551–560 of 605 posts
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> Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy. I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.
Nah, the sign language really is different.
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Why restrict your kid's knowledge? I know about plenty of people in plenty of countries.
Did you have to read books about Slovenian history in school? There's not enough time to include everything about everyone. The history of the descendants of US slaves might be more interesting to people because of our cultural reach, but it's not necessary for Slovenian kids to learn except as an example of a well documented protest movement.
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We have many French cultures in Canada besides Quebecois. There are Acadian people in The Maritimes they are not Quebecois many forced to flee to Louisiana and are called Cajuns. Non-Quebecois French people in Ontario and the prairies, plus Metis (French+First Nations) on the prairies too. Other distinct cultures in Canada would be Newfoundland a separate nation for years. Plus all the First Nations across Canada and…
And none of those cultures have cultures nearly as strong as the Quebecois, which is basically a global cultural brand at this point.
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Did you have to read books about Slovenian history in school? There's not enough time to include everything about everyone. The history of the descendants of US slaves might be more interesting to people because of our cultural reach, but it's not necessary for Slovenian kids to learn except as an example of a well documented protest movement.
Serious question: does Slovenia have civil rights events in its history comparable to those in the USA? Because, try as I might, I can't think of another country with as serious a history of civil rights (abuses and promotion) than the USA - I'd love to hear of an underrated civil rights movement in Slovenia.
In my country (Brazil if you must know) the cultural avalanche that comes from the US is such that some people genuinely admire the US civil rights movement and its leaders, but will not tolerate anything similar locally. Such is the power of propaganda: you get tied up in the problems of the US and ignore your own.
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> If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong. Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.
This only serves to form unnecessary barriers. If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off. History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not) The rest is just about which language and who chooses. The only thing this…
Would it? It would matter which language. It'd benefit those most familiar with it today.
People have been laughed at for their accents when learning a language. How does this help?
You can't just flip a switch. It'd create a huge inequality divide moreso than today.
Some countries are surviving because they use a different language that's not English i.e. less impact from globalization.
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Serious question: does Slovenia have civil rights events in its history comparable to those in the USA? Because, try as I might, I can't think of another country with as serious a history of civil rights (abuses and promotion) than the USA - I'd love to hear of an underrated civil rights movement in Slovenia.
You see, that's the whole issue right there. Slovenia has its own history, its own problems, and its own heroes. Those things are important for the Slovenian people, not the problems created and sort of solved by the US. In my country (Brazil if you must know) the cultural avalanche that comes from the US is such that some people genuinely admire the US civil rights movement and its leaders, but will not tolerate any…
America is good at one thing: being very loud, when everyone else isn't. It's a pity that we therefore associate being loud as being American...
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English too, is a mix of foreign languages. Only dead languages don't evolve. Italian is a descendant of the Latin language, which itself borrowed extensively from Greek. What is so special about today's Italian language that it should by all means be preserved in it's current form without continuing to borrow from foreign languages? European languages borrow from English because the US offers so much that we volunta…
The weirdest thing about this sensationalist proposal is that English was born out of Latin and there are a number of English words which are a letter removed from their Italian counterpart. The example in the article (bru-shetta/bru-sketta) highlights the absurd pedantic nature of this proposal. I truly weep for the world which we seem to have created.
On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic. Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved. How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy? On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No of…
> Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved A counter to this is the Académie Française [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
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This is an artefact of how Germanic languages can often just glue words together without explicit connective words "Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese. But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (ligh…
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"