Masterpiece Duolingo

Hello, I'm Owlistair Cooke, and welcome to Masterpiece Duolingo. Here, we delve into the artistry of the stream-of-consciousness novel, as created by the language-teaching robots of Duolingo. Join us, won't you?

[elbdot]

Hey @staff? :) H E L P ((Shoutout to my Patrons for supporting this animated sh*tpost!))

[kim-hu]

Hey guys, I’m just saying--

If you’re fresh from twitter or some other place and just signed up, please at least change your pfp to SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Scribble glasses on the default pic if you want, anything to tell me you’re human.

Whenever I share a link on Twitter or such I get lots of followers with default pic that I have a feel is fresh users that just cannot be bothered to change the pfp yet. But to us you look like bots and I’m always in a pinch if I should block you or not. 🥲

[thingsofimportanceanddelight]

If not your profile picture, at least change your blog title. Description. Post something. Anything. Anything at all to indicate that you are a real human being. Or else you get reported and blocked.

[shabbytigers]

in other developments re german/anglo cultural exchange on breadstuffs, this image was posted to a facebook group yesterday

the following events ensued:

1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldn’t you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?

2. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my band name” jokes

3. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my stripper name” jokes

4. one “ah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa town” joke

5. this absolute masterpiece:

[shabbytigers]

hi this tag perfectly encapsulates the FML coefficient of my life as a non-german speaker living in germany and i’m going to frame it

[lilyflxwers]

ok i absolutely need to know what accents u all have pls reblog and tell me or comment or whatever I must know

[quotespile]

“Of all the mad things we humans do … there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was the best kind of fool’s errand.”

— Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

[orteil42]

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

[pompadourpink]

Podcasts (2)

Education

1940-1944 (resistance)

A chaud (recent cinema)

Actus du jour (daily news)

A deux heures de Paris (cities to visit 2h from Paris by train)

Arte radio (several pods, very varied)

Bestioles (animal portraits) - for children

C'est la rentrée (Q&A) - for children

Culture générale (trivia)

Double-clic sur la mode (fashion)

French touch (French electronic music)

Jeux Olympiques (sports, history)

La grande histoire de l'opérette (operetta history)

L'Antiquité (episodes of history)

La Terre au carré (ecology, science)

La tête dans les étoiles (astronomy)

La voix des invisibles (historical randos)

Le monde devant soi (news commentary)

Les décolonisations africaines (portraits)

Les discours (important speeches)

Les grands méchants (fictional villains)

Les super-pouvoir des bébés (children)

Monumental (monuments history) 2024

Mourir moins con (trivia)

Philosophes (seven portraits)

Votre cerveau (brain science)

Fiction/portraits

Coco Chanel (fashion)

Correspondance de Flaubert (letters)

Des ailes de mouette noire (Frida Kahlo)

Divas (great female singers)

Franz Kafka (writer, tortured artist)

Jean-Sébastien Bach (music)

Hildegarde de Bingen (composer, healer, philosopher)

Journaux de Sylvia Plath (diaries)

Malcolm X (activism, history)

Maria Montessori (education)

Sorcières ! (witches)

Society

Beau voyage (travelling)

Floodcast (life talk show, relaxed) 2015-2025

Hot girls only (womanhood, relaxed)

In extremis (survival stories)

Kiffe ta race (race, activism) 2018-2024

La leçon (failure and its impacts)

Les couilles sur la table (masculinity)

Les histoires extraordinaires (true crime)

Storylific (adventure, exploration)

Transfert (anonymous testimonies)

Francophone content

Contes des soirs perdus (fairytales) BE

Femmes d'aujourd'hui (Morroccan entrepreneurs) MO

Gouinistan (lesbian breakup stories) SW

Hantées (paranormal stories) CA

L'autre moitié de l'histoire (indigenous lands) CA

L'Ecole des rites (religion, spirituality) SW

Le débat africain (African news, politics)

Limitless (debates about African issues)

L'insolence du quotidien (living disabled) CA

Malabary (Madagascan culture) MA

Qu'est-ce tu regardes ? (cinema) CA

Une plage pour la francophonie (news) CA

+ three podcasts by the Institut du Monde Arabe: Aswat (arab music), Paris arabe (stories), Idées (debates, history)

