151–160 of 163 posts
Which one should I support in my (automatically translated) SaaS?
Edit to add: see also the "postcode file" post about Windows 11 from a few months back.
The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English. Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know t…
The comparison is a bit flawed since there is no dialect continuum between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and there might have never been one. A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used. People write…
Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.
> People write Cantonese in private of course
It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas!
> that usage is not uniform
Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn’t know offhand how they would even do it about a purely spoken turn of phrase.
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If they were solely written languages then you wouldn’t be able to, for example, read the text aloud, right? I don’t have any first-hand knowledge, but according to Wikipedia on Bokmål it looks like it can be spoken as well (Wikipedia uses a phrase “spoken Bokmål”), but without a universally agreed-upon and regulated pronunciation. Isn’t it similar to English in this sense?
Bokmål and Nynorsk are both systems designed as a common form of writing. None of them were ever meant to be a spoken language - they are "best effort" of trying to make a unified way of writing. That doesn't mean that it's not possible to "speak" them, as in e.g. reading aloud (though the intonation and pronunciation may still wary wildly depending on the speaker's actual dialect).
this energetic overview necessarily blurs a lot of distinctions when describing the changes in population and language over time. The Vikings (aka pirates) were a dominant form for a very long time, with care going to ferocity and travel skills, not fancy verb forms or leather bound books. It was literally larger and larger Feudal associations that led to merging into this kingdom or that kingdom, and not everyone wa…
> Along with Christianity came fancy verb forms I think you have that backwards. Old norse had more complex grammar. The grammar have simplified over time. Icelandic still have more complex grammar than other Scandinavian languages because it have changed less.
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The comparison is a bit flawed since there is no dialect continuum between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and there might have never been one. A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used. People write…
> A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera. > People write Cantonese in private of course It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas! > that usage is not uniform Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn…
A government regulating it by teaching it in school and actively using it in public would be a strong criteria. Alternatively, an established body of literature that serves as a model (that's how written Italian evolved).
> It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas
Yes, that's also what I said. However, any official announcements or documents are quite unlikely to use it.
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Maybe opening a can of worms here, but no... actually they/we didn't. 19th century scholars were happy to declare that the Sami were the original inhabitants of the north, but that had more with the fact that they preferred seeing themselves as the superior, colonizing culture, than with archeological and linguistic evidence. Being a native was not cool at all. It was awkward for these scholars to become gradually aw…
I didn't know that about the loan words, super interesting. I will read up on this topic. One thing I do know is that when adding genetic studies, it's also very complicated. The now Sami population at some point adopted a finno-ugric language. It wasn't only migration. (By the way the ILO 169 definition makes a lot of sense to me, because if you create a state entity, you now also have responsibilities towards the g…
this energetic overview necessarily blurs a lot of distinctions when describing the changes in population and language over time. The Vikings (aka pirates) were a dominant form for a very long time, with care going to ferocity and travel skills, not fancy verb forms or leather bound books. It was literally larger and larger Feudal associations that led to merging into this kingdom or that kingdom, and not everyone wa…
I can't find anywhere where the article talks about Latin as dominant. It talks about the latin-using Catholic Church as having been the dominant church . The point being that with reformation came translated bibles, but Norway didn't get its own. For the most part your comment is largely tangential to the article, where the rough sketch of older Norwegian history just sets the scene for why there was a growing confl…
The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English. Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know t…
In addition to what vidarh said - it's not comparable to Mandarin vs Cantonese, as those are spoken languages. Nynorsk is one way of writing (and reading) Norwegian, it is not a spoken form (nor is Bokmål). Some dialects are kind of closer if you try to "speak" it (read out loud, from e.g. a book), and some are farther away, most dialects contain elements where some words will fit better in one form and other element…
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Not being decimal is not the issue. The irregularity are special rules for certain numbers or ranges of numbers for which another pattern has to be used.
But... there is no such extra rules in Japanese. The grouping does NOT count as it is absolutely vital to make it possible to say numbers at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... there is no such extra rules in Japanese. The grouping does NOT count as it is absolutely vital to make it possible to say numbers at all.
A sibling commenter mentioned that there is a special word for "age of twenty"
The numbers (as in one, two, three..) are actually generally from Chinese, with exceptions (particularly where there are two options, as for four and seven), but counters (for smaller values) are generally from native Japanese and therefore sound different from numbers, and also changes somewhat with whatever it is you're counting. Japanese is so logical and well-structured that it appears that to compensate for that ease, you have counters.. (though we could blame Chinese for that as well, pre-contact there were only a very limited number of counter types (counter types are flat items, round items, long thin items, people, years..), post-contact there are hundreds (but fortunately it's possible to ignore a lot of them).