Languages! Are! Weird!

My parents are going to Italy for vacation tomorrow. I'm surprised both learned the language from multiple books in the span of a month. Being fluent in French probably helped.

Probably, but they're still good. Learning a language properly takes some effort. Then again, I was never in a hurry and learned English, among others, from The Secret of Monkey Island. Also by translating fanfiction (really good exercise, if you don't hurry it and really think about what you're doing).

Holy shit. Long ago, I came up with a joke character called "Death Fish, Master of Finjitsu" (a mondegreen from a hip-hop song by one of the Wu Tang guys, where I misheard "vengeance" as "finjitsu").

Turns out, in Japanese he can have a Punny Name pronounced like "puppet", but written with the first kanji of "ninja" and the kanji for "fish": "忍魚".

Apparently, if you say something like "I broke my leg" in certain languages, it may cause some people to ask you "But why would you do that?"

I remember learning this when we were going over our health unit in Spanish class; saying that someone did something usually conveys that they did it intentionally^note It's pretty similar in English as well, come to think of it. If you accuse someone of breaking something, they're almost certainly going to reply "It was an accident!", so if you're referring to something that happened by accident, it may be phrased in a way that doesn't make it sound like anyone was actually doing the action. For instance, "My leg broke".

Ambiguous Syntax is pretty interesting sometimes.

Well, it's sort of the case with Polish. But not exactly. Thing is, we've got more in the way of pronouns. To wit:

Złamałam nogę - no pronoun, conjugation marks first person (feminine, but that's immaterial); that's how most of us would say it in most situations

Złamałam sobie nogę - reflexive pronoun, it's correct and understandable, although usually used with more context

Złamałam moją/swoją nogę - weird; unless you said "złamałam nogę" (or "złamałem", in your case) and someone asked "czyją?" (Whose leg?) - then you can answer "moją" (mine) or "swoją"; but normally no one talks like that.

And yes, jokes along the lines of "I broke a leg. Oh, I'm sorry. That's all right, it wasn't mine." exist. I'm not saying they're very funny, but they exist.

How cool! I think it's interesting to learn about the little nuances of the ways languages work - and it's always fun to learn what kinds of wordplay exist in the language, too.

Yup. It definitely is

I'm not sure if this fits, but it's annoying how Duolingo doesn't actually tell you the differences between similar-sounding Hindi letters. I had to go to another website (learnsanskrit.org) just to know the difference between च, छ, and ज (ca, cha, and ja) since there's no guide on how to actually say them.

In My Language, That Sounds Like... can be rife with hilarity, but one of my favorites is that the word for "brother" in several Slavic languages (such as Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, and Slovak) is "brat".

It's pronounced more like "brot"^note Which, incidentally, is German for "bread", but still. Gives "Beat on the Brat" a new meaning.

<obligatory joke> Well, mine is a brat.

Do you pronounce the “h” in “Neanderthal” or not?

I pronounce a "th" sound, of that's what you mean?

Also can someone who speaks Arabic fluently tell me the difference between the letter sin and the letter sad (which I can't post here because Arabic script isn't supported). They both sound exactly the same to me, but every resource is like "no, they're different I prommy". Arrrrrrgh.

Edit: apparently I can. These two. What's the difference between س and ‎ص?‎

Edited by trashconverters on Nov 13th 2023 at 12:36:00 AM

Yeah, that one.

I don't, but my language doesn't have the "th" sound and it's surprisingly difficult for us to pronounce (or remember it should be pronounced differently than "t").

Not related, but does anyone here know Vietnamese, or is a Vietnamese?

x7: I have no idea how do you pronounce "brot", but the Germans certainly don't pronounce it like Slavics pronounce "brat".

Yeah, it's really not similar. Like, the way you prounounce English "Brat" i.e. a lil kid is way closer than German "Brot".

Edited by Adannor on Jan 18th 2024 at 1:22:27 PM

Looking back on it, I'm not really sure why I didn't say "like the first syllable of bratwurst".

So do you pronounce the “Y” in “wyvern” as “I” or like in “sit”?

In Polish? "Y" sounds more like the "i" in "sit". Definitely not like the English "y".

I was learning to count in my Japanese course tonight. Sometimes you change the prefix or suffix when counting to higher numbers. It's so confusing.

Almost a year learning portuguese little by little using the Duolingo app, while also learning some Galician by accident (technically the roots of Portuguese, Galician and Spanish are the same), at some point I want to do something big in Spain that allows me to say a speech that would involve to add some paragraphs in Basque, Catalan and Galician just to blow the minds of the Castilians...

As you read, my English is not so good (I am Mexican by the way) and, regarding, Japanese, yes, counting is hard... specially when moving to the thousands...

Edited by Travsam on Feb 13th 2024 at 9:09:47 PM

IIRC Japanese also counts things differently depending on the physical shape of the counted object?

Can confirm. I speak some Japanese and counters are an absolute pain in the ass. It's to do with the shape and whether or not it's sentient, too. Some things have unique counters, like people (which is fair enough), but it makes it really hard to remember how to count sometimes.

Then again, the fact that the pronunciation of the number itself changes depending on what you're counting and the context you're using the number in is worse.

For example, the number 1 can be said as "Hito", "I", "Ichi", or "Itsu", and it's usually combined with another syllable or two, like "Hitotsu" (a single thing), "Hitori" (a single person), "Ichigatsu" (the month of January, with "gatsu" being "month")...

Kanji pretty much all having at least two readings makes it a frustrating language, but it's still really interesting to me.

Also, the kanji with the most readings is 生 (means various things like "life", "genuine"/"pure", "birth", etc) with 17 different possible readings depending on how it's used. So that's neat.

Edited by Zazie122 on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:46:14 AM