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This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

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Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#271

Post by ankurdhama »

chris_wot wrote: post #193
ankurdhama wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say what should appear on HN (that would make the the set narrow), I just expressed something that shouldn't be here (that leave it wide wide open to many things)

You still narrowed the set of things that should be on HN. By expressing the set of things that should not appear on HN, you actually do dictate what should appear on HN. i.e. anything can appear on HN except xyz.

May be my definition of HN being "news platform for news which justify the philosophy of word hacker" being wrong and I should just refer HN as "just another any news dumping area which has the word Hacker just as a word"

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#272

Post by phillc73 »

dmytrish wrote: post #234
phillc73 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced your Polish-Russian-Ukrainian example is correct. My wife is from the west of Ukraine, and her home language is Ukrainian. However, she is totally fluent in Russian, as to be expected from someone growing up during the Soviet era. Both Ukrainian and Russian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Polish uses Roman letters. She finds Polish fairly easy to understand, from an aural point of v…

I'm agree that the grandparent example is, uhm, weird: it rather reflects Poles' and Ukrainians' knowledge of Russian language than some unbiased inter-intelligibility. Polish language is quite close to Ukrainian in regard of vocabulary and maybe grammar, but is quite different phonetically and does not use Cyrillic like Russian. Still, I can't agree that Ukraine is _ethnically_ divided in halves, ethnic Russians are…

You're right, ethnic Russians are only about 17% of the total Ukrainian population and heavily concentrated in the east. I guess it must be the distribution which effects voting patterns, rather than purely ethnicity.

Having asked the wife, so yes it's anecdotal evidence, she feels both Polish and Slovakian are closer to Ukrainian than standard Russian. She cites the example of a friend from St Petersburg who can only understand a few words of Ukrainian. Perhaps my wife's Ukrainian is somewhat dialectical, incorporating many Polish/Slovakian elements.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#273

Post by irfan »

Interesting point is that no sweet shop owner knows any sweet by the name of 'Jhajaria' in Lahore. Even 'Fazal Sweets' shown in this ad doesnt know about it. Same seems to be the case in India: http://thedailyretard.in/demand-for-jhajariya-on-the-rise-af...

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#275

Post by sq1020 »

Like many of you said, it's true that Urdu and Hindi are pretty much the same when it comes to the colloquial, spoken form of the languages. However, when you experience more advanced usages of the languages, they begin to sound totally different. Watch a news broadcast in Hindi and Urdu and you'll see what I mean. The formerly seemingly identical languages diverge sharply in academic settings and literature because Urdu borrows it's more advanced words from Persian which in turn borrowed these words from Arabic whereas the more advanced Hindi vocabulary is based on Sanskrit.

Not to mention the script is totally different.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#276

Post by gordaco »

nekopa wrote: post #115
dsrguru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…

A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?

As a Spaniard that has visited Italy, I can attest that they definitely understand us and we understand them, at least for the basics. However, there are interesting differences, like the way we pluralize words (quite different in both languages) or the lack of certain prefixes that Spanish imported during the Arabic occupation (carciofo -> alcachofa, zucchero -> azúcar, etc). I haven't studied Italian but I guess that the grammar is very similar.

It's a little like Galician or Catalonian (languages without an army or navy ;) ), the other latin languages spoken in Spain (then there is Basque, but that's a completely different thing): they have palpable differences to Spanish, but in most cases both tongues can reasonably understand each other without many problems (it also helps that most Galician and Catalonian speakers also speak Spanish, of course).

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#277

Post by gordaco »

mariuolo wrote: post #196
liviu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. Related romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) speakers can understand most of the words. As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.

I don't think it goes both ways, though. Romanian is rather obscure to me. Possibly because of slavic influence?

Written Romanian looks a little intimidating because of the amount of diacritics, but what I've heard sounds surprisingly similar to Italian.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#278

Post by gordaco »

raverbashing wrote: post #122
nekopa wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?

Yes, the basics are ok to understand (even though Spaniards speak too fast)

Have you been to Andalusia? We speak quite fast even for Spanish standards :).

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#279

Post by marshray »

ankurdhama wrote: post #148
marshray wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, I'm sure someone will come along to comment on the web design on some computer screen in the background. And that will be OK.

Better would be if someone discuss how we can bring up http://extendedsubset.com ;)

How important is it for you that we bring back the old content?

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#280

Post by mariuolo »

gordaco wrote: post #277
mariuolo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it goes both ways, though. Romanian is rather obscure to me. Possibly because of slavic influence?

Written Romanian looks a little intimidating because of the amount of diacritics, but what I've heard sounds surprisingly similar to Italian.

Phonemes are similar, but spoken Romanian is complete gibberish to me.

Things get better in writing, but there's still no comparison to Spanish.

After all there was a longer interaction with the latter: for historical reasons words and verbal constructs in southern dialects can give insights with regard to it or French.

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