Languages! Are! Weird!

The latter. The former is used to mean "across the whole system", such as in medicine when it signifies that a physical disease/disorder affects the whole body rather than just be localized to an organ or specific region of said body.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I've been learning Ukrainian over the past few months and I'm sometimes kinda surprised by just how many cognates there are between English and Ukrainian.

Oddly, sometimes Ukrainian is easier than German for me. German's rules for sentence structure can be very difficult to remember.

Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.

I watched an interesting video about "ghost words", basically words that end up in the dictionary without actually being ever used, usually by accident - my favorites were "Dord" (meant to be "D or d", as an abbreviation for density) and "phantomnation" (which did appear in a translation of Homer once, but only because the translator had an idiosyncrasy about inventing compound words unnecessarily - it should have been "phantom nation"). I would say Phantomnation would be a Good Name For A Rock Band, but Google says it already is.

Edited by MikeK on May 22nd 2023 at 11:12:36 AM

I tend to use words that fell out of common use in Polish, mostly because my parents or grandparents use them. For example, on my Twitch channel you can buy out a "Pepega" emote that pops out in the middle of the screen.

But, it's a visual pun: it has a sneaker in its mouth, and back in the day, those were called "pepegi" (sing. pepeg), from the acronym PPG (Państwowy Przemysł Gumowy - National Rubber Industry), the company that made soles for them pre-War.

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

Thanks, Marq FJA! I really got confused here.

Cognates are a funny thing, aren't they? I'm subscribing to a learn-Spanish-magazine (because reading in Spanish is a good brain workout and actual books in Spanish are hard to come by) and find myself comparing words to English ones a lot.

ETA: About words going out of use in Polish, it's a funny thing, too - when was the last time you heard someone talk about a "saturator" (a device for making sparkling water at home)? Even though you can buy them. Or brand names becoming common names - "rower" is a bicycle, but not everyone knows it comes from a company name. If someone refers to their car as "Rover", they're probably being funny (or think they are; Rover isn't a popular make in Poland anyway).

Edited by Veanne on May 24th 2023 at 7:24:05 PM

I was thinking about about the conversation about the Oxford comma that started in another thread, and I thought of a situation where opting not to use it can make a sentence clearer — when a list of people starts with "I" or "me" followed by a single name. E.g. taking out the comma in "I, Alice, and Bob went to the park" removes the ambiguity about whether or not Alice is the person speaking.

Edited by Bluethorn on Jun 7th 2023 at 1:43:56 AM

A great Mascot Mook.

...In German it is considered bad manners to not call oneself last in such a summation so I never had that issue

"Der Esel nennt sich immer zuerst" - "The donkey always names itself first."

Edited by Kiefen on Jun 7th 2023 at 12:00:32 PM

Quick question- how bad of a grammar flaw is using the wrong gendered article for an inanimate object in languages with gendered nouns? What would it be equivalent to in English?

Edited by Electrite on Jun 7th 2023 at 6:03:00 AM

fun fact: pro tip: breaking news: life hack: i can't find a good signature

In German there are a few words which change meanings depending on the gender, most notably is "Band" which has a different meaning for each:

• Das Band (neuter) - the ribbon
• Der Band (mask.) - the (book) volume
• Die Band (fem.) - the (music) band, pronounced as in English since it's an anglicism

Then there is "See"

• Die See - the sea
• Der See - the lake

But these are just a few edge cases, as long as you stay consistent and use the correct case endings for the other words which relate to the misgendered noun it would remain coherent.

Edited by Kiefen on Jun 7th 2023 at 12:40:40 PM

Hey, not only we have the same "rule" in Spanish, but the same idiom as well (El burro por delante).

The whole Oxford comma is a bit confusing to me. I always use it in case of ambiguity. But in Spanish is actually outright stated that this is incorrect since it is implied that the "and" will work as a comma anyway.

