Soooo many languages @hrshl-multilangue - Tumblr Blog

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Languages I know masterpost !!!!

Mothertongue: French (from France) (yea there's a difference)

C2 (almost bilingual): English

C1: /

B2: /

B1: /

A2: Norwegian

A1: German (despite 12 years of learning lmaooo), Spanish

Started recently/shit level: Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Martinican Creole

Planning on learning/wishing to learn: Alsatian, Welsh, Russian

#languages #blabla

clockworkspider

My pet peeve when talking about chinese language is that "Mandarin" is the biggest spoken branch of Chinese. If you're talking about Chinese writing you can just say Chinese, or Hanzi if you wanna be precise.

All Chinese dialects/spoken branches uses hanzi, so something written in mandarin can still be read in cantonese, for example. (Cantonese has an expanded set of characters for its vernacular, so it is a different written language, if you're specifically referring to those characters it's correct to say Cantonese.)

There are two ways to write hanzi, traditional and simplified. Traditional Chinese is more commonly used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and has more strokes. But like, you can pronounce Traditional Chinese in Mandarin. The written form of the characters themselves isn't tied to the dialect.

So if you're referring to specify the written form, it should be "simplified chinese" or "traditional chinese".

So like. You're learning to speak mandarin, but you're learning to write Chinese. Which is a wonderful thing because this means you can communicate in writing with speaker of other dialects even if you can't understand what they're saying.

#Chinese

routledge comprehensive grammar my beloved but also WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT LANGUAGE????

So fucking far from any others I've learned so far... it's fucking kicking my ass...

#japaning #japanesing #idr the fucking tag

Trying to learn Japanese and I feel like in order to properly learn the hiraganas and katakanas, you need to have some vocabulary.

It is much much easier to be looking for a word in a text and remembering what it uses than to just try to learn the katas on their own

#japaning #japanese learning

Learning is hell but it can also be fun when you're trying to make food and you have to decipher shit around...

Like what is the difference between かけつゆ and つけつゆ when google translate says they're both sauces? Well now you have to learn new words by doing research!

#Japanese learning

Extremely annoying that there are no phone keyboard that cater to my needs specifically...

Just let me slide between languages, or like I hold on something and it proposes me stuff... Also having better Japanese proposition when writting...

And like the main issue is that I'm French so I NEED the AZERTY so I can't just use one keyboard to fit all languages since I switch between AZERTY for French to QWERTY for English and then add all the å, ø and æ for Norwegian...

Spent 40€ on a Teach Yourself "short stories for beginners" in german, a fucking teaching method in german and a small moomin book in Japanese lmaoooo

I've been translating Cass Apocalyptic series since July 2023 and holy shit there's 6% left for me to translate...

Once I'm done I'll... Start trying to translate the Kongen På Havet series??? It's in Norwegian and I need the fucking practice so yeah it's gonna be absolute trash at first, but hey... At least it will exist? And it will train me??

#translationing

I need to learn japanese to be able to read mangas because jesus christ the french translation sounds soooo bad

mosswall

"English doesn't really have any equivalent whatsoever to Japanese honorifics, so we just completely leave them out of our subtitles because there's no way that our English-speaking audience could possibly grasp their significance in explaining these character's relationship with each other"

There is a character named Robert Thomson.

At work, he's known as Robert by his coworkers and Thomson by his boss. At home, the people in his neighborhood call him Rob. His parents, spouse, and closest friends call him Robbie. His best friend from childhood calls him Robbie and also sometimes calls him Roberto. The children in his neighborhood call him Mr. Rob but when he does volunteer work at the library the kids there call him Mr. Thomson. Children in the wild who don't know him personally call him sir. When he goes to anywhere with reception, he's typically addressed as Thomson.

