[kopretina]

wanted to know what this post said and fucking locked in and lost track of time for easily an hour if not two....... translating this random sentence. which is why I can't get anything done. it's now too late to run the errands I had planned. but. I am aware of how to form the negative aorist in Turkish 👍

[lost-neurons]

16.4.2026 • focusing on the real things lately.

[nonomaster]

Brains, books and better boundaries 🤍

.

Last leg of the preparation, only a month to go-

[joy-is-what-it-means]

Coffee and a sweet treat never fail🧡

📖 Currently reading: No Place on Earth by Christa Wolf

[jinyjazyk]

some vocabulary!

çalışmak - to work

yaşamak - to live

:: Çekya'da yaşıyorum. Türkiye'de yaşamıyorum.

kalabalık - crowd, crowded

taze - fresh

üst katta - upstairs

alt katta - dowstairs

eşyalar - things

çanta - bag

bal - honey

[jinyjazyk]

A flipthrough of my Turkish notebook. The notes are a bit messy but I was really proud of myself for how much progress I made in Turkish a few years ago without a teacher and without any prior experience with Turkic languages.

I don't remember where I got this idea but I very diligently wrote an uppercase I in green to represent 4-way vocal harmony and an uppercase A in orange for 2-way vocal harmony. This system proved very helpful. The notes are written mainly in English and Czech, the languages I use in my everyday life, with some things written in Korean, a language I studied in school which has certain similarities to Turkish. 👀

The ghosting you might see on the pages is from what used to be my favourite pen for many years. I didn't realise the ink had this problem for a very long time so unfortunately many of my notebooks have this same problem.

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone, but I like watching these types of videos and felt like making one of my own. Sorry the camera's a bit shaky, I couldn't figure out how to rig the camera in place so I was just holding the tripod.

[kopretina]

Korean notes, strange soup and iced tea

[mystudystation]

27th April 2026 ~ 17:42

Sometimes u just gotta do the work from the bed

[jinyjazyk]

common names for this fish (gadus morhua) in different languages!! the distribution of this fish is around the coastlines in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, so I have chosen to examine a selection of languages from these regions specifically :)

shared word type #1: "bacalao" or "kabeljauw"

the etymology for this word is unknown as is its geographic origin. possibly from Basque bakailao, from archaic Dutch bakkeljauw or from Latin baculum "stick, staff". word type "kabeljauw" is the result of metathesis where the first two consonants have simply been flipped.

bacalao (Spanish); bacalhau (Portuguese); bacallau (Galician); bakanyado (Ladino); bacalau (Aragonese); bacaláu (Asturian); bacallà (Catalan)

kabeljauw (Dutch); cabillaud (French); Kabeljau (German); kabbeljau (Frisian); kabbeljauw (Limburgish); kabeljoo (Estonian)

shared word type #2: "torsk"

this word ultimately derives from Proto-Germanic *þurskaz "dry (thing)" and was borrowed into many non-Germanic languages as well.

torsk (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish); dorsz (Polish); Dorsch (German); dorsh (Yiddish); Þorskur (Icelandic); turska (Finnish); tursk (Estonian); tr'osku (Livvi-Karelian); dorski (Northern Sami); tåårske (Southern Sami); trosc (Irish Gaelic)

note: trosk (English) and trosg (Welsh) refer to a different fish, the brosme brosme

shared word type #3: "morue"

this word comes from Old French, a compound of Breton mor "sea" and Old French lus "pike (fish)".

morue (French); moru (Breton); milwell (English, dialectical); merluça (Occitan)

shared word type #4: "menca"

this derives from Proto-Baltic *menkyā- "to weaken, to make small".

menca (Latvian); menkė (Lithuanian)

isolates and/or unknowns

cod (English); peju (Mi'kmaq); saarullik (Greenlandic); penfras (Welsh); abadeixo (Aragonese); barvus (Cornish); boiddagh (Manx); nokamagw (Abenaki); nuhkomeq (Maliseet-Passamaquoddy)

[marilearnsmandarin]

Source

[jinyjazyk]

learning practical Italian through menus pt. 2

(note: I don't eat meat so I am usually writing down only the pertinent information for someone who wants to avoid these items)

settimana - week

crostini - canapes; croutons

fegatini - liver

panzanella - summer tomato and bread salad (seems to be w/o meat)

bollito - boiled meat (also sometimes written as lesso)

coratella, pajata - innards

peperoni - bell peppers

nervetti - calf's head

bombolotti - short pasta similar to rigatoni

salvia - sage

porcini - cz. hříb smrkový

casereccio - homemade

baccala - cured codfish

involtino - meat roulade

petto - breast

vitella - veal

purè - mashed potatoes

salsicce - sausages

"sulla piastra" - grilled

fatta da noi - made in house

pera, pl. pere - pear(s)

maialino, porchetta - suckling pig

sera - evening

semplice - simple

[jinyjazyk]

learning practical Italian through menus pt. 1

(note: I don't eat meat so I am usually writing down only the pertinent information as someone who wants to avoid these items)

tagliere - (cheese) board

salumi, affettati - deli meats

manzo - beef

tonnarelli - egg pasta similar to spaghetti

alla Amatriciana - tomato sauce with guanciale (a cured meat)

polpette - meatballs

coda - (ox)tail

ragù bianco - white meat sauce typically made with veal

griglia - grill

tagliata - cut (of meat)

pachino - (variety of) cherry tomato

arrosticini - skewered meat

pecora - mutton

[inbetweencoffees]

