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

shark vs the universe
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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Misplaced Lens Cap
I'd rather be in outer space đž

blake kathryn
NASA
Sade Olutola
art blog(derogatory)
we're not kids anymore.

Discoholic đȘ©

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trying on a metaphor

oozey mess

#extradirty
Claire Keane

@theartofmadeline
Peter Solarz
DEAR READER

Product Placement
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@mino-lingual
age regressing back to toddlerhood for the sole purpose of reopening my critical period and learning Arabic
Ich identifiziere mich als GmbHe/er
@swanfloatieknight
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 scriptâ theyâre 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 couldnât 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
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 â 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
in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other
scale as in âto climbâ 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.
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 moreâŠ. descriptive in a way that takes more words to understand? iâm 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 (âPlease wait hereâ is 16 characters in English, vs. you need 15 characters in French just to say âpleaseâ / sâil vous plaĂźt...)
rigid syntax: in French you can't use shortcuts like "word length". You've got to say "the length of the word". We donât have concise adjectival structures like X-friendly, X-based, X-prone, and often need to use an entire clause (âwhich is prone to...â) to translate them. Articles are mandatory (e.g. you would need to start this sentence with "the articles" rather than "articles"), the possessive form canât just be a quick apostrophe (not âMaryâs friendâ but âthe friend of Maryâ) 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 âThis explainsââ; the French one was: âCâest donc ce qui expliqueâ, I.e. âIt is therefore that which explainsââ) Someone very accurately commented on my last ask âFrench goes on and on enjoying itself.â 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 âsavoir manier la langueâ / knowing how to wield the French language, and keeping your sentences direct and to the point doesnât 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. âThis is part of a larger problem. We wonât solve it without tackling [other thing].â English doesnât mind this staccato style but French finds it ugly and much prefers to use one long, flowy sentence, eg âSeeing as it is part of a larger problem, we wonât be able to solve it withoutââ or âThis is part of a larger problem, and consequently it wonât be solved unlessââ I remember reading a bilingual edition of a novel in which the original French went âIl sâacquitta du montant puis, aprĂšs avoir froidement saluĂ©, il sortit.â The English translation was âHe paid the fee, coldly bowed, and went out.â The French version says âHe did X, then, after doing Y, he did Z,â while in English the âthenâ and âafterâ are implied by placing actions one after the other (in the first example, the âconsequentlyâ 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...
@brilliantyears
You think youâre tricking me? Youâre the one being tricked.
The Handmaiden | ìê°ìš (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook
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
dropbox containing linguistics textbooks
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dropbox containing books about language learning
includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by katĂł lomb
if thereâs a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!
Time to revive this blog in the year 2021 because Iâm learning Dutch now
(X)
@holdwine @evergrove is this accurate?? đ€Łđ€Ł
@niuniente
#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 âwe can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb itâs 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 theyâre mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD
Oh! Oh! Thatâs because Finnish is from a different language family! The Uralic languages!
:D
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 arenât many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but thereâs a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.
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 nastaÊżlÄ«q 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 â fonts so iconic that we know them by name, like Helvetica or Times New Roman â digital Urdu fonts are limited to a handful at most. The nastaÊżlÄ«q typography that you might see on the streets of Pakistan is most likely to be hand painted.
âWe went on Google and typed âwhat are fonts, how do we develop them,â Zeeshan recalled. âWe purchased software but sat on it for a long time because we didnât know how to use it.â Produced in collaboration with a government technology board over the course of a decade, Mehr Nastaliq uses 500 characters, all handwritten by Nasrullah â 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 doesnât 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. âIt is imperative that the calligrapher and developer understand each other,â emphasised Zeeshan. âAbbu understands programming too now, so he can offer a different solution when confronted with tech limitations.â Working with his parent comes with its own challenges, of course. âSometimes, Zeeshan would say, This letter isnât looking nice,â Nasrullah said with a chuckle. âAnd Iâd get huffy and say, Are you the calligrapher?â
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 â in naskh or nastaÊżlÄ«q â on one computer, it wonât appear as a string of garbled symbols in another. But technological advances donât automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages. Nemeth notes that the proliferation of easy-to-use design software doesnât eliminate the need for script-specific expertise. âDesigners who are not willing or able to invest the years of learning and research necessary to master a foreign script,â he says, âare led to believe that their tools and some superficial âborrowingâ of design elements are sufficient for successful design.â
Read the whole article.Â
I love explaining Brabants dialect to non natives
please explain Brabants to me, a non-native
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
i hate languages
Jonathan Stallingâs 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, âæ©äžć„œâ which is Simplified Chinse for  âgood morning,â followed by a line of English text that reads, âgood morning,â followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, âgĆ© dĂ© mĂ o nĂng.â Then a line of Chinese characters which is read phonically the same as the above pinyin (I couldnât 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, âEven alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.â End image ID.]
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Such a cute comic! <3
I like the implication that the Chinese have mastered every human language and are only confounded by the speech of the undead.