So explain to me again why English speaking audiences can't grasp that those kids are calling that woman Oneechan because she's a young adult woman that they aren't personally acquainted with, and more importantly why you chose to localize that to her given name and not the equivalent of "Miss" or even "Miss Given Name"? Because if your goal is to replicate the experience that the original Japanese audience would have with those characters, you're failing spectacularly. Because now not only do you have a bunch of kids going around calling adults by their given names when in the original language they're calling them a cultural equivalent to Miss or Mister, but your insistence on removing all honorifics and just using names means that there's no absolutely zero difference in the way a person is addressed by the people closest to them and total strangers. Which is not only wildly inaccurate to how the Japanese audience would experience that, it's not even that accurate to English, either.

necromancelena

Die temu ad die

necromancelena

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

chef-boy-ar-girl

It accidentally is latin

saanah

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

santapau

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

qqueenofhades

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

nudistcat

@theshitpostcalligrapher

sekkitsune

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

qqueenofhades

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

sekkitsune

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

qqueenofhades

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

laurenthemself

how dare you say we error on the scribes

jtimu

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

pocket-deer-belly

it will forever bother me that like every language has some saying for before a meal (itadakimasu, bon appetit, eet smakelijk) but english doesn't have a pre-meal saying

pocket-deer-belly

eet smakelijk and bon appetit are for wishing someone a good meal, itadakimasu is to thank for the food, and all of these are fairly consistent etiquette in each language. like i don't say eet smakelijk every dinner or every meal, but it's polite to do at event dinners or in restaurants. i doubt people are saying "dig in" or reciting christian prayers as a strictly polite unironic gesture at a restaurant, especially fancy ones.

catdotwav

image that was circulating a while ago of people frantically trying to fill this exact gap

tlirsgender

[ID: a screenshot of a discord message that reads, "hi guys!!! the wired humanities nahuatl project is completely out of funds and had to be moved to new self-funded servers to even remain online. this is one of, if not the only, ways for people to easily access a nahuatl dictionary and learn some basics of the language and culture. PLEASE if you can, donate to them." Attached is a link to the wired humanities nahuatl dictionary donation page. /end ID]

Boosting this from a server I'm in!

Please help support them how you can, Indigenous language preservation/education is important to me

imsobadatnicknames2

I rarely bring this up because it feels like fairly silly and low-stakes compared to all the other effects of american imperialism, but one of the funniest things when Americans deny that living in the imperial core and the center of global cultural hegemony confers them any sort of privilege over people from the imperial periphery is that like. In order for this conversation where you tell me you have no privilege over me to even be able to take place one of us had to learn the other's language, and it wasn't you.

I think the fact that by default the onus of learning the other's language to enable communication is always put on the other side is a pretty significant privilege on the cultural front.

imsobadatnicknames2

Someone commented this post with "So if I learned, say, Hawaiian and talked to a hawaiian person, then the hawaiian would be privileged? Come on, think about what you're writing, man" and then blocked me as soon as I tried to reply, so.

Monolingual anglophones are a deeply solipsistic people unable to think about international power dynamics on any level beyond the individual to comprehend that "one guy making the individual choice to learn your language" does not represent the same level of linguistic hegemony and privilege as "millions of people all over the world learning specifically your language because they're expected to be able to speak it as a near-universal requirement for any kind of upward mobility while learning a second language is never expected of you"

soup-mother

this is a niche one but instead of "they would not fuckin say that" it's "they would not fucking use American sign language".

ASL is not the only sign language. two british characters in your fanfiction would not be using ASL. England in fact has its own kind of sign language, BSL, that forms a sign family with many other sign languages around the world.

ASL isn't even the original member of its sign family, it comes from french sign language. do you know sign languages aren't related to spoken languages? that's an important one! it's not a direct 1:1 with people speaking English around the world. people in other countries don't learn ASL just in case they run into an usamerican or Canadian (who do often use it)

i know the entire world is the USA or whatever and sign languages do sometimes borrow from ASL for signs they don't have, but please be aware that there are other sign languages and families in the world that are not in fact ASL.

derinthescarletpescatarian

I once saw somebody on this website say "Everyone should be taught sign language in school because then people from all over the world could communicate without having to learn each others' [spoken] languages" and I have never recovered. It was so many years ago but I simply cannot forget.

More people should learn sign language but buddy that is not how it works.

#well some stuff are similar enough to understand #like if you take the ASL and LSF's alphabets you'll notice they're quite similar #and SL from the same family CAN somewhat be understood between them #but overall it's just like other languages family #like yeah I can understand Spanish more easily because I know French and both languages are derived from latin #but also there's enough differences that I need to learn Spanish despite my knowledge of French