411–420 of 576 posts
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I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.
If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the most famous document written in (modern) English tells the King to take a hike?
Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parents complaining of the retro-influence of some common bastard children. :P Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_lan…
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I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…
> E.g. Handy for smartphone For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.
I say the EU should adopt the Romanian language. It's spoken the same way as it is written. That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))
It's not though. It's much more regular than english, but there are a lot of issues (which were addressed in the past). Take for example the sentence "Ea ia ia". It's pronounced /ja ja ia/. Some examples: * x exists and it's not clear if it's pronounced /ks/ or /gz/. * e is sometimes pronounced /je/ * h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. E.g. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think t…
Does the language actually have any minimal pairs where [h] vs [x] makes a difference? Most languages that have a velar fricative have a single phoneme that is either /x/ with [h] as an allophone in some contexts, or /h/ with [x] as an allophone in some contexts. There's no reason to reflect this in spelling if the distinction doesn't actually matter.
> I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
Serbo-Croatian in all its varieties is almost perfectly phonemic aside from pitch accent. Cyrillic vs Latin doesn't actually matter because even though Latin has more digraphs (lj for љ and nj for њ), they are unambiguous - there's no contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic is still not ideal because "дз" is a digraph. Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "ѕ" [д]зело for /dz/ though, if you want a perfect 1:1 glyph to phoneme mapping.
Cyrillic in general is surprisingly good as a "universal alphabet" if you also consider historical letters and not just the current ones. It has unambiguous glyphs for all labial, alveolar, retroflex, and velar plosives, affricates, and fricatives, a uniform way to represent plain/palatalized/velarized distinction for any consonant, and if you consistently use "ь" for palatalization of consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
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I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke" There…
> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German. We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.
If they train the predictive text function on swedish text, I don't know why it would do English-y things, and if they didn't train it on Swedish how does it work at all?
It's very surprising, and interesting, to me that this category of problem, in this particular context, is even possible
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Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to Th…
Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects historically because they are seen as disruptive to "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend to be more touchy about that.
We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff.
They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for some time nobody understood anybody (this is a slightly romanced version but it was a mess).
Some of the words made sense, most did not. They were published by an important organization in France as a dictionary.
We did a lot of great things in computer science - this dictionary was not one of them.
Reminds me of the story: > A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich, overheard the following: > Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?" > Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English." > Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?" > Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British…
I might regret saying it, but I think we as humanity should go back to wars being definitively won, rather than dragging on indefinitely. It's obviously a poor metaphor, but I'm thinking of something like the "Fifty-move rule" in chess - e.g. if no significant area changed sides in e.g. 100 days, then we officially redraw the maps (by treaty if possible), cease hostilities and let people rebuild and get on with their…
Made me think of this old joke that's been on HackerNews, Reddit, etc for years: The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that wou…
I think the conclusion is wrong; that sounds much more like dutch.
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Boy have they atrophied. Even as a German speaker in whose first language these words have current equivalents I'm not 100% certain when to use thou, thee, thy, thine etc. that still were part of the language at Shakespeare's time and have since been simplified into you/your/yours etc. But it's true, English takes this stuff in stride, with modernisms e.g. "sick" meaning something good gradually being incorporated in…
thou/you is formal and informal and the distinction largely depending on your relationship with the person and respective social ranks. There were times when one person (social superior) would use thou (informal) while the other (social inferior) was expected to use you (formal). So yeah, no hard and fast grammar rule on when to do it but would depend entirely on the culture and the speaker and listeners social posit…
Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you, started being used as a polite form as well (in French, like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".
Then, this polite form using singular you became so widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped, especially since English also had little distinction between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my friend, you, my friends.
Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou, sir.
This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with the current state, where there is no polite form and you is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a few areas.