General Language Thread

Icosad, however, has.

Well, it doesn't mean what you want it to mean (it's a highly technical chemistry term), but you can just say it with the meaning you want it to have and people will eventually figure it out, especially because nearly no one actually knows the chemistry term icosad.

They should know what a myriad is, though. (From the word for 1 000.)

Myriad is 10,000. The ancient Greek number for 1,000 is khilioi, from which was derived the kilo prefix (the initial metric prefixes used Latin roots for submultiples and Greek ones for multiples).

A group of twenty things/objects/people/etc. is a "score".

And that comes into English as a "chiliad" (a group of 1,000 things).

Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 19th 2023 at 11:09:33 AM

huh I figured "Myriad Truths" was just a weird translation, but now I think it might be understating the amount here

(Context: the JP name more accurlay translates to "million truths"^note at least according to the fan wiki for SMT games and is a reference to Izanagi's counter to Izanagi's vow to kill a certain amount of people daily)

Granted I also though Myriad was just a synonym for "countless" as opposed to being the term for 10000, (but then again that might not be mutually exclusive)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 19th 2023 at 7:21:59 AM

Ah, I was off by a factor of ten. Sorry!

As an English word it's almost always used to mean "countless", while the "group of 10,000" definition is only really applied in the context of translations from other languages.

Edited by Perseus on Aug 21st 2023 at 5:27:44 AM

It is. It means both. You will find that a lot of first-language English speakers don't know that it means "10,000" because they've learned it solely in the context of "countless". I've seen "chiliad" used for "countless", too, but it's a less well-known word in general than "myriad". "Million" and "Thousand" also get used to mean "countless" as well (as does "jillion", "zillion", and several other words, including "gillion", which is an alternative word to "milliard"). English uses loads of words for figures higher than a thousand to mean "countless".

Other words that are less well-known in general these days are words like "milliard" and "billiard". That's because of the difference in British long-scales counting and American short-scales counting (which kicks in at a million and higher). Both systems are Italian in origin (as are the ultimate origin of the names from a million and above, lower numbers tend to be Germanic in origin, such as "thousand").

Germanic countries adopted counting in groups of six and France adopted counting in groups of three (but confusingly used the Italian words for counting in groups of six). It's that French mix of counting in groups of three but using names that mean multiples of a million that entered American English during the American Revolutionary War. Words like "milliard" entered British English from French due to the Franco-Prussian War. These days, business preference is causing short-scales to take over international counting to the point where I'm not sure British schools teach long-scales any more.

It's only when you look at long-scales that you can see the original meaning of the words:

And so on.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 20th 2023 at 6:30:32 PM

Romance languages were also spoken in the Balkans, central Europe, and Britain for a surprisingly long time! However, as in north Africa, waves of invasions & migrations eventually swamped those Romance-speaking populations. And as with north Africa, the only written records we have are in classical Latin, which was still considered the only appropriate choice for inscriptions.

The international alignment on short scale is pretty much only in English. Though the existence of the short scale leads speakers of other languages to use phrases like "1000 milliards" (usually in country-level budgets) to avoid ambiguity.

Yeah, seeing French people translate the English "trillion" by the French "trillion" is a pet peeve of mine. It’s not the same thing, you dimwits. But then I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard the French "billion" outside of mathematics papers. Like said "1000 milliards" is much more common.

Edited by Lyendith on Aug 23rd 2023 at 2:00:39 PM

https://hongkongfp.com/2023/08/28/hong-kong-cantonese-language-advocacy-group-closes-after-national-security-police-raid-founders-home/

Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis (SLHK), a Cantonese language advocacy group ceased working after National Security Police raided it over an essay submitted to a contest that was deemed a threat to the HK SAR government.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-s-cantonese-speakers-advocate-for-language-amid-suppression-in-hong-kong-1.6553093

More efforts are done by Cantonese-speaking immigrants/residents in British Columbia to preserve it due to concerns after the HK-based language association was made to close.

I'm learning Japanese, recently having started watching videos in Japanese with Japanese subs as reading and listening practice and it randomly popped into my mind - does anyone want to share experiences/tips about learning a different writing system?

I'd say it makes a huge difference which writing system. Greek and Cyrillic, for example, are alphabets much like ours, in which a written word ideally contains most of the information you need to pronounce it correctly. Using them is a fairly elementary preamble to learning the language.

An abjad such as Arabic or Hebrew, though, conveys only partial phonetic information—not only do you have to learn a word, you have to learn to infer a word (or the inflected form of a word) from its written consonants alone. Chinese writing, on the other hand—and the Japanese kanji borrowed from it—provides no direct phonetic information in itself*; learning it is nearly as intensive a task as learning the spoken language itself is.

* Yes, many letters include a radical that provides some phonetic clue to native Chinese readers, but a) that's pretty opaque to non-native learners in practice, and b) the phonetic clue is often obsolete because either pronunciations have changed, or because Japanese and other non-Chinese readers are using it.

It is a pretty strange feeling when I read a Japanese novel or manga to see words where I roughly understand the meaning from the characters used but have no idea how to read them. With alphabets it’s usually the other way round.

Edited by Lyendith on Oct 4th 2023 at 1:33:24 PM

Heh yeah, that keeps throwing me for a loop, and especially when I see several characters next to each other and am like "right are you in one phrase/word or not?" sometimes xd

And that's not even to mention how the sound-element might have changed during the evolution of the character... or how in the case of Japanese for example Chinese words came over sometimes in waves, not one at a time.

x 3. It's even worse with Japanese (and I presume other languages that have historically used borrowed Chinese characters) in that characters don't have unique pronunciations like in Chinese. Most characters in Japanese have at least two, sometimes more and unless you've got furigana there's no indication of which you're supposed to use in any situation.

There's a reason Chinese characters are only used for decoration in Vietnam and Korea.

I can’t imagine what an earthquake it was when Vietnam suddenly switched to a Latin alphabet… Must have taken some getting used to. >.>

On another note, I stumbled upon a channel about Louisana French and Lousiana Creole, pretty interesting.

LF sounds like French with an English accent but otherwise I understand both it and the creole just fine.

I am not sure that people in Vietnam wrote their language at all before their current system was created. Maybe they would only write Chinese language, pretty much like at some point many Europeans would mostly use Latin when writing.

This is just a guess though.

Look up Chu Nom. Can't link the Wikipedia article cause the actual spelling has nonstandard letters.

Edited by Alycus on Oct 6th 2023 at 5:00:18 AM

Thanks, this is interesting.

x 4. While I'm not all that familiar with the specifics I know it was an uphill battle in Korea to get hangul into wide-spread adoption as there was a lot of push back from scholars more used to using hanja

I also imagine that the upper classes didn't like the idea that reading might become easy.