Realised once again how much of a sucker I am for academic validation, oh well. At least I got positive feedback. Went to my 4h long Cultural Studies seminar, had lunch with some friends, sent a mail to get out of taking yet another library quiz. Still have to finish packing, complete my flashcards, and create some practice question sheets for my exam. Just completed everything I currently can complete for my didactics seminar – been considering dropping the class…

[hollowmaison]

notes

[tulunnguaq]

how do you say 'northwest' in greenlandic

Okay, well this is actually a really interesting question.

Before we go further, I need you all to commit to memory the following diagram*:

*All diagrams from Fortescue’s Eskimo Orientation Systems (1988)

Got that? Oh there’s also this one. 

Let’s focus on point “c” in the first diagram, which represents Nuuk or standard West Greenlandic.

The compass points here are (in extended form, with standard third person singular ending):

N - avannaa

E - kangia

S - kujataa

W - kitaa

But if we look at point “a”, Ammassalik in East Greenland, (sorry about image quality):

We see that “av-” no longer points north but closer to south. And all the other alternative designations from point “c” have become directionally reversed! (i.e. allowing for sound changes, each of pav-/pu-, sam-/sav-, qav-/qav- now points in the opposite direction)

So what is going on here? As Map 1 suggests, which compares the directional systems across the entire Inuit language continuum (and wider Eskimo-Aleut domain), there is a lot of individual variation, and the relationships between neighbouring areas can even be a “mirror” one, whereas the relationship between West Greenland and East Greenland is a rotational one. 

The answer is based in the fact that the concepts of “true north”, “true east”, etc are not native to Inuit dialects but rather the terms used locally are reflective of the environment in which each community has lived.  Each term has an underlying meaning that relates to that environment in some way, so:

avannaa is from Proto-Eskimo (PE) avan (from a demonstrative av- “over (there)”) meaning “area around”/”surroundings”, which over time in West Greenlandic has semantically moved to mean “off from land”, and in turn with -naq (something resembling) giving avannaq with specific meaning “north wind”, and from there with 3s possessive giving avannaa, now meaning generically “north”. But in East Greenlandic, which was derived from West Greenlandic as a wave of Greenlanders steadily moved south and then round the southern tip of Greenland back up the east coast, the term has retained a similar directional meaning from the perspective of being “to the right, when looking toward the sea”. And in East Greenlandic qav- therefore effectively now means the opposite “to the left, when looking toward the sea”. You can see from the diagram that Fortescue notes that av- and qav- type stems also act as similar opposite pairs (left/right or upriver/downriver) in other western Inuit dialects.

kitaa is from PE kətə- “area in front or towards the water” which has a more transparent meaning in the context of West Greenland settlements. A similar term used to exist in East Greenlandic with meaning “outwards” as shown here:

but as seen in the diagram another term kana- has taken over the meaning of east in that dialect. I also understand that more recently the West Greenlandic standard terms have been incorporated into East Greenlandic, no doubt due to some natural cultural pressure (national media presumably being almost entirely in West Greenlandic)  and the fact that some of the West Greenlandic terms like kitaa (for west) no longer has a native East Greenlandic term to compete with. But it does create the unusual position that if an East Greenlander uses kitaa for west the term would literally be pointing in the opposite direction of the original meaning (i.e. now inwards, away from the sea).   [NB this is perhaps no different in a sense from someone in the Southern hemisphere using the term “south”, since the etymology of this is derived from the direction of the “sun”, which for them would actually be in the north.] 

So to come back to your question, “north west” in West Greenlandic is “avannaa-kitaa”, but I didn’t want to answer so quickly without giving a hint of the interesting background. 

[best-friend-quads]

Really great post!

I love that the answer to “how do you say northwest?” is basically “directions are a social construct”

[tulunnguaq]

[blueprint-9376]

23.10.2022 [😇]

🗂: 용량 과부화

[the-bibrarian]

Weird French #04

Être fleur bleue

Literally “to be blue flower.”

Means “to be romantic and sentimental,” maybe even overly so, and also a little naive. Could be translated as being mushy, but has a gentler connotation. When talking about a person, refers to their personality.

“Elle rêve au grand amour, elle est un peu fleur bleue.” (She dreams of finding the one, she’s a little too sentimental.)