Languages! Are! Weird!

Your double negative confuses me. Is capitalization important? I believe to a degree yes, it has it's uses. Was capitalization important? Perhaps. I wasn't alive back then and wouldn't know. However I can say that as far as I'm aware the original English alphabet: The Futhorc has no capitalization.

Given that capitalization has a couple of different purposes in current English (and other languages) I would say that yes, it is important. It'll be important until most people stop using it, which probably isn't going to be for a while.

Sorry. That was a slip-up.

Yes. I meant that the person doesn't believe that capitalization is important anymore.

Your friend will be sorely disappointed then when everyone turns to him and tells him to start capitalizing things in reports and such.

Yeah, I always saw it as weird since I saw the person post that. Just because some rules in languages can carry over into others, that doesn't mean that all of them will. I don't know much about the Japanese language, but I certainly agree with you that capitalization has a place in today's society. It gives English a bit more structure.

Well, Japanese writing makes capitalization impossible, so it's no wonder they don't use it. It has its uses, to be sure, which is probably why it isn't going anywhere.

I grew up in a Tagalog speaking household and I never learned how to formally read or write it. This is important because there are things which I understand on a cultural level but can't explain very well technically.

For example:

• handsome: pogi. And it's gendered much like "handsome" and "beautiful" are in English. 'Maganda' is for women.
• very handsome (according to an article): mapaka-pogi. I've never heard anyone use this. Well, maybe news reporters.
• very handsome (according to real life): pogi-pogi. I've seen this in a few articles explaining differences between informal and standard Tagalog, but never used outright.

Thanks to the divide between standard and informal Tagalog, I've tried reading articles in Tagalog and get very little comprehension. It bothers me, but I'm not really surprised. Substantial articles in Tagalog are generally written in a subset of language which was never emphasized while I was learning.

I wonder how I'm going to fix that.

edited 8th Feb '14 2:38:34 AM by Leradny

Swedish used to have three grammatical genders; Masculine, Feminine and the gender neutral Neutrum. Eventually the Masculine and Feminine genders melted together into one gender called Reale. This means that Swedish has two genders, and both of them are gender neutral. In that long wall of text I posted some pages ago about Swedish, the "en" words are Reale while the "ett" words are Neutrum.

edited 8th Feb '14 8:52:03 AM by Druplesnubb

I think some Native American languages have grammatical gender based on the properties of the noun. I think I read that somewhere. So like, a belt is flat thin and long. A shirt is flat and big.

edited 8th Feb '14 9:01:12 AM by Bede

The original meaning of gender was simply "category"^note It comes from the same root as genre and genus and only within the last few decades has it taken on its current meaning of sex.

Swahili has eight "genders," for instance: people, trees/natural forces, groups, artefacts^note inanimate objects, I'm assuming, animals/miscellaneous, extension^note Sort of like pluralization but not really, and abstractions.

Gender != sex, though. It's a separate identity/role. The term gender being used for that separation was a usage coined in 1955.

Well, its biological/psychological meaning then. That wasn't the point. The point is that nobody uses "gender" anymore in the sense that you saw maybe 150 years ago, where a man described himself as "of the patriotic gender."

I get what you meant.

"Gender" actually has been used to refer to the abstract linguistic or socio-psychological counterpart to physical sex for a long time, but it was generally understood to be meant as a particular use of the greater concept of genera—that is, formal categories of a given concept.

Mentioned how I tho't TTFN was more common in the US than it is. And that in the UK ta can mean thanks while it only means 'bye' to me.

One said that 'tra' / 'ta-ra' was bye. To me that means bye-shout. Ra being a shortened form of hurrah 'n' ta being bye.

Another day another post?

I can not pronounce water with a T. It sounds robotic and wrong, I can only pronounce it with a D. :B

This was brought up when someone commented on my sipping of a nice cool glass of ice-woder.

When I was making a conlang for a little world-building project of mine, fortis/lenis pairs piqued my interest for some reason. T and D, K and G, S and Z, et cetera.

At least you're consistent, then. I normally pronounce "water" with a "t" (and my accent, in general, resembles RP more than it does any other accent). Sometimes, though, I pronounce "water" with a "d" - and other features of my accent also change somewhat, mostly depending on which variety of English I've last heard. (My Finnish is like that, as well - when I hear accents from other regions I sometimes adopt features of them without even noticing until it's been going on for a while.)

edited 11th Feb '14 12:56:15 AM by BestOf

^^^ When I read that post the first time, I thought you pronounced it "wa'er". Which I do think sounds wonderful.

"Wa'er" - as in, "water" with a glottal stop. I love that. I also sometimes pronounce it like that, but very rarely - if I've been talking to (or listening to) people who do that I'll usually start doing it, as well; but if I'm listening to a variety of accents I tend to return to my pseudo-RP.

I've always pronounced it as wa'er, because of my accent. There are quite a few glottal stops in the Scottish accent, I've noticed.

On glottal stops.

Speaking of pronunciation, my brother would always get annoyed when I pronounced "mithril" the way it's spelled instead of like they do in The Lord of the Rings (with a long "i" and rolling the "r").

I suppose you could have different pronunciations for that word based on which syllable you stress. Normally I'd think the second syllable would take the stress in "mithril". That way it'd be something like "mith-REEL". If you don't stress the second syllable at all the vowel (betweel r and l) disappears.

I say MITH-ruhl. I can't roll my Rs. My girlfriend makes fun of me about this when I speak Spanish.

edited 11th Feb '14 12:20:00 PM by Bede

In your opinions what is the Most Annoying English word to spell?

For me it's 'tear'. How one Earth teer and tere both became tear shall forever be lost to me. And the word will forever confound me.