Languages! Are! Weird!

(I presume that you're referring to "str" as found at the start of "strong" or "straight"; if not, then feel free to disregard this post. ^^; )

I don't think that I have any problem with pronouncing "str", while "sdr" and "sjr" seem to be a little more difficult for me, the latter especially. Thus I imagine that it is a dialectal effect, indeed.

I don't recall encountering the pronunciation "schr", but of course it may simply be uncommon in my quarter of the world, or I may simply be forgetful of such encounters at the moment—but where did you get the information that it's particularly common?

edited 14th Jun '14 5:27:28 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

A variety of sites when looking up TR->CHR and DR->JR. It seems less common than the others.

Found a pronunciation video talking about this. One of the comments even talks about how they (sometimes) say SJR.

I don't think she talks about 'SCHR' but if I had a guess, it's someone pronouncing it like 's-trength'

edited 14th Jun '14 5:48:29 PM by Blackcoldren

Ah, after watching that video, I do at least somewhat see what they're talking about with regards to the "chr" sound. For myself, I don't think that I find that happening with "str", but that it can with "tr" alone, at the least when it appears at the start of a word (as in the example that they give, "try").

(It occurs to me that the effect may well simply be more apparent to non-native listeners, who might be less accustomed to listening to English, and thus not have the mental shortcuts that a native listener likely has to more accurately parse the intended sound from such slips in pronunciation.)

So I accidentally stumbled into some 'history' of one of my fictional alphabets. I have two sets of vowels— one with 5 letters (Ii, Ee, Aa, Oo, Uu), one with 6 (Ii, Ee, Aa, Ɑɑ, Oo, Uu). The I, O, and U are the same in both sets, but the E-1 letter is replaced with E-2/A-2 and the A-1 letter is bumped over to Ɑ-2. I noticed that A-2 and E-2, when ligatured (Æ), look like an altered E-1, so... that's how the switch happened. Except backwards.

edited 14th Jun '14 8:21:33 PM by Blueeyedrat

Here is why I love the Indo-European languages. The Veda scriptures are the oldest Hindu texts in existence, traditionally attributed to Brahma himself. Their names come from the Sanskrit word "veda", which means "knowledge". Meanwhile, Swedish has the verb "att veta", which means "to know". (Bonus points if you, while reading this, also noticed the similarties between the words "scripture" and "Sanskrit". Sweden also has the words "skrift" (scripture) and "sann" (true). Although Wikipedia claims that Sanskrit means "refined language", so it's not a 100% match.)

edited 15th Jun '14 6:19:41 PM by Druplesnubb

I'm trying to learn Russian right now. Very confusing for me.

So while looking at other Germanic languages I noticed that English doesn't have an 'er' sound to make plurals. While German can say 'Männer' and Swedish can say 'gudar', English can't say 'doorer' or somesuch.

So I started looking for when it disappeared in English; and apparently it didn't.

The plural of child is children formerly childre or childer. For whatever reason time seems to have slapped an N onto the ending. The now -ren ending is sometimes used for jokes such as 'kidren'.

edit: Said 'use' instead of 'have'

edited 18th Jun '14 12:00:15 AM by Blackcoldren

German plurals are a good deal more complicated than that, but -er is one of the endings that can form a plural, yes.

As far as I can tell, Old English and Old Norse both had several ways to form plurals, which were all kind of "unified" into one: -[e]s in English and -er in Norse.

I implied that there are other ways to make plurals. I was just wondering where the 'er' method went in English.

Speaking of Germanic languages I haven't worked on my German for about a week, should get to that in the morning...

Hmm, Duolingo has fixed a lot of it's old bugs. Now I can actually use contractions and y'all, and not speak like I'm some Martian.

edited 18th Jun '14 4:04:30 AM by Blackcoldren

So I found a non-obnoxious way to explain why I make certain changes; footnotes. Anyways, I was bored again and decided to screw around with English again. Being as lazy as I am I just copied the back of a game box sitting next to me.

