propose reclassifying some or all of them as well.
"Set the television on."
"Where been ye?"
"I have hunger, when ere going we eating?"
(It would be easier for English speakers to understand "wanneer" by the similarity to "whenever" but it turns out that "wanneer" is actually cognate with when+ere (as in 'before') and not with when+ever.)
Gaelic is the surviving Celtic language of Scotland, and not the dominant Celtic language of Scotland when the Angles and Saxons arrived, which was more like Welsh. I don't think Gaelic has had a sizable influence on English. One would expect this to have come more from Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbric, the displaced languages, but I'm not aware of a huge influence here either.
I would not have picked Strontium.
The other method of grouping is by degree of mutual intelligibility. It appears that Anglo-Saxon evolved to become mutually intelligible with Old Norse, so on pragmatic terms, they could be considered dialects of a common language.
Edit: I'll add that from my experience in the domains of applied linguistics and public policy, the practical distinction most commonly made is that if two speech forms are mutually intelligible, we call them dialects, and if not we call them separate languages. For some reason, that seems to really upset some people.
You simultaneously made a lot of Portugese people unhappy and Swissgerman/Alemannic people happy
Unless those scientists are born in Antarctica, they are not native speakers; they learned English elsewhere.
This doesn't sound like a true variant of English, but more of a cant/argot type of thing.