[caesarsaladinn]

age regressing back to toddlerhood for the sole purpose of reopening my critical period and learning Arabic

[fuerst-von-argot]

Ich identifiziere mich als GmbHe/er

@swanfloatieknight

[balzabul]

I remember seeing many maaaany years ago like within my first years of Tumblr, a handy post/chart for learning the differences between shared (and unshared) symbols used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and so I wanted to throw something together quick to help people learn the differences between languages using the Arabic script– they’re not all Arabic!! These are just some of the more common ones you see online.

Many many languages use a modified Arabic script, and I couldn’t possibly detail each and every one, so here are links to some info about others as well! Including:

Azerbaijani

Sindhi

Balochi

Luri

Mandinka

Arabi Malayalam

Kyrgyz

Pegon script (Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese)

This is also just a basic list of all languages current using a modified Arabic script in one way or another

[culmaer]

one of things I noticed in the Netherlands and Belgium, is that menus often list bottled drink sizes as "25cl" or "50cl", and people usually say kwart liter and half liter

whereas in South Africa we always write "250ml" or "500ml" and we'd usually say twee(honderd) vyftig mil and vyfhonderd mil when speaking Afrikaans

now, it's perfectly obvious what all of those mean, like it's all the metric system. but it's precisely these small and subtle differences which I find fascinating ! and that's probably why I enjoy the Dutch language so very much. people always talk about how similar the languages are, and it's true. if communicating is your only goal then they're almost perfectly intelligible. the classic example is wandel[en] which in Dutch means "to walk", but in Afrikaans means "to take a leisurely stroll". if communicating is all you care about, that distinction is irrelevant. the person is going on foot. but — if you're into languages and linguistics or poetry, then that's a huge difference !! (this example might actually work better in Flemish than Hollandic ? but that just adds a whole extra layer of excitement to things)

I find that so much more interesting and rich than the super obvious differences, like how a "receipt" is bonnetje in Dutch and strokie in Afrikaans. or even the false friends like the word aardig, which means "friendly, nice" in Dutch, but "weird, unpleasant" in Afrikaans. because the subtle ones can slip by you unnoticed

[laika-the-bitch]

in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other

[laika-the-bitch]

scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.

scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device

scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk.

[hedgehog-moss]

wait can you please explain to me why a french book has more words than an english book? they say the same thing, yeah? why 400 more pages in french version? does it just take more words to speak in french, or is the actual content more…. descriptive in a way that takes more words to understand? i’m not as stupid as it sounds like i am. thank you

That's not a stupid question! You do literally use more words to express an idea in French (generally speaking). Translators call this the expansion / contraction ratio of languages. Translating a text from English to Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian typically makes it 20-30% longer. Other languages like Chinese or Korean will result in a contraction. Appropriately enough, the French term for "expansion ratio" is "taux de foisonnement" which has an expansion ratio of +33%.

It's a combination of factors:

word length: English uses so many monosyllabic words, unlike languages with mainly Graeco-Latin roots. It can be a headache for translators who translate online stuff because apps designed with English in mind have tiny frames and buttons meant for tiny English words and if you can't modify the layout, your language might just not fit... Same problem when you translate subtitles, or small signs in public places (“Please wait here” is 16 characters in English, vs. you need 15 characters in French just to say ‘please’ / s’il vous plaît...)

rigid syntax: in French you can't use shortcuts like "word length". You've got to say "the length of the word". We don’t have concise adjectival structures like X-friendly, X-based, X-prone, and often need to use an entire clause (“which is prone to...”) to translate them. Articles are mandatory (e.g. you would need to start this sentence with "the articles" rather than "articles"), the possessive form can’t just be a quick apostrophe (not “Mary’s friend” but “the friend of Mary”) etc.

a general preference for simple, active, direct and pared-down writing in English vs. a preference for 'diluted', passive, indirect, embellished phrasings in French. French adores grammatical emphasis / redundancy while English hates it (I saw a translation recently where the English phrasing was “This explains—”; the French one was: “C’est donc ce qui explique”, I.e. “It is therefore that which explains—”) Someone very accurately commented on my last ask “French goes on and on enjoying itself.” English style guides are absolutely obsessed with advising writers to prune their sentences, use straightforward syntax, remove 'unnecessary' words, while this really isn't perceived as evidence of good writing in French. Writing talent rather lies in “savoir manier la langue” / knowing how to wield the French language, and keeping your sentences direct and to the point doesn’t demonstrate your ability to do that...

