81–90 of 98 posts
I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)
There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?
An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being i…
I'm half-Australian, half-Estonian, but don't really speak any Estonian yet still live here (sorry, nationalistic Estonians!). My wife is Estonian, and our nieces speak English to each other quite a bit when I'm around (and, I suspect, some significant part of the time besides that). People like me are definitely 'part of the problem' with the Estonian language being not as used as it should be, however outside of Es…
Not being an avid learner of languages, I have personally always liked the idea of an universal language. English seems to be closest to the spot at the moment. It seems that Esperanto has its most avid supporters in China these days, because they would like the luxury of having to learn just one western language.
Still, every language is also a cultural artifact the loss of which would be a bummer. Today we cannot read the writing of Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island, which is sad.
The recently deceased Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä once talked about the idea of two languages: the language of the heart and the language of trade. The former you speak to express the deepest thoughts and the latter to make deals with all of the people in the world.
Maybe sometimes in the far-away future we will all speak two languages, the heart-language and the trade-language. I don't care if the latter is English or Chinese or anything else as it's just about trade and utility. For poetry and confessing my love I have another language.
I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)
There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?
For an attempt at mapping not just standard languages, but also dialects that could be considered independent languages, see https://www.deviantart.com/totentanz0/art/Languages-of-Europ...
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This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that th…
> In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. French is definitely the language of choice for pretentious twits who like to do this.
It's always been a thing in our family, in my childhood it was Kswahili and French, the former because of my parents history and the later because of family holidays en France. After German/Russian/Latvian exchange students stayed with us there would be other phrases.
Nowadays I drop the odd "privyet" (RU), or "ca va?" (FR), or "" (BSL) but it's mostly domestically, sometimes that leaks in to the public arena ... does it offend?
Perhaps people aren't showing off but just doing something they think is fun.
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I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?
I don't think so. I'm British and know it as "borscht"; I've never (consciously) seen "borshch" until now.
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Switzerland has Romansh as one of its four national languages, though I'm not sure if that's the context you were intending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language
Interesting, I somehow had missed the existence of this even though I've lived a couple of months in Switzerland. Thanks for the link!
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'sproeiauto' is still legal, one of the few Dutch words using all vowels in a row. One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spellin…
Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.
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Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.
But British English could have. I mean it desperately needs reform, it's a mess. I guess the problem is the momentum of such a large population of speakers means this risks breaking British English off in such a way that it may eventually become too non-standard and British people become disadvantaged somehow.
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Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages. Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example, Romanian: borş. Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"): - "sh" and "ch", - "sh" and "t", or - all three, "sh", "t" and "ch". Or an approximation thereof. In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "…
My Russian teachers always used the old "fre[sh ch]eese" example for us English speakers.
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There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…
I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?