stupid first world problems you're dealing with

[dingformung]

2 hours ago, zkom said:

When I was younger and a non-native English speaker the way how "sweat" and "sweet" are pronounced confused me frequently. It makes no sense, you fuckers. Why not write "sweat" simply "swet"? I'm going to start pronouncing "beat" as "bet" and "the Beatles" as "The Betles" from now on.

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.

Edited October 5, 2020 by dingformung

[dcom]

Quote

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
   Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
   Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
   Just compare heart, hear and heard,
   Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
   Made has not the sound of bade,
   Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
   But be careful how you speak,
   Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
   Woven, oven, how and low,
   Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

[...]

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité

Spoiler

 

 

Edited October 5, 2020 by dcom

[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.

[dcom]

9 minutes ago, dingformung said:

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.

Cognates or Interlingual homographs.

Edited October 5, 2020 by dcom

[dingformung]

4 minutes ago, dcom said:

Cognates or Interlingual homographs.

Thank you, that was it.

[drillkicker]

This thread went from first world problems to third world terrorist problems.

[zkom]

45 minutes ago, dingformung said:

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.

 

18 minutes ago, dcom said:

e.g. Dutch goed, English good, German gut, Danish godt.

Let's try this with Finnish, which is my native language:

light->valo (f.e. daylight) or kevyt (f.e. lightweight)

knight -> ritari

though -> kuitenkin, vaikka, vaikkakin (depending on the context, there's probably more)

good -> hyvä

Even some of the more modern words are completely different: telephone -> puhelin, cell phone -> kännykkä, plastic -> muovi, electricity -> sähkö. Although there are some like television -> televisio and radio -> radio

Good luck to all foreigners trying to learn Finnish. The vocabulary is the easy part.

[dingformung]

16 minutes ago, zkom said:

 

Let's try this with Finnish, which is my native language:

light->valo (f.e. daylight) or kevyt (f.e. lightweight)

knight -> ritari

though -> kuitenkin, vaikka, vaikkakin (depending on the context, there's probably more)

good -> hyvä

Even some of the more modern words are completely different: telephone -> puhelin, cell phone -> kännykkä, plastic -> muovi, electricity -> sähkö. Although there are some like television -> televisio and radio -> radio

Good luck to all foreigners trying to learn Finnish. The vocabulary is the easy part.

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? 

Edited October 5, 2020 by dingformung

[zkom]

2 minutes ago, dingformung said:

Do you think that the lack of a grammatical gender made the Fins less gender discriminative? 

Probably not. If I would have to make some guess I'd say it's because of the strong role the women had in making decisions in the old Finnish agrarian culture which translated later to women being some of the leading figures in political movements in the early 20th century. While still being part of Imperial Russia, Finland was the first territory in the world to implement universal unrestricted suffrage in 1917.

There are also very few housewives in Finland but that has more to do with post-war poverty when everyone was needed to get the economy back on rails and then it became kind of de-facto way of running a household.

But I'm not a historian or anything.

[dcom]

54 minutes ago, zkom said:

Good luck to all foreigners trying to learn Finnish. The vocabulary is the easy part.

Ours is probably one of the hardest languages for non-natives to learn due to the agglutinative morphology, consonant gradation etc. - the phonetics are also very hard for foreigners, and then there's the difference between standard language and spoken/colloquial language; there are some fun synthetic words like epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän (that's the Guinness world record for the longest single Finnish word - the meaning is difficult for even us Finns to parse). My second foreign language is Russian, that's a hard one as well with seven different types of letter s, three grammatical genders, the Cyrillic script and so on. If you're wondering, English is my fourth language, because Finns have compulsory Swedish as a third language (unless you're Finnish-Swedish, in which case your native language is the Finnish variant of Swedish and Finnish proper is your third language) - Finland is officially bilingual (Finnish, Swedish) but our government also supports the Sami languages, Romani language and Finnish Sign Language (FSL).

Edited October 5, 2020 by dcom

[cwmbrancity]

Finnish isn’t related to Indo-European language branches, hence the big difference.

Basque is now interpreted as an original Neolithic language that spread from the Middle East, which was then displaced from the European peninsula with the Bronze Age Yamnaya culture (that originated in the Ukraine). Basque used to be thought of pre IE.

Here the remnants of Welsh turn up in certain English contexts - river Avon (Afon is Welsh for river, skills English scum), Derby is a hybrid of dwr/water and old Norse setttlements that end in -by, Glastonbury Tor where Tor is Welsh for holy mountain or peak. The remains of Welsh in English come in the form of metre and sentence structures.

Far out, well, maybe not for a Monday.

You English cunts called a river the river River.

[cwmbrancity]

2 posts got consolidated there without asking. How rude, probably something to do with the English, again.

[dcom]

59 minutes ago, zkom said:

Finland was the first territory in the world to implement universal unrestricted suffrage in 1917.

The first one was New Zealand in 1893, Finland was the second.