English prefers connecting ideas implicitly rather than explicitly, which is easy to do with short, straightforward sentences. I was translating a text the other day that was full of logically-linked sentences, e.g. “This is part of a larger problem. We won’t solve it without tackling [other thing].” English doesn’t mind this staccato style but French finds it ugly and much prefers to use one long, flowy sentence, eg “Seeing as it is part of a larger problem, we won’t be able to solve it without—” or “This is part of a larger problem, and consequently it won’t be solved unless—” I remember reading a bilingual edition of a novel in which the original French went “Il s’acquitta du montant puis, après avoir froidement salué, il sortit.” The English translation was “He paid the fee, coldly bowed, and went out.” The French version says “He did X, then, after doing Y, he did Z,” while in English the ‘then’ and ‘after’ are implied by placing actions one after the other (in the first example, the ‘consequently’ is similarly implied.) French likes to add tool-words everywhere in order to keep its more convoluted sentences clear, by making all the logical connectors visible.

So this mixture of etymology, grammatical differences and just plain cultural preferences (which of course stem from the nature of the language) is how you end up with a 700-page book in English becoming a 1000-page book in French...

[unscharf-an-den-raendern]

[itsyveinthesky]

@brilliantyears

[sprachgefuehle]

[moviehub]

You think you’re tricking me? You’re the one being tricked.

The Handmaiden | 아가씨 (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook

[mewletos]

So i was trying to make one of those aesthetic one word pictures....and idk why that's the first thing that came to mind

[loveletter2you]

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!

[mino-lingual]

Time to revive this blog in the year 2021 because I’m learning Dutch now

[rowark]

(X)

@holdwine @evergrove is this accurate?? 🤣🤣

[mythicmayhemcomic]

@niuniente

[ruffboi-mags]

#fjsdfs #when i studied in denmark #they spent an entire class showing us simple words and how similar they were across danish #norwegian #etc. for the express purpose of ragging on how different the finnish word was #the teacher literally said ‘we can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb it’s finnish #also the delivery on this video is just delightful (via @destinyandcoins)

I find it hilarious that denmark has to stoop to ragging on the finns (instead of doing it for I guess shits and giggles like the others), because all the other nordic languages rag on them for sounding like they’re mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD

[mzminola]

Oh! Oh! That’s because Finnish is from a different language family! The Uralic languages!

:D

[ruffboi-mags]

Yup! The roots of the majority of European and many nearby languages is Indo-Eropean, which is the root of everything from English to Russian to Hindi to Persian and more!

Finnish however, as you said, has its roots in a different branch than Indo-European, the Uralic languages. There aren’t many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but there’s a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.

[allthingslinguistic]

Meet the people fighting to keep a language alive online

For decades, it was nearly impossible to type in Urdu. Some are working to bring the script into a digital future.

If you were to walk down a street in New York City, you might encounter hundreds of fonts on a single block: everything from street signs to shop names take on distinct personalities. Urdu and its nastaʿlīq typeface, lagging in the digital space, are much more difficult to iterate on with existing technology. Where there are hundreds of thousands of Latin digital fonts — fonts so iconic that we know them by name, like Helvetica or Times New Roman — digital Urdu fonts are limited to a handful at most. The nastaʿlīq typography that you might see on the streets of Pakistan is most likely to be hand painted.

