Languages! Are! Weird!

It's probably because "extranjero/a" describes someone from another country while "foráneo/a" and "forastero/a" describe things or people from another place like a town, a city, a village, etc.

Although it sounds weird and most people use other words to mean the same, la Real Academia Española accepts the term so it's ok if someone uses it.

Also, while "forastero/a" does mean someone from another place it's not that used outside of cowboy movies. It would be like saying "outlaw" instead of "criminal".

edited 7th Jan '16 1:07:48 PM by DeisTheAlcano

Yeah, pretty sure that's the word I mean. And I apologize, accent mark is a lot better way of putting it.

Still, I've picked up so many idioms that aren't intuitive to me just from watching Mexican programs that I figured this might be another one of those.

edit:Not to mention I remember Místico's "defending Mexico City" angle, and me not understanding what he was defending it from. I thought maybe this might be another indicator of some city/state divide I don't know about.

edit 2Thank you.

edited 7th Jan '16 1:24:44 PM by IndirectActiveTransport

In Irish, when am I supposed to use Na and when am I supposed to use An in a sentence. I keep getting confused to which "the" to use and when.

For example, if I want to put "the boy" in a sentence, when do I say "Na buachaill" and when do I say "An buachaill"?

edited 10th Jan '16 7:25:05 PM by trashconverters

Stand up against pinkwashing, don't fall for propoganda

How do you pronounce the suffixes -roth, -rath, -rode, -reuth, and -rade that are used in German toponymy?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1S7xvuwNjqd

Here the examples from Wikipedia.

... So "th" is pronounced like "t"? What's the point of the diphthong, then?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I'm not sure, I guess it signals that the vowel is drawn out.

This is just a guess, but maybe from not having formed a standard orthography/Early New High German sometimes adding extra consonants when places were getting their names? (Like why it's 'Neanderthal' and not 'Neandertal' or maybe someone's last name being 'Seedorff' rather than 'Seedorf')

EDIT: Well, first one only applies for English.

edited 12th Jan '16 12:08:18 PM by CorvusAtrox

"life is just a series of increasingly canon-eluding ao3 tags" ~ everydunsparce "Keep your hellfruit away from me, tempter" ~ also Every

trashconverters- As far as I know "na" is the plural form for "an". So for example, "the boy is happy" translates to "Tá athas ar an buachaill," whereas "the boys are happy," would be "Tá athas ar na buachaillí" I'm not 100% certain about this but it sounds right to me.

I prefer books to people.

Thanks!

Stand up against pinkwashing, don't fall for propoganda

Can someone explain the concept of linguistic drift to me? The Wikipedia article seems to have been written a bit too technically for a layman with absolutely no background in linguistic studies like me; just because I can speak, read, and write English as good as if not better than the average native speaker does not mean I am an expert linguist when it comes to said language! XD

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

It just means the change in a language over time. Hence, drifting. Say some new way to ask questions shows up in English and it actually gets popular, stops being 'slang' and becomes the norm; well that's linguistic drift.

Cyclic drift is a language changing to from complex to simple grammar back and forth, slowly over a long time. An example would be Old English, which had gendered nouns, case systems, and other such things. This utterly collapsed in Middle English. Since then English has largely become more and more analytic. At some point in the far future this system too will collapse and give rise to an other.

Not dead, just feeling like it.

I don't understand the whole noun declension system that goes on in languages like Russian. I think English used to have a system like it too. It makes Russian a lot harder for me to learn.

A lot of PIE languages have similar systems. I myself have never actually looked into Russian but a quick look at Google and Wikipedia shows that it seems to have the standard 5~7 declensions common in PIE languages. Declensions on the whole aren't that hard to understand, they're simply a word changing in one of a few specific ways to match the case of the word. The easiest way to overcome this is to learn what words use what declension group, and how each group responds to plurality and case.

This is a direct quote from Wikipedia explaining the various cases PIE languages tend to follow, note that Russian does not follow all of them;

"The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:

The nominative case indicates the subject of a finite verb: We went to the store.

The accusative case indicates the direct object of a verb: The clerk remembered us.

The dative case indicates the indirect object of a verb: The clerk gave a discount to us.

The ablative case indicates movement from something, or cause: The victim went from us to see the doctor. and He was unhappy because of depression.

The genitive case, which roughly corresponds to English's possessive case and preposition of, indicates the possessor of another noun: John's book was on the table. and The pages of the book turned yellow.

The vocative case indicates an addressee: John, are you all right? or simply Hello, John!

The locative case indicates a location: We live in China.

The instrumental case indicates an object used in performing an action: We wiped the floor with a mop. and Written by hand."

edited 12th Feb '16 1:23:12 PM by Blackcoldren

Not dead, just feeling like it.

