General Language Thread

NHK also recently does the same too, through I doubt that would catch out outside Japan, except between some weeaboos.

Edited by luisedgarf on Jun 1st 2022 at 11:43:04 AM

Plenty of languages tolerate spelling variations, even prescriptivist ones, though descriptivist ones tend to be more lenient.

Yeah, standardised spelling is a relatively recent newcomer to party overall. Variations in spelling is one way that historians use to track dialect difference and language shift, both for historical languages as well as the pre-standardised spelling of existing ones.

We get a lot of that in Welsh, where there isn't a soft-c sound, but the letter K does not exist in the Welsh alphabet. However, in Middle Welsh the 'k' is often used before vowels... and the digit 6 is often used for 'w' in mediaeval transcriptions.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jun 4th 2022 at 5:44:34 AM

Are there any countries other than Norway whose main national language has two or more written standards in the same script that are used concurrently to this day?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 6th 2022 at 9:53:55 PM

What do you mean by written standard?

I mean standardized written forms of the language. The Norwegian language has two official written standards — Bokmål and Nynorsk — and two unofficial ones — Riksmål and Høgnorsk. The whole thing is... subject to much debate, to put it lightly.

Does English count, even if it has, to my knowledge, no organization for standardizing its spelling?

I don't think so. The orthographic differences in the various Standard English varieties are trivial and boil down to US American vs. British, oftentimes resulting in a mix of the two (as shown here). In contrast, Norwegian's different written standards have significantly greater differences between them, extending to the grammar itself.

The only other case of such a "multiple concurrent written standards" language that I know of is Modern Greek, and only in the past, when the Demotic and Katharevousa forms coexisted and competed with each other until the Greek government discontinued the use of Katharevousa, by which time it had significantly influenced Demotic, which became the Standard Modern Greek known today.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 6th 2022 at 2:02:31 PM

I can't really think of anything like that. When said differences crop up it tends to be across national boundaries where different countries using the same language standardise things differently.

Yeah, I was thinking of Dutch and Flemish, but they are separated by a border (though not for that long, admittedly).

A thing to note about Norwegian language is that this multiple written standards policy is possible because in Norway it's far more tolerated to use dialects in formal speech. Norwegians see written standards mostly as that, as something you learn for writing purposes but don't really have to use correctly in speech, with very few exceptions (such as national broadcasting). This doesn't really happen elsewhere in Europe, where to speak the standard variety properly you're also expected to employ a certain pronunciation, and the bar of tolerance for dialects/regional varieties is considerably lower.

At least in Europe, Norway is probably the only case of two written standards existing for the same language within the same state. With languages like English, German or Dutch there are multiple written standards because there are different states exist to begin with, so it's not really that jarring.

Edited by gc10 on Jun 7th 2022 at 2:32:18 PM

How should you translate "Native American" into Dutch? We usually use the word "Indiaan", but this would seem wrong for much the same reasons as "Indian" is in English.

Interestingly, Surinam Dutch uses "inheems", which translates as "native".

We also use the word "Indiër" when referring to someone from India, so Dutch makes that distinction where English doesn't.

Edited by Redmess on Sep 5th 2022 at 2:23:34 PM

What do they mean when they talk about rolling your R's?

Well, the Dutch Wikipedia version of the Native Americans in the United States article uses a calque of the English term, "Inheemse Amerikanen"; inheems meaning "native, indigenous, domestic, autochthonous".

Oh, that is a good one.

As for rolling R's:

As long as Dutch clearly distinguishes between American Indian and "Indian Indian," I wouldn't worry about it. Russian also distinguishes between the two ("индейский" vs. "индийский"), and with Dutch as with Russian, I find it wrong to export essentially English-language sensitivity debates into linguistic milieux where few could imagine that ill-will or insensitivity is at work.

Very good point, though that was not my intent. I was mostly curious about the translation side of it.

That does raise another interesting translation question, though: when translating an American work, should you try to reflect that English language sensitivity or not?

Edited by Redmess on Sep 7th 2022 at 9:20:51 PM

That depends if you plan to publish your work in the U.S. When publishing in your country, that would be fair game, I guess.

And regarding the use of the terms for Native Americans, al least here in Mexico we use the terms "Indigenas" (Indigenous people) and "Indio" (Indian) for them, while the people from India are called "Hindues" (Hindus) here. It should be noted, however, that unlike the U.S., using "Indio" is not considered as an insult and many local natives had no problems on using the word on themselves, unless you either add an insulting adjetive or you're using the word with racist undertones.

Curiously, in some Asian languages, like Japanese, as a result of both Eagleland Osmosis and lack of better words in the local language, Native Americans are either called as such in English, but written in katakana (ネイティブ・アメリカン), Indians (インディアン) or American Indians (アメリカインディアン), but only when reffering to Native Americans/First Nations from the U.S. and Canada; other non-American natives, such as the Nahuas, Incas, etc, are just called by the name of their tribes or cultures in Japanese, while the people from India are just addressed as "Indo-jin" (インド人) in Japan.

Korea, on the other hand, translates "Native Americans" as just Migug Wonjum'in (미국 원주민), which translate also as "Autochthon person from the U.S.". Dunno if they just koreanize the word for "Indian" in Hangul.

Edited by luisedgarf on Sep 7th 2022 at 2:57:11 PM

We do Koreanize the word for "Indian" as 인디언, but it is falling out of usage in favor of 미국 원주민 (literal translation of "Native American")

There's also the term "Amerindio" (Amerindian) that has appeared recently and is used solely in context of the native people's of the American continent such as the Quechua, Maya, Lakota, Nahua, etc.

The term "Indio", as luisdegarf mentioned, is not inherently pejorative just like the terms "negro" or "mulato" in Spanish, the context of its use is what makes it pejorative such as using it coupled with an insult or a bigoted implication.

I think context matters though, like who you're talking about.

Like, Canada uses the term First Nations for the Native Americans and it's because a bunch of the First Nations decided they wanted it acknowledged that they weren't just "tribes", they were full on cultures and nations that were distinct from each other. It wasn't just divisions of some monoculture.

If native peoples in Mexico are fine with the Spanish terms, that's great. But if you're talking about natives within the borders of Canada, then I think that going with a translation of First Nations (unless you're talking about a specific group) would probably be the most respectful, and it would be educational too for readers in that language.

As far I could find, at least in the Spanish Wikipedia, Canadian First Nations are translated as "Naciones Originarias de Canada" (translated as "Original Nations of Canada"), but traditionally, they are just named as "indigenas canadienses" (Canadian indigenous people), at least here in Mexico.

Fuuny, I just realised that one of the main differences between Spanish and English is that we in Spanish prefer to use the term "original" over "first" when refering to the native peoples and nations.

I was checking a lot of translations, and I noticed something interesting: in order to find a unique sentence, I generally only needed to search for three consecutive words to find it.

I'm wondering if there is some kind of linguistic law or statistical principle behind that. Is there a minimum number of words to uniquely identify any sentence (or perhaps clause)?

I'm going to ask what is possibly the single silliest question asked in this thread.

Like, let's say if you somehow cloned Jesus or something. In that case, what would the plural of Jesus be, or would it just be Jesus like with the case of moose?

Also: I learned that German language has a word for the fear that time is running out/missing out things in life, called "torschlusspanik."

No wonder why Germany (and its many iterations before getting that title) had so many philosophers.

Edited by dRoy on Dec 20th 2022 at 11:27:20 PM