“We went on Google and typed “what are fonts, how do we develop them,” Zeeshan recalled. “We purchased software but sat on it for a long time because we didn’t know how to use it.” Produced in collaboration with a government technology board over the course of a decade, Mehr Nastaliq uses 500 characters, all handwritten by Nasrullah — a tiny fraction of the 20,000 glyphs Jamil so painstakingly wrote in the 1980s. The Mehrs are particularly proud of how light their font is: at 60 KB, it doesn’t slow down websites and renders quickly. You can elongate letters and add diacritics.

Their experience of developing Mehr Nastaliq drove home an important lesson: the need for close collaboration between the calligrapher and developer. “It is imperative that the calligrapher and developer understand each other,” emphasised Zeeshan. “Abbu understands programming too now, so he can offer a different solution when confronted with tech limitations.” Working with his parent comes with its own challenges, of course. “Sometimes, Zeeshan would say, This letter isn’t looking nice,” Nasrullah said with a chuckle. “And I’d get huffy and say, Are you the calligrapher?”

Unicode, developed in the early 1990s, is now a global standard for representing characters across language systems in computing code, which means if you write Urdu — in naskh or nastaʿlīq — on one computer, it won’t appear as a string of garbled symbols in another. But technological advances don’t automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages. Nemeth notes that the proliferation of easy-to-use design software doesn’t eliminate the need for script-specific expertise. “Designers who are not willing or able to invest the years of learning and research necessary to master a foreign script,” he says, “are led to believe that their tools and some superficial ‘borrowing’ of design elements are sufficient for successful design.”

Read the whole article. 

[dutch-polyglot]

I love explaining Brabants dialect to non natives

[culmaer]

please explain Brabants to me, a non-native

[dutch-polyglot]

So my favorite things to explain are:

- standard dutch doesn't allow pronoun drops. Brabant basically adds the pronouns to the verbs and can drop the pronouns, or leave them in the sentence! (For example: hedde = heb jij)

- the Brabants second Person singular pronouns are gij/ge instead of jij/je (with velar fricatives, not uvular fricatives!!) Some people also say gullie (for jullie) but I'm not sure how common that one is

- when you want to ask someone if they know something, in standard dutch you'd ask "weet jij (he)t", the Brabants version of this would be "witte gij 't" which, if said without context sounds exactly like "witte geit" (meaning 'white goat')

- for saying goodbye we say "houdoe", that's a telltale sign of a Brabander because other Dutch people bully us for it :((( just like the zachte g (soft g) which is honestly superior bc it's not as harsh :)

- we call everyone someone's person: ons mam/pap (instead of mijn moeder/vader), jullie mam/pap (instead of jou moeder/vader), menne mens (what women call their husbands)

- and my favorite thing: diminutives! You've heard of -je now get ready for -(s)ke. Meiske(meisje), huuske (huisje), panneke (pannetje), etc. Whether you add the s or not is still hard for me to understand (I wasn't directly raised w the dialect) but it makes everything sound much cuter imo. The belgians do the same which isn't surprising since they're right around the corner, but I like that it's a unique thing compared to standard Dutch :D

[yonaks]

i hate languages

[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of English poetry, then matches its sounds to those that appear in the Chinese language. Those sounds produce their own, separate meaning. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no languages at all, with multiple meanings that can be read multiple ways.

[Image ID: A line that reads, “早上好” which is Simplified Chinse for  “good morning,” followed by a line of English text that reads, “good morning,” followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, “gũ dé mào níng.” Then a line of Chinese characters which is read phonically the same as the above pinyin (I couldn’t find the characters to include in the transcription, sorry), followed by a line of English text which is the translation of the above Chinese, reading, “Even alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.” End image ID.]

[chapmangamo]

The international chain of smack talk!

website | twitter | instagram | shop

[nordic-language-love]

Such a cute comic! <3

[rsbenedict-deactivated20181216]

I like the implication that the Chinese have mastered every human language and are only confounded by the speech of the undead.