zompist bboard

ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ wrote: J'allerais là si j'aurai du temps. Je l'aime.
I'd go there if I had the time. I like her.

J'y irais si j'avais le temps.

Currently reaiding in a small village in se morocco. Most residents are berber speakers. Other speaker has talked about tamazight in central morocco but here they speak varieties of tachel7it. In marakech i also am learning it. No clicks in the language but in moroccan culture clicks are used for a ...

I was thinking more about a pluricentric language model where there IS no standard...I don't know how that would work. I mean German is pluricentric, but of course there is one standard. Is it impossible to have different national standards of Arabic, but also have MSA at the same time, or is that h...

Some of the languages I'm learning, notably Arabic, have pronounced diglossia. I actually like the standard High language as well as the non standard Low language, but I'm wondering if there's any real benefit or good side to having such a diglossic situation.

...damn. All this talk about Basque is making me hot and bothered. I should have lived in the Basque Country instead of Madrid.

All this talk about translation and writing down is parallel to my own concern, which is its impact on linguistics. We simply don't have enough, and may never have, enough documentation of a language to equal one speaker and the knowledge of their language that they can contain in their head, let al...

By being a historically small ethnic group, or being lukewarm about their "own" language? There are plenty of ethnic groups that have (or had) their own language, but the number of speakers is much, much less than the ethnic groups themselves. Just to draw some random examples: Manchu: despite bein...

Magnificent work.

Quick questions, I don't see je t'emmerde (screw you) there.

Neither niquer, like the band NTM.

Well if you wanted to write a story, heck if you wanted to write a children's story for your grandchildren, you would need to know how to use the passe simple.

It's not dramatic to say that colonialism went hand in hand with the oppression and disenfranchisement of colonised peoples AND their languages. What happened and is happening in Australia, the United States and Canada is not dramatic, it's apocalyptic . Hundreds of languages are dead or dying. And ...

I think they can be harder. I'd say that the difficulty increases the greater the distance from everyday use. So for me, Classical Arabic is not that hard because I use its daughter languages on a near-daily basis and the Classical Language still is used alongside and greatly influences the prose a...

I don't know a lick of Classical Arabic but I was discussing with my friend who is learning and I said to her that I bet 80% of the difficulty of CA comes from the way they teach it, because they focus so much on grammar and don't know or ignore the communicative approach or heck the last 40 years o...

As for verbs: I heard yesterday katmotivini (refering to a female speaker), you motivate me. Or another one, tlebt mennek trecomendi liya (I asked you to recommend me something). You slap MA prefixes and suffixes on and you have a Moroccan verb. Some nouns, quite basic, are well integrated and follo...

Words related to concepts that are foreign to the native speakers are most likely to be borrowed,then words related to more complex ideas like academic and legal terms; on the contrary, grammatical affixes, functional words and words related to everyday life(like those listed on the Swadesh list or...

For me, studying linguistics has impressed upon me just how enormously enormous languages are...I would argue they're our greatest cultural heritage. And the prediction that we're going to lose half of these languages that have gone through so much, surviving wars, famines etc etc and thousands of y...

Hi Arzena, I have no background in Arabic but I did study Persian, so I have familiarity with the Arabic writing system (with its Persian modifications of course). Thank you for the website and the books. When I lived in Spain I noticed there were lots of books in French and Spanish for learning dar...

Hey, I recently arrived in Morocco and will live here for about a year. My French is proving alot less useful than I thought even within the cities. For example in working class neighbourhoods the languages I overwhelming hear are Arabic and Berber languages. It's all good to know that French is tau...

Im korean australian kiwi. I was born in south korea and left as a child. My korean has deteriorated to deplorable levels.i can speak and listen but I imagine many learners are better than me. My mother is from gyeongsang and speaks that dialect. My dad speaks standard as far as I can tell. I live i...

Darija aka Moroccan Arabic شي ناس كيبدلوهم الفلوس [ʃi nɛs ki.bɪdːɪ.lu.hom l̞flus] ši nes kybiddiluhom lflus ši nes k-y-biddil-u-hom l-flus some people IND-3sg.-change-PL-3pl.ACC DEF-money Money changes some people. I share this (beginning of a Moroccan friend's Facebook post) because this is a comm...

Me enteré hace un par de días de la existencia del dibujado animado steven universe. De verdad, me ha enganchado a tope, aunque el doblaje al español de España deje algo que desear, no detracta de la cualidad intrínseca del programa. Ahora me toca a pasar todos los capítulos en tan solo un día jeje....

Pues vivo en España y mi mejor amiga aquí es alemana y ya estoy pensando (en serio) aprender el alemán, o sea si tengo acceso a una hablante nativa porque no. I live in spain and my best friend is german and im now serious thinking about learning german, i mean i got access to a native speaker. Tien...

El latín es el idioma más frustrante de los que jamás he aprendido. No soy mucho de quejarme, pero llevaba años estudiandolo en el instituto y luego en mi tiempo libre, pero aún así, no me siento cómodo a la hora de escribirlo, aún menos componer frases - nunca se me ha ocurrido semejante dificultad...

yeha but precisely for that! i donno. i reckon a lot of it (maybe all of it) has to do with the kind of people you associate with the language. and if you have good experiences with good people, that rubs off on the language. dutch is nice for me because my dutch friend is so nice and i associate it...

A good friend of mine is dutch. I love hearing her talk dutch. Dutch is the combination of all that is good and right in the world. The gyeongsang dialect of korean, that of my mums side of the family. Fuck that standard korean, saturi for liiiife. I really like the madrileño dialect of spanish (i l...

According to who? Ken Hale?