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This blog is written in en-GB

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Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#401

Post by throwaway2037 »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #206
Theodores wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues. As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference betwee…

>Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was. The Académie française has exactly 0 to do with the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca.

    > the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca
I think you are over-interpreting this point. Japanese has far fewer speakers globally compared to French. And yes, Japanese imports a huge number of foreign words -- akin to modern English. Ironically, mainland China practically has an alergic reaction to loanwords and creates natives terms for everything. Even weirder, Taiwan and Korea are somewhere in between. None of these places speak anything close to a "lingua franca" and have wildly different language cultures around loanwords.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#402

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dgellow wrote: post #317
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.

Did you actually think I wanted fr-GB to replace en-GB? It was a joke based on the Norman French references from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English

I've seen more absurd ideas :)

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#403

Post by lioeters »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #137
jerf wrote: post #35

"This blog is written in en-GB" Excuse me, but I believe you meant to say this bloug is written in en-GB. More seriously... you know, 30 or 40 years ago, I can sort of understand this attitude. Today, in the amount of time it takes you to complain, you could have popped the word into Google or something instead and learned what it was instead. Probably in less than the amount of time it took you to complain for an on…

> bloug * blogue

blogge

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#405

Post by card_zero »

jowsie wrote: post #389
card_zero wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more of a joke if there was a connection between "west" and "terfs". > Here in the UK, there is a significant section of the population whose base state is mildly dissatisfied and the external manifestation of that is low level grumbling about minor things Does that have a name? What causes it? Is it a proud cultural tradition, or more a sort of disease?

I'd say it's cultural. Stiff upper lip and all that. It would be impolite or even confrontational to complain about something, so you have a little moan instead. A common response to the question "how are you?" is "could be worse". I've always felt this is a good example of British culture, though maybe it's not so simple to understand if you've not lived here. A casual moan about the weather or the fact that the pot…

I believe it was Family Guy season 3 episode 4 in which the Drunken Clam is taken over by the British and turned into a pub, and when Peter and his pals try to storm it and take it back they get defeated by means of biting wit and clever sarcasm. That kind of focused negativity would be an awesome image to live up to, but instead you paint a picture here of habitual incoherent cattiness, it seems like some unfulfilled potential. But I have no specific proposal in mind, guess I'm just moaning about it.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#406

Post by jrm4 »

MrJohz wrote: post #285
mghackerlady wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. At least in the US, AAV seems to be a major cultural thing for the people who speak it

But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently. This means that AAV is culturally import…

Right, I think the major thing that both of you are unwittingly dancing around is the extent to which AAV is generally "popular," almost subconsciously. Especially in the US, but I'd argue the whole world.

It would be exceedingly difficult to strongly distinguish it from "Gen Whatever Slang" or "US Slang" or a lot of "LGTBQ Slang" etc etc. The list goes on.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#407

Post by 3836293648 »

TimK65 wrote: post #176
prima-facie wrote: post #149

If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one. It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses…

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

Vad himla pratar du om? ALLT använder dd/mm-yy. Jag har aldrig sett något på svenska som använder yyyy-mm-dd, det finns bara inte. Det finns i Sverige, men då är det också på engelska.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#408

Post by ButlerianJihad »

dhosek wrote: post #387
card_zero wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.

I rarely have cause to give people my phone number anymore, but I always like to give it as three billion, 128 million, …

Most every personal phone number I've obtained has had a spelling, and a good logical spelling, which isn't really the norm for personal phone numbers.

In fact, the first time I signed up for my own line, it happened unintentionally, and it was only after Pacific Bell had installed the line that I figured out it spelled something, and I informed my father and it was hilarious (the spelling was "BUG-BLOW").

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#409

Post by TFNA »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #371
hdgvhicv wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just today https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/mandarin-...

Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.

The PCR’s official diversity has been a Potemkin village since the 1970s. Yes, the coinage still shows multiple languages, and the Chinese do love their touristy ethnic villages where people dress up in traditional clothing (though often these are outside actors instead of actual locals). However, there is almost no room for minorities to use their own languages; even in the family circle there has been increasing pressure to switch to putonghua.

Around the turn of the millennium, Muslim Uighur radicals got a lot of attention in the international press. But what most of the world had not followed was that before that, there had been conflict between secular Uighur Communists and the central government because the former saw the space for use of Uighur shrinking. Those Uighurs were silenced or forced into exile abroad, leaving only Islam as a channel for ethnic discontent.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#410

Post by TFNA »

tialaramex wrote: post #302
MrJohz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.

Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, i…

You misunderstand the region. Gaelic arrived in Scotland as a medieval import from Ireland, and it never extended far enough south to affect Scots overall. The literature on English historical linguistics emphasizes far more the impact of Old Norse on Scots, as the Scots-speaking region was Norse-ruled for some time.
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