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NASA
h
i don't do bad sauce passes
Misplaced Lens Cap
RMH
cherry valley forever
Product Placement
Stranger Things
Not today Justin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Mike Driver
Cosmic Funnies
almost home
Acquired Stardust
Discoholic 🪩
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
JVL
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ellievsbear
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@buqalamun
Heard this stupid dad joke that killed me: Which Chinese word takes the longest to write? "Friend" (朋友) because it takes two months just to write half of it
Which character is faster, hot (热) or cold (冷)? Obviously hot, which has 4 legs to cold's 1
Why do Chinese vampires hate spicy food? They only drink 不辣的
official orthographic comedy post
"Irish doesn't have a word for please, you have to say if it be your will" buddy do I have news for you about "please"
"Irish doesn't have a word for hello you have to use a shorthand religious blessing" buddy do I have news for you about "goodbye"!
"In Polish the word for car is that which walks by itself" BUDDY what do you think an AUTOMOBILE is?
you have got to understand that your mother tongue is not the model of language. all your words have secret histories and layers of meaning just the same as other people's words. the word you think of as just a word has etymology, it wasn't handed down from God as a finished word. English doesn't have a word for movie you have to either refer to the recording medium or use a short version of "moving picture", isn't that cute?
official linguistics post
i’m obsessed with these…
(From DepthOfWikipedia on Instagram)
start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret
This quote is not by the great Persian poet Hafez, who lived in Shiraz, Persia from 1325–1390, it's by Daniel Ladinsky, a contemporary American poet who "translated" Hafez into English and whose books about Hafez are the most popular "versions" in the West nowadays - the problem is just that the poems written by Ladinsky have absolutely nothing to do with actual Hafez poems (which follow very strict form conventions and the difference is obvious to anyone who has seen a real Hafez poem). Ladinsky does not speak Persian and claims his "translations" came to him in dreams, but if you look at his poems, you see that they are essentially original poetry published under Hafez's name and at most loosely inspired. I can really recommend this article about the whole topic
That so many of the poems attributed to Hafez are fake reveals a Western appropriation of Muslim spirituality.
I may never get over this quote from the linked article:
Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English “translations” he is publishing: “About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers’.” It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works.
credit goes to calle börstell for this one
official linguistics post
Today's word of the day is el arancel which is "tariff" in Spanish
There are some other words that get used - some people use la tarifa but that's more often the "utilities" like when you rent an apartment or pay for "utilities", that's la tarifa too
The other word is el impuesto which is just "tax" - this comes from imponer which is "to impose", or literally "to put within/upon"
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Coincidentally, today's other word of the day is la payasada which is "clownery" or "buffoonery"
This comes from the word payaso/a meaning "clown"
Me. Don't ask me which ones. All of them.
That was excruciating. Was that painful for anyone else?
I told my students they're allowed to be creative and don't have to be factual when writing about themselves in German because I keep getting questions like "what if I don't have roommates or what if I don't have hobbies" and I'm like guys just make something up! Have fun! I won't fact check you!
So now I am grading homework where a student is claiming to be from North Korea and his hobby is tax fraud
I fully believe that as long as it's grammatically correct, coherent and answering the question students should be able to write whatever the hell they want. I don't care about their actual hobbies and the names of their siblings.
One of my students is writing about a ghost he "interviewed". The ghost is called Walter and died in 1865 . The ghost has ghost friends.
This is making grading homework significantly more fun.
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse on translating Abdulla Pashew's "Resurrection" (essay here, full poem here) [ID'd]
Finding delight in language learning
It's all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of unknown vocabulary when learning a language. That's why it's important to savor moments of delight. Here are 4 words I've come across recently that delighted me.
【1】 虎口 hǔkǒu - the area between the thumb and index finger When I came across this word, I was very confused as to why the webnovel I was reading had a tiger.
【2】 烛泪（燭淚）zhúlèi - drops of melted wax that run down the side of a candle This one seems so poetic to me—candle tears!
