Random Thoughts XIV: Pizza, Pomegranate Juice, and Shreddies

[Takhisis]

Probably the simplest European language, due to absence of so many grammatical elements including gender and cases. But of course you know that perfectly well ^^

Cases such as the genitive (-s) and gender such as he/she/it? Mmmm, right.

Yeah, but I'm trying to hear the consonant sound that you hear at the start of "irregular."

Maybe it's something like “yirregular” to warpus?

 

[warpus]

Yeah, but I'm trying to hear the consonant sound that you hear at the start of "irregular."

We're in the same boat, I don't understand my brain's stance on this. Or at least didn't. I just said the sentence out loud again and "an irregular language" makes a lot more sense. My brain has issues

 

[Gori the Grey]

My brain has issues

Or it may be something you carry over from Polish being your first language.

I've been reading a book on how English speakers place pitch-accents in sentences. It sometimes draws examples from other languages, and it's astonishing the things that one language takes for granted that another language has no place for.

 

[warpus]

Or it may be something you carry over from Polish being your first language.

I've been reading a book on how English speakers place pitch-accents in sentences. It sometimes draws examples from other languages, and it's astonishing the things that one language takes for granted that another language has no place for.

Could also be a part of my reptilian brain at issue here. I choose to blame the British monarch though

 

[Kyriakos]

Cases such as the genitive (-s) and gender such as he/she/it? Mmmm, right.

Maybe it's something like “yirregular” to warpus?

Yes, but I meant the other (=>non suffix) nouns. As you know tm.

 

[Voidwalkin]

I think Denzel Washington could do a great job portraying Julius Caesar in a hypothetical movie.

I think he's the actor best able to rapidly alternate between charisma and cruelty currently performing. That's old Gaius J. Heroic speech one moment, grimly orders a massacre and mass enslavement the next.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I was under the impression that it depends on how the next letter is pronounced, and not whether it's a vowel. i.e. silent letters, how do they work?

Example:

A historic is right if you pronounce the h
An historic is right if you don't pronounce the h (the h becomes silent and the first pronounced letter is a vowel, thus the "an")

an hat would obviously be wrong (right?), but if you don't say the h in hat, then an hat makes more sense. But nobody says hat like that except for 3 people in Liverpool (a complete guess, but I bet somebody says hat like that)

If I heard anyone say "an hat", it had better be spelled "an 'at." Or the speaker had better be former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, because that's how he talks (strong French-Canadian accent that's been modified over the years because he had polio as a child and has suffered from partial facial paralysis ever since - which affects how he speaks).

Actually the instance of "an historic" that annoys the hell out of me is on Star Trek, when one of the characters says, "Oh? This could be an historic occasion."

Or it may be something you carry over from Polish being your first language.

I've been reading a book on how English speakers place pitch-accents in sentences. It sometimes draws examples from other languages, and it's astonishing the things that one language takes for granted that another language has no place for.

My normal, everyday way of communicating draws on English from three different countries, some words/phrases in French, and the occasional indigenous word. I spell some words the French way, and it grates on the ears to hear someone pronounce "theatre" as "thee-ter".

There's an American guy named Tyler on YouTube who has several channels where he reacts to other videos about cultural and political things in Canada, England, and Norway (dunno why he has a channel about Norway; I don't watch that one). One of his language tics is that he has trouble pronouncing "Alberta". He often pronounces it as "Al-BEAR-ta" and I usually end up yelling at the screen that he's managed to pronounce it correctly sometimes, so why can't he pronounce it correctly every time?

As for things that one language has a place for and another language doesn't, this reminds me of a typing client I had over 30 years ago. She was from Hobbema, a Cree reserve, and Cree is her first language. She was taking the same cultural anthropology course I'd taken a few years before, which came in handy one time when she called to cancel one of her papers because she couldn't find enough references. I asked her what she was writing about, and it was basically the same topic I'd written about for my term paper. I told her that I'd gone out and bought some books and articles to use as references (because none of the local libraries had anywhere near enough), still had them, and I'd be willing to lend them to her.

She took me up on the offer, and during our conversation she mentioned that she had trouble with some of her assignments because there are concepts that exist in Cree that don't exist in English. So the best she could do was an approximation of what she really wanted to say, and found that frustrating. English lacks the nuanced language that was needed for what she wanted to say.

I think Denzel Washington could do a great job portraying Julius Caesar in a hypothetical movie.

Hypothetically, yes. He can pull off Shakespeare, as he did in Much Ado About Nothing. That's the only movie I've ever seen him in.

 

[r16]

isn't he opposed to "Woke" or something ?

 

[Kyriakos]

There's woke and then there's deep woke :S

 

[r16]

checked google , either it is satire that he is establishing a no-woke union in Hollywood or he just destroyed liberal Hollywood multiple times this year .

 

[Takhisis]

We're in the same boat, I don't understand my brain's stance on this. Or at least didn't. I just said the sentence out loud again and "an irregular language" makes a lot more sense. My brain has issues

Don't fret over it too much.

I choose to blame the British

Wise choice.

Yes, but I meant the other (=>non suffix) nouns. As you know tm.

Oh, well, technically the -os in Greek is a suffix, but anyway… English certainly does not lack complexity.

 

[Kyriakos]

Reminds me of a short story by Lord Dunsany.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

But what if "when" refers to something that will happen in the future?

Then it will happen then

 

[Gori the Grey]

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys.

 

[warpus]

How do we really know how pirates used to talk? Maybe all that arr matey stuff is something Disney cooked up?

How did French pirates talk?

 

[Kyriakos]

Probably they used an assortment of solecisms and creole? ^^

 

[warpus]

All I'm saying is that I don't think Polish or Korean pirates were saying "Arrrr" and I bet if 1600s pirates saw Johnny Depp's depiction of a pirate they would immediately decapitate him and mock his fashion sense

I support the idea of learning & speaking in Creole for this day though

edit: TIL what solecisms are. If someone ever corrects my grammar I am going to raise my nose a bit and exclaim that I'm a solecist

 

[Kyriakos]

They probably just cursed all the time, being old-timey sailors and all.

 

[Arakhor]

How do we really know how pirates used to talk? Maybe all that arr matey stuff is something Disney cooked up?

Well, yes, but (as the story goes) that's because the actor that Disney hired back in the 50s to play Long John Silver and Captain Blackbeard used a West Country accent and those verbal tics stuck.

 

[Voidwalkin]

They probably just cursed all the time, being old-timey sailors and all.

Given how deep religion ran at the time, I'd imagine religious curses were common, but perhaps they swapped more harmless versions of words to avoid offending the lord or taking his name in vain.

Geemany Christmases.