Edited October 5, 2020 by dcom

[Squee]

27 minutes ago, cwmbrancity said:

2 posts got consolidated there without asking. How rude, probably something to do with the English, again.

If you post twice in a row within a minute or two the posts will automatically get merged.

[zkom]

30 minutes ago, dcom said:

The first one was New Zealand in 1893, Finland was the second.

By unrestricted I mean women could stand as candidates and that there was no ethnic exclusion. In the case of New Zealand women could just vote, not stand as candidates. After New Zealand Australia allowed women to vote and stand as candidates before Finland in 1894 but they had ethnic exclusion of indigenous people.

[dcom]

13 minutes ago, zkom said:

By unrestricted I mean women could stand as candidates and that there was no ethnic exclusion. In the case of New Zealand women could just vote, not stand as candidates. After New Zealand Australia allowed women to vote and stand as candidates before Finland in 1894 but they had ethnic exclusion of indigenous people.

Universal Suffrage (Wikipedia):

Quote

With the extension of voting rights to women in 1893, the self-governing British colony became one of the first permanently constituted jurisdictions in the world to grant universal adult suffrage,^[24] suffrage previously having been universal for Māori men over 21 from 1867, and for white men from 1879.^[49] Plural voting (impacting men) was abolished in 1889.

 

[drillkicker]

2 hours ago, zkom said:

 

Let's try this with Finnish, which is my native language:

light->valo (f.e. daylight) or kevyt (f.e. lightweight)

knight -> ritari

though -> kuitenkin, vaikka, vaikkakin (depending on the context, there's probably more)

good -> hyvä

Even some of the more modern words are completely different: telephone -> puhelin, cell phone -> kännykkä, plastic -> muovi, electricity -> sähkö. Although there are some like television -> televisio and radio -> radio

Good luck to all foreigners trying to learn Finnish. The vocabulary is the easy part.

That's because Finnish is not only not a Germanic language, but it isn't even Indo-European at all, making it completely irrelevant to the discussion of Germanic cognates.

[zkom]

18 minutes ago, dcom said:

Universal Suffrage (Wikipedia):

 

From the same Wikipedia article:

Quote

Twelve years later, the autonomous Russian territory known as Grand Duchy of Finland (which became the Republic of Finland in 1917) became the first territory in the world to implement unrestricted universal suffrage, as women could stand as candidates, unlike in New Zealand, and without indigenous ethnic exclusion, like in Australia. It also lead to the election of the world's first female members of parliament the following year.

 

[zkom]

2 minutes ago, drillkicker said:

That's because Finnish is not only not a Germanic language, but it isn't even Indo-European at all, making it completely irrelevant to the discussion of Germanic cognates.

Yes, yes, I was just pointing out that I didn't have that kind of privilege of learning English that I could use much of the Germanic cognates.

Estonian would be pretty easy tho

[drillkicker]

2 hours ago, dingformung said:

Do you think that the lack of a grammatical gender made the Fins less gender discriminative? 

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).

[dcom]

5 minutes ago, zkom said:

From the same Wikipedia article:

You're right, I stand corrected.

[dingformung]

39 minutes ago, drillkicker said:

That's because Finnish is not only not a Germanic language, but it isn't even Indo-European at all, making it completely irrelevant to the discussion of Germanic cognates.

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.

33 minutes ago, drillkicker said:

2 hours ago, dingformung said:

Do you think that the lack of a grammatical gender made the Fins less gender discriminative? 

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).

Edited October 5, 2020 by dingformung

[dingformung]

35 minutes ago, zkom said:

Yes, yes, I was just pointing out that I didn't have that kind of privilege of learning English that I could use much of the Germanic cognates.

Estonian would be pretty easy tho

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.

[Zephyr_Nova]

SFWP: SFWP thread has been replaced by linguistics thread.

[IDEM]

6 hours ago, dcom said:

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité

  Hide contents

 

 

Ha, this is brillant!

 

4 hours ago, dcom said:

Ours is probably one of the hardest languages for non-natives to learn due to the agglutinative morphology, consonant gradation etc. - the phonetics are also very hard for foreigners, and then there's the difference between standard language and spoken/colloquial language; there are some fun synthetic words like epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän (that's the Guinness world record for the longest single Finnish word - the meaning is difficult for even us Finns to parse). My second foreign language is Russian, that's a hard one as well with seven different types of letter s, three grammatical genders, the Cyrillic script and so on. If you're wondering, English is my fourth language, because Finns have compulsory Swedish as a third language (unless you're Finnish-Swedish, in which case your native language is the Finnish variant of Swedish and Finnish proper is your third language) - Finland is officially bilingual (Finnish, Swedish) but our government also supports the Sami languages, Romani language and Finnish Sign Language (FSL).

Shouldn't it be easy for Finns to pick up some Hungarian on the fly, seeing as they both belong to one linguistic family? For me, they're the two European languages I really can't make head nor tail of; I guess it might be different if you speak one of them.