word of the day: japanese マッチポンプ matchi-ponpu, literally 'match-pump'. means stirring up problems and solving them yourself just to take credit for it, and comes from the idea of starting a fire (with a matchstick) just to put it out (with a pump) later (and take credit for it).

i forgot to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite songs in this thread! anyway here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TUM.... the first line has one of those japanese-made words with -chikku, or rather, -tikku:

ドラマチック、サディスティック、ドメスティック、カオティック
doramatikku, sadisutikku, domesutikku, kaosutikku

i love it when suffixes that originally come from a foreign language become productive. english has a few cases of this, both older (-able) and newer (-ista), but i'd like to talk about one portuguese one and another one from japanese. i'll start with the japanese one first,

‹ #langsky #lingsky #linguistics ›

welcome to matiwords! my name is mati [ˈmat͡ʃi], and this is my linguistics account. expect to see posts about historical phonology and etymology mostly, with a slight cjk focus. also writing systems from time to time

oh by the way you can read my older stuff at rentry.co/marticles

this is true btw what the other mati is saying is real