#culmaer

[geschiedenis-en-talen]

gelukkig is happy. blij is glad, I think. at least that's how I'd translate them from Afrikaans

Mh I guess but I don’t feel like they’re very good translations. I often see “happy” used where I’d use “blij” in Dutch, and it does have more of like a short term meaning to me. But I’m not a native speaker so that might not be accurate. I also feel like glad and happy are more interchangeable than gelukkig and blij, but again that might be me as a non-native speaker.

[sprachgefuehle]

✌ : favourite proverb/saying from your language

Hmm, das ist eine schwierige Frage, weil ich finde, dass es im Deutschen viele tolle Sprichwörter gibt. Ein schönes Beispiel ist "Auch ein blindes Huhn findet mal ein Korn." Das sagt man, wenn jemand, der inkompetent ist, plötzlich doch mal etwas schafft. Ich mag es, weil man meistens richtig schön gehässig ist, wenn man es benutzt.

[polysprachig]

hi Maria ! was really nice to see you pop up in my notes ! I've actually been thinking about you these last few weeks : couldn't quite remember whether you had been teaching in Byelarus or Ukraine, and given Current Events, wondered if you were still there or had moved on ? in any event, hope you've been well〜

Thank you for your kind message. These are dark days for Ukraine, Europe and the world at large, and I am glad that you thought to reached out.

I left Belarus in 2018 (thinking I would work abroad again in Japan in 2020, which didn't happen), and have been teaching online ever since. Many of my students are/have been Russian-speakers from Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and other FSU countries, although the first group ceased taking lessons entirely following the 2020 election in Belarus and ensuing unrest. I am extremely worried for everyone's safety and well-being, whether they are currently in their home countries or have emigrated to other cities throughout Europe and the US.

My non-Belarusian friends and foreign colleagues left Minsk for Kiev and other cities following the 2020 Belarusian election. Those that moved to Ukraine moved out of Kiev in the days leading up to the bombardment, but I am waiting for information about their health/safety following how widespread the attacks have been in the last 24 or so hours, as some of them may have only travelled as far as western Ukraine.

To everyone in or from the areas affected by this madness, please try to seek shelter, contact your loved ones and stay alert.

[sonechkaandthedynamos]

1, 7

1. what is a sound that you can’t make?

i googled the phonology of the czech language for fun and i don’t understand what “ř” is.

7. name a grammar point that seemed really hard to you at first but is now second nature?

the subjunctive mood in spanish

thank you for the questions :)

[somecunttookmyurl]

I was born in 1993, but we didn't have internet until, like, grade 9 (2008) I think ? by which time phones had gprs, so Connectivity rather happened all at once. MXit (a mobile IM) was already a thing though, but thankfully you added people with their mobile number, effectively limiting it to irl fiends

my dad was big into computers so we had enough parts in our house at any one time to build like 12 of them but that also meant we got internet at home super early

tbh though even though most people (here) had internet by the mid-00s you still only really used it for irl friends

[rudjedet]

culmaer replied to your post: culmaer replied to your post: I really liked that...

ooooh, I’m anxious to see the Dutch version !! but will try to avoid it until I finalise the Afrikaans text

Nah don’t worry I’ll wait until you post the Afrikaans :)

[honeyandelixir]

hi ! I really love the poetry on your blog, and I hope you don't mind me asking where you source them ? I'd specifically like to quote some of the Pashto landay in a uni paper and I'm not sure how to reference it

Hi, thank you. Thats kind.

I have a Pashto landay book and saved poems in my notebooks.

The book you can check here

[dedalvs]

hi DJP ! I'm trying to work on a font for my conscript (largely from the guidelines in your book). however it's RTL ; I'll probably map the base glyphs onto Hebrew, but is there anything in particular one needs to look out for when adding contextual ligatures ?

Ugh… >.< To answer your question, you shouldn’t have to do anything special for your ligatures at all, if the RTL part of it works right. That’s a HUUUUUUUUUUUGE “if”, though. If you can manage to map every single one of your characters to a Hebrew Unicode point, that may work (or, to be accurate, it should work anywhere Hebrew correctly renders as RTL rather than LTR), but I have never tried it personally, so the best I can tell you is that it should work. Honestly, it’s been so long since I tried RTL that things may be better now. I don’t expect them to be better, but they may be. I should try out a toy script just to see some time, but there’s no way I’m going all in for a script I care about unless I know exactly how it’s going to behave. My usual advice is to design the glyphs as RTL then flip them all and generate a LTR font—then mirror any text whenever you’re making anything public-facing. It’s convoluted and silly, but it honestly seems better than relying on applications correctly implementing RTL.

Again, that’s based on my experience from a while back; haven’t tried it recently. If you give it a go, let me know how it goes. If it only works mapping things to Hebrew or Arabic Unicode points, that’s a bandaid fix that I’m personally not satisfied with, but it will be good to know. Best of luck!