"Dark Soles^note I find 'ou' to be clunky., Prepare Too^note They used to be one word and are still pronounced the same, there's already confusion, giving them the same spelling won't change much. Die Frum ðe makers av^note  not pretty but a more obvious pronunciation than 'of' Demunś^note The apostrophe is such an annoying thing, why not just add an S with a mark over it for possesives? Soles"

"Tens^note Etymologically correct and more phonetic. dunjunkraling^note dungeon's spelling is all English's fault, it was 'donjon'. This spelling's closer.^note crawl changed to both show relation to Old Norse 'krafle' and to better fit in with a 'more Germanic' spelling system., feresum^note Two archaic spellings that make more sense then their current ones. enemy inkownters^note  This word's been in English for a very long time; so why not change it's spelling to reflect this?, & growndbreaking^note grownd is an archaic spelling that IMO looks better, and while I think 'ea' looks silly, 'brekeing' looked worse. anline fetures^note Better looking archaic spelling."

"Inkredibel^note Changed for the same reason as Encounters. And I find it absurd we spell the 'uhl' sound like it should be pronounced 'lay' chæleng^note  Old French Chalenge with an æ, and removed final e because otherwise it'd be read as 'chæleenj' provides en æbsolute fowndation av achevement ænd reword^note  When was the last time you said 'ward'?."

edited 22nd Jun '14 5:46:20 AM by Blackcoldren

As for the discussion about the translations of Jabberwocky, there are around twelve translations into Polish, and the one given on Wikipedia is not even the one used in "Through the Looking Glass"!

The Polish word used as the equivalent of "outgrabe" in the translation used in TTLG is funny in itself, and onomatopoeic, so I often use it when I'm absolutely tired stupid.

So, how y'all doing? I ran into a forum over on Omniglot called An English Spelling Reform That Doesn't Suck He listed among other things this:

A /æ/ /ə/

Á /eɪ/

À /ɑː/

E /ɛ/ /ə/

É /iː/ /i/

I /ɪ/

Í /aɪ/

O /o/

Ò /ɔː/

U /u/ /ʊ/

Ú /ju/

Y /iː/ /i/

Personally I think it's a bit too many accents. To look quite right. I tried to write like they specified with the difference that I didn't like leaving those acute vowels on the ends of words; so I replaced them on the ends. Hence Day = Dey rather than Dá. Here's the Derby Ram's start:

"Az Í wàz goin' ta Derby, 'twàz àn a màrket dey, Í met the fínest ram, sirs, that ever wàz fed upàn hey."

I tried to write in an accent that used the most common (or older if tied) sound. Hence 'wàz' and not 'waz'. It's not too ugly in my opinion. Anyone else?

Saw this on Da Netz today. Its written in German Sütterlin script. Never saw anything like it before in my life. It look so cool

Hmh, I can read some of that.

I think there's a rice soup with corn on the first page and below that another soup with dumplings. Both made with lemon and cinnamon, surprisingly.

edited 10th Aug '14 3:46:44 PM by Catfish42

Oh wow, thats really cool that you can read that, it looks so poetic. Its funny to think that its just an old recipe

I agree it's very nice looking writing, ornate but efficient.

The Z's stand out to me^note  and by extension the lemon and cinnamon - Zimt and Zucker, the cursive I learned had the lowercase ones just like that. A couple others are familiar too, the b or the f, but most are pretty weird, uppercase in particular.

edited 10th Aug '14 4:18:38 PM by Catfish42

Looks very nice. Us that looks like Vs, and long S capitals I was not expecting. :p I have trouble with English cursive so I don't think I'd ever be able to read this.

Swelling up cinnamon in lemon skin sounds interessting The first page are all soups with different things added to them ( rice, semolina balls etc.)

I'm surprised I can actually read that stuff if I concentrate...but if someone wrote like that along with a bad handwriting, no way.

Why is it that, in English at least, the names of biological species are not treated as proper names, i.e. we write "human" instead of "Human"? I have always been stumped on figuring out why the fantasy/sci-fi genres more often than not write out species names as proper names, whether or not the species in question are sapient creatures, when IRL this is apparently considered "wrong".

This a cross-post from here, after I've been directed to this thread as a proper place for a lengthy discussion of this question. Follow-up posts are here, here, and here.

Catfish, "Zucker" means sugar, not lemon. Lemon is "Zitron".

"Zitrone" actually...

Allow me to say: Deeeeerp.

@ Marq, I think the logic is at, say the point of Mass Effect, that their species (or a large part of it) is so unified as to count as a single faction.

IE: humans come from Earth, Humans are making deals with aliens.

Except that Mass Effect is one of the few instances where species names aren't capitalised.

For example, it's turian, not Turian.