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dingformung

Knob Twiddlers
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Everything posted by dingformung

  1. dingformung
    It's my fav thing to do tbqh
  2. dingformung
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008559
  3. dingformung
    It's not so much the Latinisation that removed that possibility, though (especially since Latin is a language that has extreme flexibility of word order). It's the transition from being a fusional/inflected language to being an analytic/isolating language that happens naturally to all languages. There is something like a natural cycle of change of morphology languages typically go through. Agglutinative languages (such as Finnish) tend to become fusional/inflected over time, because all the agglutinated endings start to merge together into endings that combine different meanings. And over time the fusional/inflected languages start dropping endings and instead make use of more words or using word order as a grammatical marker, hence becoming analytic (such as Chinese). And at some point words melt together and what has been separate words becomes endings, so the language becomes more agglutinative again. Right now English is mostly analytic/isolating but within the process of becoming agglutinative, e.g. have not -> haven't; I am -> I'm; can not -> cannot -> can't, etc. All these shortenings that are no longer casual but part of the standard speech indicate that. It still has some fusional/inflected aspects, too: Remains of a case system, e.g. who, whose, whom. Just saying.
  4. dingformung
    imagine it was boc, just imagine omg OMG
  5. dingformung
    thanks
  6. dingformung
    burger! BURGER!
  7. dingformung
    dunno but you simply do have a good eye for pleasing to look at scenes, no doubt about that
  8. dingformung
    I like your explanation but I dislike the Austrian in the picture, he killed juice
  9. dingformung
  10. dingformung
    Hungarian and Finnish are both Finno-Ugric but still only remotely related. The difference is about as large as between German and Russian. I talked to an Estonian who said she can understand a little bit of Finnish (I imagine in a similar way as we understand some Dutch) but not a single word of Hungarian.
  11. dingformung
    The fact that it's even a possibility that this guy gets reelected says a lot about American society. This cliché of Americans being stupid comes from somewhere. No offence Trump is an obnoxious low intelligence loudmouth who is insufferable. Every second I hear him say anything I cringe inside because of this blatant stupidity. It almost hurts physically. How in the world can you hear him and think: "Great guy! I want him to be president of the most powerful country in the world!"? I cannot compute this.
  12. dingformung
    Honestly, they aren't all that useful after all. Especially English has bastardised from its Germanic roots a lot, lol. Like 80% if its words are of Latin or Old French origin. It does help with irregular verbs, though, because they often correspond with German inflection.
  13. dingformung
    While Finnish isn't an Indo-European language it still belongs to the European Sprachbund. That means it has been in close contact with Indo-European languages for a long time and hence has adopted many words and made them its own to an extend that they seem native to a native speaker. It indeed makes sense to discuss cognates of languages that belong to the same sprachbund even when these languages aren't genetically related. Finnish is heavily influenced by Germanic languages, especially Swedish, as far as I know. Since I don't speak it myself I of course can't tell to what extend that's really the case. I think Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender, and they have one of the most gender-imbalanced cultures in history (to the extent that women and men were expected to use two different writing systems, so readers could distinguish the gender of the author). Yes, I was asking because there is an ongoing discussion in Germany (and in other places that have languages with grammatical gender) about whether forcing politically correct adjustments onto the language will help anyone. I dislike the gender star and forced gender sensitive language. It's just very ugly and unnatural and won't help the cause (which is an important cause).
  14. dingformung
    Sorry for lack of obscurity but Alice Coltrane is still one of my faves:
  15. dingformung
    Ritari is similar to the German word "Ritter" which means knight. I guess it has a respective Swedish cognate. German "Knecht", which I mentioned, has shifted its meaning and now means a servant of a knight, I wasn't clear about that, lol. Finnish is such an alien and fascinating language. From what I know it does have adopted a lot of Indo-European words, mostly through Swedish. I think one of the weirdest features of that language is that it's an agglutinative language, meaning all grammatical features have their own ending and all the endings are then combined, so you end up with long ass words. Very weird for speakers of mostly analytical languages (English, Chinese) or synthetic/fusional languages (all languages with a case system such as Dutch or Italian). It's just different in so many aspects. For example stressed syllables are spoken at a lower pitch than non-stressed syllables, similar as in Swiss German, while most other languages have a higher pitch on stressed syllables. And generally the grammatical concepts are very different from Indo-European languages. I wanted to learn it for a while but gave up. But I do like the sound and melody of it. Do you think that the lack of a grammatical gender made the Fins less gender discriminative? ?
  16. dingformung
    Nah, just sad
  17. dingformung
    Oh, that's why the yanks used radiation on Iraqi children during the Iraq war.
  18. dingformung
    Thank you, that was it.
  19. dingformung
    FWP: I said "homologue" in my last post but meant something else. For some reason I can't remember the technical term for words that are related to each other in different languages, e.g. Dutch goed, English good, German gut, Danish godt. What was it, damn. Analogues? Homophones? Nah, that's words that sound the same but have a different meaning within the same language. What was the right word? Damnit.
  20. dingformung
    I used to be a strong advocate of an English spelling reform (lol) but these days I enjoy how English maintains a string to the past with its ancient spelling. A lot of words that have a weird spelling have German homologues cognates where the weird spelling still makes sense, which was something interesting for me to discover. E.g. light -> Licht; knight -> Knecht; though -> doch, etc.. If our English teachers had told us that at school English would have been a lot easier to learn.
  21. dingformung
    ?
  22. dingformung
    4 kg in 4 weeks isn't really impressive. I'm glad it's going into the right direction but if you want to impress anyone you have to work a little harder,
  23. dingformung
    @Tim_J I see that got me a facepalm from you. I view that as a marker of quality.
  24. dingformung
    Honestly, breaking this hole thing up into these different sections is kinda admirable. I'm bowing before you uncontrollably like the Japanese do, unironically.
  25. dingformung
    Yeah but it seems they tried to make a compilation of the worst Ethiopian music. It's still good doe
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