My first podcast MP - RFI - podcast to learn French

Fanmail - masterlist (2016-) - archives - hire me - reviews (2020-) - Drive

[pompadourpink]

Podcasts

Knowledge:

Au coeur de l’histoire (history)

les chasseurs de nazis (nazi hunters)

france musique 

on ne parle pas la bouche pleine (food + literature)

les chemins de la philosophie

le collège de france (advanced)

il était une fois (fairy tales)

la main verte (gardening)

la méthode scientifique

regardez voir (photography)

sur les épaules de darwin

very good trip (rock n roll)

chroniques du ciel (aviation)

la tête au carré (popularization)

les p’tits bateaux (pros answering children’s qs)

les grands musiciens (interview with a pro musician)

littérature moderne et contemporaine

Society:

Arte radio (politics, health, history, tech…)

slate (similarish to ted talks)

hashtag (debating very current problems)

quoi de meuf (women talking about pop culture)

affaires sensibles (trials)

les gentilshommes (relationships men/women)

bouddhisme et méditation

kiffe ta race (about racial problematics)

le flow (well being)

sois gentille dis merci fais un bisou (portraits of women)

les couilles sur la table (men talking to women)

miroir miroir (destroy social norms)

du grain à moudre (debating sensible questions)

coucou le q (casual sex ed)

change ma vie (about personal growth)

la poudre (powerful women’s interviews)

nice to hear you (talks with creators, ceos, artists and nice humans)

mortel (to reconcile you with death and mortality)

la menstruelle (periods)

Movies + tech:

La cartouche (gaming)

la chronique ciné

studio 404 (tech)

geek inc (nerd chatter)

nouveau monde (innovations)

2h de perdues (shitty movies)

silence on joue (gaming)

radio rôliste (role playing, mmorpg)

nociné (pop culture/movies)

season one (to discover new shows)

[exitwound]

And a world with fewer languages isn’t only a world with more limited means of communication. It’s also a world with fewer stories and folk tales, fewer hagiographies, fewer poems, myths, and recipes, fewer remedies, fewer memories.

Fennelly, Beth Ann. “Fruits We’ll Never Taste, Languages We’ll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity”

[rocketbirdie]

heh. didn't even stand a chance.

[clapuhands]

to everyone in the notes asking for a translation: panel 1: "weigh your heart" (the suffix pronoun for heart should be .k not .ti i think but i see what you are going for. also, my copy of faulkner doesn't have a copy of the word but it's pretty clear from context what it means) panel 4: "what"

anyway op good job this is really funny and better than 99.9% of hieroglyphs on the internet

[oodles-of-boodle]

@thatlittleegyptologist

[thatlittleegyptologist]

xAa is 'to throw/dispatch/abandon' because fAj is the verb 'to weigh' (this can be checked on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae), .tj should be =k as already pointed out.

Thus with xAa as the imperative 'dispact/throw', the scales determinative doesn't belong to that word and is thus a word in and of itself the 3-consonant jws.w (the .w is just a plural, it's still 3-consonants), and then .tj which should be =k.

It's more: xAa jws.w ib=k 'chuck your heart on the scales' *ma'at gets obliterated* ptr 'what'.

As an aside; it's not good practice with Middle Egyptian to go 'we can infer this from context' when you can't find that word in one dictionary. You should be consulting at least three. Also, because my ass has been doing this for nearly 20 years, just so you're all aware xAa is in Faulkner:

This is page 183 of my personal copy of Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. xAa is right there! You'll see that the picture of the entry for the TLA also cites it as FCD 'Faulkner's Concise Dictionary' 183.

[fallenangelvictorious]

You know the art is good when the academics start getting spicy in the notes

[truetgirl]

Car Trunk vs Car Boot: A clear win for US English, trunk was already a thing in which you stored items, frequently for transport.

Crisps vs Chips: I gotta admit, the Brits have this one. They're thin slices of potato that have been made crispy. No chipping of any materials involved.

Car Park vs Parking Lot: Equally matched. What's a car park? A place to park cars. What's a parking lot? An otherwise empty lot where you can park.

