zompist bboard

And of course there's also emotions we don't have good compact words for, generally because they're too complex. The premise of the charts is rather Whorfian about equating what words we have with what emotions we have! Here are just a few of the others I experience and lack short descriptors for: ...

I disagree with your analysis of "football league". It's stressed like "blackbird", not like "black bird", i.e. it's [ˈfʊtˌbɒlˌliːg], not [ˈfʊtˌbɒlˈliːg]. It's a single word. Both /ˈfʊtˌbɒlˌliːg/ and /ˈfʊtˌbɒlˈliːg/ sound okay to me, so maybe one's a true compound noun and one's a modifier noun and...

What the hell, man? I made a serious comment and added what I thought would be taken as a lighthearted, not very serious aside at the end of it. I know a lot of people in this forum are extremely fond of correcting people (myself included), but you're going pretty far.

Yng wrote:What? No you can't. -fucking-'s position is determined by stress and sometimes by morphemic constraints: *ab-fucking-solutely doesn't work, but abso-fucking-lutely does.

I may have exaggerated.

Just to point out: English also defines words phonologically, as well as syntactically. "Football", "blackbird" and "White House" are all phonologically distinct from "foot ball", "black bird" and "white house", thanks to the stress patterns. So, for instance, I'm not sure you can put anything betw...

All languages are equally ugly.

Looks to me like the "spend" construction takes either a gerund, or a limited set of prepositional phrases -- mostly ones that indicate location, I think. I also feel like "endure" is preferable to "spend" here because "spend" seems to imply a greater degree of volition, although you can say e.g. "H...

Wiktionary also lists "now" as an old meaning: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hw%C3%A6t. Could "what with" be an instance of that meaning, i.e. "now with"?

Don't some Swedes* exhibit masculine/feminine agreement in adjectives, e.g. store = m., stora = f./n., or is that mostly/entirely gone by now?

* Not counting the Swedes who clearly distinguish masculine/feminine in other ways, that is.

Also "you there" I guess. Or maybe that's more of a "combative pronoun".

I browsed up the porn.

Shrdlu wrote:Being Sweden, I can of course speak with an:
Southern Sweden accent
Northern Swedish accent
Finnish Swedish Accent
Norwegian Accent
Danish Accent
apart from
British English Accent
American English Accent.

We may need to hear all of this.

I'll have a look when I get home, if you like? That would be great! Now that we are discussing loans in Icelandic, I have a question about Icelandic that has been bugging me, but that doesn't warrant its own thread. Other western European languages have loaned some derivational suffixes that is use...

Oh, Icelandic has no doubt thousands of loanwords from various sources, but the number is minuscule compared to for instance the Scandinavian languages. I think I've read a figure saying loanwords make up something like 5% of the vocabulary of the language.

The lack of dialectal variation in Iceland is fascinating to me too. I think it has to be at least partly a result of the relationship Icelanders have with their own language. This is of course a generalization, but I would say that Icelanders in general are very proud of their language, and very pr...

Well, actually... Do Norwegians understand Ingmar Bergman's movies easily or is it a matter of acculturation? Like Portugese and Spanish? The biggest challenge as far as understanding Swedish for Norwegians is the vocabulary, while for Danish it's the pronunciation. Eastern Norwegian can be very ro...

Qwynegold wrote:grädde på moset – cream on the mashed potato – something extra that's like too much
kaka på kaka – cake on cake – same as above

In Norway we say "smør på flesk" ("butter on pork").

To my non-native self, the first sentence means "I insisted that they must be locked up (in the future)", and the second one means "I insisted that they were locked up (in the past)", and making the distinction is obligatory.

Faroese has a pair of sound changes that are very roughly:
Ø > ggj / V[+long][+front]_#
Ø > gv / V[+long][-front]_#

Examples: oy > oyggj, trú > trúgv

<ggj> is pronounced [dʒː].

For the Dutch haters: I'm with you on the Randstad accents (the four largest Dutch cities and their immediate surroundings, basically), which is probably what you think of when you think of Dutch. But please, give it another chance! Standard Flemish, for instance, is so soft and gentle, it's imposs...

Norwegian: Du høres ikke [X] ut du hør-e-s ikke [X] ut 2SG hear-PRES-PASS NEG [X] out Lit. "You aren't heard [X] out". I know the "out" at the end is found in many similar constructions in other Germanic languages, but I've always found it to be very odd. Du låter/lyder ikke [X] ("You don't sound [X...

After some more searching, there's apparently also "base", "baske" and "bure". I've never heard any of those before. What's funny about these is that they all describe essentially the same thing, so it's a pretty different phenomenon from the "X words for snow" thing, which is of course supposed to ...

Oh, yeah. How's the corresponding vocabulary on the other side of the border? :D I grew up with "mula". The ones I already knew about were "kryne", "dynke"/"dønke" and "døpe", although where I'm from all three of those could be used for slightly different ways of rubbing snow in people's faces/neck...

Who cares? In Swedish we have a hundred words for rubbing snow in someone's face. 8) This is pretty neat, though. Inspiring, definitely. Not necessarily for snow, but for anything important to the culture of one's people. ... And no, rubbing snow in someone's face isn't important to Swedish culture...

Some "Norwegian" from an X-Files episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDe0xQN1XSE