Languages! Are! Weird!

Huh. I guess the adjectival form for locations is just a case of a mistake that become so widespread it's now the colloquial norm, despite being proscribed by literary rules.

If the company is owned primarily by Portuguese people, it is a Portuguese company, and may or may not be Portugal based.

That is true. Forgot to add that part.

If said company is not based in Portugal, but is owned primarily by Portuguese people, then 'Portuguese-owned' would be the more appropriate term, correct?

edited 9th May '16 10:10:53 AM by Quag15

I believe so. And you can omit 'owned', as that is the default read of 'Portuguese company'.

日本語はとても難しい言語です。

そうですね、漢字が多いから。

Actually I'm surprised that Japan didn't try to reform their language the way Korea did. Hangul is very easy to learn (although it doesn't sound as good). Japan should've done something similar while they shut themselves in under Sakoku Law.

Handwritten Kanji (the skill) is actually being rendered obsolete with the advent of digital input and IM Es. They probably need to do something about that.

edited 16th May '16 1:37:54 AM by FlowingCotton

Bueno, yo hablo español. Aquí en México y Lationoamerica se habla el español (y en otros lugares la gente habla el portugues), gracias a que unos tipos con armadura no tenían nada mejor que hacer que venir y reclamar tierra del continente americano. Por supuesto, el idioma se quedo y desde entonces hablamos un bonito idioma llamado español, el cual se caracteriza por tener una gran cantidad tiempos gramaticales para una sola palabra. De hecho, tenemos diez tiempos gramaticales que debemos aprender para describir cada verbo. Siiiiii, que divertido, yuju.

Translation:
Well, I speak spanish. Here in Mexico and Latin America we speak spanish (and in other places people speaks portuguese), thanks to a bunch of guy with armor who didn't have anything better to do than coming here to conquer territory from the American continent. Of course, we kept the language and since when we speak a beautiful idiom called spanish, which it is characterized by having a lot of tenses for a single word. In fact, we have ten grammatical tenses than we must learn to describe every single verb. Yaaaay, so much fun, yippie.

edited 21st May '16 10:53:23 PM by ClownToy

Would "augmentee" be a valid neologism to describe someone who has been augmented, e.g. via cybernetic prosthetics or genengineered organ implants?

the -ee refers to someone that has had an act done to them. Augmentee would only apply to discussions of medical procedures. For a person who has been augmented, augmented is the correct word.

But "augmented" doesn't work as a noun, unlike "augmentee".

Many adjectives are usable as nouns in English. For example the reds.

edited 23rd May '16 6:06:30 PM by war877

Yes, but AFAIK an adjective made from the past tense of a verb cannot be used as a countable noun (i.e. "An augmented will arrive." and "Some augmenteds will arrive." are both grammatically wrong).

edited 24th May '16 2:58:48 AM by MarqFJA

If a noun were to be formed from the adjective based on the past tense of a verb, I think the plural would be the same as the singular in most cases.

Then please explain to me why such words as infectee, abductee, and others like them here exist.

Those words also exist. But again, they only make sense when talking about a procedure. One might call a swarm of zombies the infected. They would not call a swarm of zombies the infectees.

"The infected" acts as a non-countable collective noun here. I'm looking for a countable noun. "Cattle" vs. "cow", you know?

edited 25th May '16 12:51:03 AM by MarqFJA

That's not what countable means. Uncountable means that you cannot put a number on it. "Give me seven water." "Seven infected are coming our way."

I really wish Nynorsk (one of Norway's two written languages) education in greater part taught when to use the acute accent. It's rare and really only appears for a certain ó sound, but I keep getting into situations where I don't know the correct usage. : /

My hobby of writing notes in Anglo-Saxon runes has evolved into an absurd cursive barely resembling what I started with. I spent the last hour figuring out where half my letters even come from.

At some point a younger futhark 'm', the Ypsilon, the Tironian et, and a calendar rune (Tvimaður, which I'm using for 'z') made their way into my alphabet. 'A' and 'O' swapped sounds, and an actual orthography kinda showed up. Tuesday is Tgwsdag, hail is hagl, bow is bág, chalk is cea(l)ch, etc.

edited 27th May '16 3:44:34 PM by Blackcoldren

That is a cool story. I wouldn't mind seeing a writing sample.

It looks cool too.

edited 27th May '16 5:32:40 PM by war877

Normally I write it on line paper in short blocks but since I'm too lazy to scan anything, have the more cursive form on a white page.

The text is just the first thing that came to mind. "For ðe gód ching & lord; Gad iz wiþ gew." 'For the good king and lord; God is with you"

A letter on its own says its name, hence 'the' only being the letter 'dhe', 'is' is a bindrune, & king is written without any vowels.

Edit: I tried scribbling the standard form, didn't really work well◊

edited 27th May '16 6:17:46 PM by Blackcoldren

You guys want a weird language? Try Albanian.

Oooh, you mean "shqip"? Yep, that one's plenty weird. Along with Hungarian.

Anyway, is "dungeon" one of those words from the time when English language beat French silly and stole a lot of vocabulary from it? It kinda makes sense if you consider that the French word "donjon" means the main tower of a castle and having unruly princesses locked in a tower is one of those things everyone's familiar with...

Looks like it, yeah

Note: as with anything, there are arguments if some of the languages are even part of the Finno-Ugric family. The term was sometimes used for Uralic languages in general.

edited 19th Jun '16 9:35:13 AM by TerminusEst