Okay, since I talked about lucha libre last time, here is a question I probably should have lead with but didn't think to ask until today.

According to my dictionary, both Tercero and Tercio mean "third" and "trio" means the same thing it does in English. I see the word tercera on pretty much every show, for obvious reasons and see "trio" a lot in reference to the fact most of the matches are three on three, but the match type itself seems to be called tercia, which doesn't make sense to me.

The first time I saw tercia used to describe a lucha libre trios match was in the English language section of a website, so was that mistranslated? If not, why are tercera and tercia used in such different contexts?

Do the matches have three periods? Because it could mean that each period is a third of the total match (tercio/a is 1/3 and tercero/a is 3rd, just in case). If they don't, then you got me 'cause I don't know what it could mean.

Oh, third as in progression and third as in fraction.

Yes, most of the matches are best out of three and while one team could win in two straight falls, that almost never happens. Of course this applies whether its one on one, two on two or three on three...I think I'm just going to call three on three trios for now. But thanks, that still clears up a lot.

I first saw the difference for the World Wrestling League, which is Puerto Rican based, so the three on three two out of three is probably as weird to them as it is to most English speaking fans but in explaining to fans in the native language just confused this English speaker who was used to the format. The only other user on this site I know watched the promotion doesn't speak Spanish either so neither of us was in a position to correct the other.

Odd question: is there any relation between the verb "to learn", the noun "lore" and the compound adjective "lorn"? Because funnily enough, the three words sound like forms of an irregular verb...

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Wiktionary says origins of 'lore' comes from Old English lār, which is something like a teaching, lesson, or council. Though that comes from læran (teach) rather than leornian (learn), it sounds like

The lorn I see there is listed as a past participle of lese, which is more to lose or forsake.

So, first two are sorta related and if I've got the last one right, it doesn't seem to be related?

edited 7th Mar '16 1:36:29 PM by CorvusAtrox

"life is just a series of increasingly canon-eluding ao3 tags" ~ everydunsparce "Keep your hellfruit away from me, tempter" ~ also Every

Ah so it does share a common root with the German word "Lehre" - lore, like in English most words about learning derive from this:

Lehre - lore
Lehren- teachings
lehren- to teach
lernen- to learn
according to Wictonary "lorn" comes from the Old-English "forleosan", a word that is pronounced,conjugated and looks like the German word "vorlesen"(to read to someone, to hold a lecture(Lecture-> Vorlesung) and means "to lose".

Then I remembered that the German "auflesen" means "to gather", it comes from the Proto-Germanic "lesaną" also meaning "to gather". It forms a pair with the Proto-Germanic "fraleusaną" which means "to lose".

tl;dr:

So my theory is that the Old-Englisch "forleosan" is a compound-word of "for-" and "lese" which can be understood as "loosing what was gathered". While "lesen" means "to read" in Modern German it also meant "to gather " in Middle High German.

edited 7th Mar '16 2:40:38 PM by Kiefen

I think that's a false cognate. Dropping the fra from 'fraleusaną' results in 'leusaną,' not 'lesaną.' And the latter apparently became 'lease' in English with the aforementioned meaning of 'to gather' (though this is my first time hearing it can be used like that, so dunno)

And this page links 'forleosan' with 'verlieren', not 'vorlesen'

"life is just a series of increasingly canon-eluding ao3 tags" ~ everydunsparce "Keep your hellfruit away from me, tempter" ~ also Every

Here is an old question of mine that I never got a conclusive answer for, and which I hope to receive as I revive the topic now. Quoting from the old post...

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.

edited 30th Mar '16 2:35:27 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Capitalization is always about making things seem important. Or "showing the proper respect" to things. This may be why common names for species are never capitalized, but scientific names are always capitalized. The former is a type of thing. The latter is a unique group.

Oh wait. Genus names are always capitalized, but species names are never capitalized.

edited 30th Mar '16 3:09:52 PM by war877

That logic seems flawed to me. What makes humans as a group not unique, compared to non-toponymic ethnicities^note That is, ethnicities that are not primarily defined by origin from a particular location (though they can be strongly associated with particular locations due to prolonged inhabitation), e.g. Celts and Jews.?

Yes, that is true, but scientific names have no real bearing on the topic. The word human is associated with the species' generic name, while the word lion is associated with that species' specific name, and yet both common names are uncapitalized.

Hmmm... Here's a related question that popped into my head: What would be required to "promote" the word human from a common name to a proper name?

edited 30th Mar '16 3:19:28 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I'm sure it is flawed thinking, however it is my best guess for how this thinking goes. A type of thing is a trait, like hair colour, species, or height. A Type of thing is a designation of honour, like a nation, title, or personal name.

Possible answer: Human is reinterpreted as a single people, with one culture.

edited 30th Mar '16 3:27:38 PM by war877