Edited by ElBuenCuate on Jun 7th 2023 at 3:42:43 AM

Part of the reason why I always leave the Oxford comma in is because of sentences like:

"At the party I met Bob, a DJ, and a clown."^note Three separate people

"At the party I met Bob, a DJ and a clown."^note Wow - Bob sure is a talented guy!

Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.

Ah, a language with no articles is so convenient :)

As for Oxford comma - in Polish it would be an error, too. "And" is enough. Which makes "Bob sentences" ambiguous, admittedly.

Edited by Veanne on Jun 20th 2023 at 6:27:25 PM

x5

I'm not sure there is an equivalent in English, since it doesn't have gendered articles. The closest I can think of is using gendered pronouns. English usually only uses those for people (and sometimes animals, but only if it's known whether the animal is male or female). Using one on an inanimate object implies that the object is, in fact, alive. This is also why "It" Is Dehumanizing is a trope. Using the wrong gender pronoun on a human isn't so much a grammar flaw as it is a social faux pas, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Well, in Spanish, el guio is a guide (a guy who guides you through wilderness) and la guia is a guidebook (or a female guide). So sometimes grammatical gender does matter, semantics-wise. But I don't think this would be exactly the same thing in every language that has genders. Mind, "grammatical gender" is a bit misleading name for this phenomenon, because while Indoeuropean languages do tie it with the actual gender of whoever you're talking about (and assign seemingly at random to whatever you're talking about - there's no real reason for "a table" to be masculine and "a glass" to be feminine), other languages don't. Some differentiate things by shape.

Besides, this joke:

''Last time we were there, our guide fell into the chasm.

That's horrible!

Ah, it's been old and dog-eared anyway.''

is funny in English, funny in Polish if you don't translate it awkwardly, but needs to be translated in a specific way to be funny in Spanish. I can definitely imagine a language where it would make no sense at all.

As several of us may know, thongs are a type of skimpy underwear in the US, but in other places like Australia, it's their word for flip-flops. Makes the title of The Flamin' Thongs much funnier to Americans due to the Accidental Innuendo (though The Flamin' Flip-Flops sounds funny too).

Oh, I believe in yesterday

I just realized.

Is Newquay pronounced "nookie"?!

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

... you know, it might be.

Watching Shaun of the Dead made me think of this one.

Why is that? In America, we pronounce the letter “z” by itself, whereas in the United Kingdom, they call it “zed”?

I smell magic in the air. Or maybe barbecue.

Apparently, Kyrgyzstan is pronounced "kerg-uh-stahn". If it were up to me, I'd make that pronunciation more obvious in the spelling (Kergaston, perhaps?).

Oh, I believe in yesterday

I've always heard "keer-ghiz-stan"

ok boomer

Trying to learn Japanese. There's an "I" for both males and females.

Watched Ladybug and Cat Noir last night. Bryce Papenbrook needs to learn to roll his Rs.

I've been learning Spanish lately and three past tenses are too much :) Każdemu co jego ;) Then again, Spanish doesn't seem to have aspects (not in the way Polish does), so it needs more tenses to make up for this, but still.

In Kurdish, they have four possible grammatical numbers: singular, dual, paucal ("a few") and plural ("a lot"). This is believed to be a record for Indo European languages (the same macro-family that English belongs to.)

The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light, the realist sees two lights and the engineer sees three idiots.

@Demetrios Regarding zee and zed for "z", I believe that may have to do with French saying it as zed as well. Then again, aitch for "h" comes from the French name for the letter "h" (ache) too and that was kept in all versions of English as far as I'm aware...

You know how in Canada, the word "about" is stereotypically pronounced "aboot"? I wonder if that was because of the French? Because in French, ou is pronounced like how an English-speaker would pronounce oo? I remember hearing a person who spoke this way say "joosting" instead of "jousting" once, so...

As an American who knows nothing, this is total WMG.

Edited by HunterGr33n on Sep 18th 2023 at 7:51:21 AM

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