【3】 毛毛雨 máomaoyǔ - drizzle The dictionary says 毛 can mean small or fine, but in my head I think of it as "fuzzy rain" since 毛 also means hair/fur.
【4】 趿拉 tāla - to wear (one's shoes) while stepping on the backs to flatten them / onomatopoeia for shuffling sound I used to wear my shoes like this all the time when I was growing up, so I love that there is a specific word for it.
Definitions are from MDBG, edited by me.
A little something for Linguistics Tumblr.
So the Crunchyroll newsroom isn't a "room" so much as a Slack channel. We have news writers all over the US, in Australia, and in Japan. This means we have something akin to 'round-the-clock coverage, but it also means that our schedules respective to each other are skewed. For example, when the East Coast contingent is starting their day, the Japan contingent is shutting down for the evening.
Because of that, we started experimenting with greetings that could apply when Party A was coming in for the morning and Party B was leaving for the night. One person came up with "konbarning": a combination of "good morning" and "konban wa" ("good evening" in Japanese). It stuck.
Over the following months, "konbarning" got shortened to "barning" and other permutations. Now, a year or some later, this is how we announce our arrival:
official linguistics post
dropbox containing linguistics textbooks
contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies
dropbox containing language textbooks
contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh
dropbox containing books about language learning
includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb
if there’s a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!
زندگی گر هزار باره بود
امشب از آسمان ديده تو
روی شعرم ستاره می بارد
در زمستان دشت کاغذها
پنجه هايم جرقه می کارد
شعر ديوانه تب آلودم
شرمگين از شيار خواهش ها
پيکرش را دوباره می سوزد
عطش جاودان آتش ها
آری ! آغاز دوست داشتن است
گر چه پايان راه ناپيداست
من به پايان دگر نيانديشم
که همين دوست داشتن زيباست
از سياهی چرا هراسيدم
شب پر از قطره های الماس است
آن چه از شب به جای می ماند
عطر خواب آور گل ياس است
آه ! بگذار گم شوم در تو
کس نيابد دگر نشانه من
روح سوزان و آه مرطوبت
بوَزد بر تن ترانه من
آه ! بگذار از اين دريچه باز
خفته بر باد گرم روياها
هم ره روزها سفر گيرم
بگريزم ز مرز دنياها
دانی از زندگی چه می خواهم
من تو باشم تو ! پای تا سر تو
زندگی گر هزار باره بود
بار ديگر تو بار ديگر تو
آنچه در من نهفته ست دريایی ست
کی توانِ نهفتنم باشد
باز تو زين سهمگين طوفان ها
کاش ! يارای گفتنم باشد
بس که لبريزم از تو می خواهم
در ميان صحراها
سر بسايم به سنگ کوهستان
تن بکوبم به موج درياها
آری ! آغاز دوست داشتن است
گر چه پايان راه ناپيداست
من به پايان دگر نيانديشم
که همين دوست داشتن زيباست
فروغ فرخزاد
when your grammar accidentally transfers
adding onto this with my own
All the shishi words I know
Last year I learned the word 时事, and it struck me how many shishi words there are. For fun, I listed out all the ones I'm familiar with. You can see more at MDBG (but a Chinese-Chinese dictionary would probably have many more).
世世 shìshì - from age to age
世事 shìshì - affairs of life / things of the world
事事 shìshì - everything
事实 | 事實 shìshí - fact
失事 shīshì - (of a plane, ship etc) to have an accident (plane crash, shipwreck, vehicle collision etc) / to mess things up
实事 | 實事 shíshì - fact / actual thing / practical matter
实施 | 實施 shíshī - to implement / to carry out
实时 | 實時 shíshí - (in) real time / instantaneous
时事 | 時事 shíshì - current trends / the present situation / how things are going
时时 | 時時 shíshí - often / constantly
试试 | 試試 shìshi - to have a try
逝世 shìshì - to pass away / to die
I ran some stats based on my Anki deck, and there also a lot of qishi words: 其实、气势、骑士、启示、歧视、启事. But not as many as shishi. Maybe we need a poem of shishis to go alongside the 施氏食狮史 poem?