Elevator vs Lift: Both equally fail to address that the damn thing also goes down.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[pompadourpink]

why does je suis contract to chuy? can french people tell when non-francophones are trying to blend in with the contractions?

French people can mostly tell non-francophone spies apart because they don't say hi when they send questions!

The answer to #1 is laziness! It's the same sound (try going JJJJ-CCCHHHH-JJJJJ-CCCHHHH and feel your mouth, it's the same without the vibration, consequently easier to create - V and F have the same relationship), the answer to #2 is not really, you usually get caught when saying things like "Ch'voulayy" instead of "Ch'voulais" or "Chais pas l'youtiliser" instead of "Chais pas l'utiliser"! x

[irishshauna]

Hiberno English ❤️

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I love language.

I love how humans improvise with language to fit the pieces together.

You could say that language is my love language...

[ritavonbees]

Okay I love the "hot news perfect" name for the grammatical form, does anyone know when this was invented?

[7-percent]

Er…. or not to er

Another consistent difference between British English and American English is in the positioning of letters e and r.  Centre versus center is the most common example. 

But then it works for metre, too, and fibre. Litre and theatre are two more.

In British English, some words from French, Latin or Greek end with a consonant followed by an unstressed -re (pronounced /ə®/).  The presence of that consonant is key, and it happens most frequently with -tre or -bre. Examples of the former include reconnoitre, goitre, lustre, spectre. Examples of the latter include calibre, timbre, sombre, sabre. 

It also includes other consonants, such as -ch, for ochre and sepulchre, or -v for manoeuvre, 

The difference relates only to root words; -er rather than -re is universal as a suffix for agentive (reader, winner, user) and comparative (louder, nicer) forms. These include Germanic words, such as anger, mother, water, and such Romance-derived words as danger, quarter and river.

Some words ending in -cre are spelt the same way in both British and American English to show that the c needs to be pronounced as a hard /k/ sound. Think of acre, massacre, mediocre. Ogre is also spelt the same way in both versions.

It can get confusing. The British will use thermometer or other meters for a measuring instrument from metre for the unit of length, while “poetic metre” is often spelled as -re, pentameter, hexameter, etc. are always -er.

The big split came in the 18th century. In 1755, Johnson’s Dictionary standardised British spelling on the -re form, while in America, Webster’s Dictionary published in the 19th century went for the simpler -er ending for everything.

And over time some of the old British spellings have been superseded by the “new” -er ending, including the months (December, October, etc), disaster, filter, letter, minister, number, oyster, sober, tender. 

The pronunciation also differs between the two versions of English, at least to my ear. The Americans are more likely to put stress on the last syllable, so fibre becomes “fi-BER”. A Brit tends to pronounce is as “FI-bur”. 

[1920s]

[terpsikeraunos]

ancient greek word of the day: κακοθερής (kakotherēs), unfitted to endure summer heat

[aphilologicalbatman-deactivated]

this literally means “bad at summer” pass it on

[mortimermcmirestinks]

it’s me.

[theangriestlittleunicorn]

It’s that time of year again!

[bisexualbaker]

You know what, I think I need a shirt with that word on it. I should do something about that.

[parisbian]

i think it’s a shame that so many people speak perfect english just from the internet/tv and get no real recognition for it. there’s this horrible assumption that being fluent in english is just a given (propaganda from americans in cargo shorts i believe) and english is brushed off as an “easy” language. that isn’t the case at all and if you’ve learned english that’s amazing and im honestly in awe. i hate that people achieve so much to reach the minimum expectation, and then english speakers will pat themselves on the back for being able to count to 10 in french

[headspace-hotel]

snake bit me today (non-venomous) (i deserved it)

[translatingpoststogerman]

kopfraum-hotel

schlange hat mich heute gebissen (nicht giftig) (ich hatte es verdient)

[translatingpoststoyiddish]

קאפרוים־האטעל

שלאנג האט מיך היינט געביסן (נישט סמיק)‮ (מיר איז עס געקומען)

[butchhatred]

fejtér-hotel

kígyó ma megharapott (nem mérges) (megérdemeltem)

[wetheunkindness]

höfuðrými-hótel

snákur beit mig í dag (ekki eitraður) (ég átti það skilið)