Erika3sis

joined 2 years ago
[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago

The few points I'd bring up are:

  1. If you want to reach a high level of proficiency you should basically be in love with the language. If you're forcing yourself to do something, learning it won't come as easily.
  2. You should use a diversity of tactics, experiment, and find what works best for you.
  3. Comprehensible input is a very good idea. There are different standards for what makes for the best comprehensible input, but I would say you should focus on finding songs, books, comics, shows and movies etc where you can still get something out of them even if you don't understand everything, and beyond that learn not to expect to understand everything. Being around L1s can also be very helpful, but it depends on how you make use of their input.
  4. Define what you actually want to get out of your language learning by setting realistic goals. If you want to learn a new language because you hear it makes you less likely to get dementia later in life, then you might prefer a more game-y or puzzle-y approach. If you're interested in translating into your first language, then focus on understanding input more than generating output. And so forth.
[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Norwegian fаg (subject, discipline, etc) is cognate with English fack (sense: rumen) and Fach (method of classifying opera singers' voices), all from Proto-West Germanic *fak (division, compartment, period, interval), which is speculated to come from the PIE root *peh₂ǵ- (attach, fix, fasten) which also gives us words as diverse as fang, fast, propaganda, hapax and peace.

Å slutte (to end, stop, quit etc) from Low German sluten from Proto-Germanic *sleutaną (to bolt, lock, shut, close) which is where we get the word slot (sense: broad, flat wooden bar for securing a door or window) from. Believably from the PIE root *(s)kleh₁w- (hook, cross, peg; to close something) whence also words like close, clavicle, cloister and claustrophobia.

This being said, slutt datafаg is not really a normal way to say "graduate computer science". To me it reads more like commanding someone to "quit computer science!", more like dropping out than graduating, right? A more normal phrasing in my eyes might be, I dunno, å fullføre utdanningen sin i datafаg, "to complete one's education in computer science".

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Yes, the app Xiaohongshu, also known as Rednote. Although originally aimed at people in China, the app saw a brief flash of popularity in Seppoland/USA after TikTok was banned.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

You might as well. If it goes poorly then surely you can just get rid of it later, right?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wanna form a neolithic comedy duo with me?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

The first thing to come to mind is "The Virus" by The Halluci Nation. I can't guarantee that I'm not misunderstanding the question or whether this will be to your liking, but yeah. It's got some heavy themes around Indigenous history and current issues, but shining through the whole song is a message of hope, pride and resilience, which only enhances the bass drop.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

Don't eat the chili. They put something in it ta make you forget. I don't even remember how I got here.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

Hahahhahahahahahha, yeah marge as in margarine. It's not necessarily a standard term for it in my GenAm ass dialect but it is used in e.g. Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, and most notably British English, and I liked the sound of it, so I just decided to start calling margarine marge. Both Marge as in Marjorie Bouvier Simpson and marge as in margarine ultimately trace to an Ancient Greek word meaning "pearl", as do the names of pizza Margherita and the margarita cocktail.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

A bowl of rice with marge and shoyu

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 7 points 4 months ago

Wikihow article: How to make sex less painful

Painlessly in my bed, in the warm embrace of a loved one, it would seem.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Honestly though the Joan of Arc quote on that page is hilarious to me:

Mais, fussent-ils cent mille Goddem de plus qu'a present, ils n'auront pas ce royaume.
[But even if the Goddams [i.e. Englishmen] numbered a hundred thousand more than at present, they will not have this kingdom.]

I dunno, just something about putting corrupted English vulgarity in the middle of a French sentence tickles me.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Sorry, you've misread the page, it's actually claiming the exact opposite.

Etymology sections in dictionaries can be kind of confusingly phrased sometimes, so I'll break it down:

also goddamn, late 14c.

This means that the phrase "God damn" has been around in the English language since the late 14th century.

from God + damn (v.).

This means the phrase actually is, straightforwardly, from the English words "God" and "damn".

Goddam (Old French godon, 14c.) was said to have been a term of reproach applied to the English by the French.

This part is saying that Frenchmen supposedly corrupted the English phrase "God damn" into godon (and variants like goddam, goddem) as a derogatory term for Englishmen — apparently mocking Englishmen for being foul-mouthed or uncouth, i.e. that Englishmen say "God damn!" so often that it might as well be their name.

Hence French godan "fraud, deception, humbug" (17c.).

This is to say that that French-language derogatory term for Englishmen, about three hundred years after the phrase "God damn" first entered the English lexicon, came to take on a new meaning in French of "fraud, deception, humbug".

 

In most languages it's easy to tell where one word ends and another begins in writing, assuming that one has spacing or interpuncts or perhaps one uses some sort of logography à la Chinese or mixed script à la Japanese. But what about in speech? People will generally not make any sort of clear stop from one word to the next, in fact people will often use reduced pronunciations when they speak.

And this is why it's important to think about the methods that speakers of a language can use to separate words from each other. The process of identifying word boundaries in speech is called speech segmentation, and this process utilizes things like phonotactics and allophony, prefixes and suffixes, syntax, set or stock phrases, common contractions and reduced forms, intonation and pauses, stress and pitch accent, and simply trying to figure out the most logical interpretation of what one has just heard from the knowledge that one already has. Surely among other methods, with multiple methods working simultaneously as redundancies.

So the way I like to test this is just by writing out a sentence, and then marking down what the telltale signs are of where one word ends and another begins. I have attached a diagram of this, and I'd find it interesting to see similar charts of your own languages, or otherwise hear about the methods that your languages use.

When I say "by sound" I am assuming that you're all developing spoken languages as opposed to signed languages, but if there is anyone here who is developing a signed language, I would love to hear more about how segmentation works in such a language.

 

The types of words that might get one's speech stereotyped as "lazy" or "disfluent" or "uneducated" or whatever else if used excessively or in too formal a setting, but which in truth are vital for fluency and listening comprehension.

I dunno, this is just an impression because I don't interact much with the broader conlang community, but I feel like these words often end up being sort of overlooked by many conlangers. I certainly overlooked them for a long time myself. But to me these words make a language feel that much more alive, you know, that different people talk in different ways with different registers.

Do any of you have any interesting thoughts or experiences with these types of words? How are they handled in your own conlangs?

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