zompist bboard

हम कुछ अद्यतन साइट के लिए कर रहे हैं. हम जल्द ही वापस हो सकता है, आपके धैर्य के लिए धन्यवाद करेंगे. To make it worse the Hindi text is quite ungrammatical and looks machine translated. So no native Hindi speaker ever saw that message. The English, Spanish, Hindi led me to believe maybe someone just...

It's made worse by pronouncing it as a native Portuguese word. I remember meeting an [udsɒ̃], and it took me a while to figure it out. I had the same problem once with a [vagiˈneχ]. I had to see it written before it made any sense. I'm going to go on an extreme guess and suggest that this is an ove...

Nobody's yet mentioned the weird Brazilian habit of using pseudo-English surnames ending in -son as male personal names as a comparison? I've met and worked with a Jackson, an Eddyson, a Ramson, an Anderson, and there's a footballer with the first name Richerlyson (sp?). It's made worse by pronounc...

In both Hindi/Urdu and Tamil, the standard phrasing of such questions would be "waffles want-INTERROG or pancakes want-INTERROG", so 'yes' is no longer a valid answer. You could however phrase it as in the english example you give with just one instance of "want" in which case 'yes' is a technically...

These rituals, for the individual, proved membership of a certain class, and for society as a whole had a magical power to prevent social and cultural degradation and maintain the value of society in the eyes of the gods and ancestors. Is it different for Sanskrit? Nope. That's a pretty accurate de...

Well, we also say "American English" and "British English", despite the obvious differences between varieties of each. Just as there's no objective definition of "language" as a count noun, there's no objective definition of "English" as one either. True, but I think the assumption of a pan-Indian ...

I am often confused by the use of the term Indian English as opposed to Indian English es . There's probably as much variation among various Indian variants of the language than between any of them and say RP. Very broadly, I'd break it up as South Indian English, Bengali English and North Indian va...

GrinningManiac wrote:

Ean wrote:when is dog?

Whoops. I meant "How much is the dog" but "When is dog" is quite funny so I'll pretend that was deliberate.

American English with its frequent /t/ -> /d/ will do that to you

Is there such a thing as useful competence in Sanskrit? The aim of studying dead prestige languages has very little to do with being able to speak them. I'm not talking about speech (there are some crazy spoken Sanskrit revivalists out there, but in all likelihood it was never a spoken language, ex...

@Pthug, I agree, sometimes I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We have gone from teaching an overly prescriptivist Latin based English grammar to not teaching any grammar to the extent that even simple grammatical terms like tense and aspect are something most people are c...

I actually just happened to see Ashmoon's locked thread about learning Spanish through immersion from a "basic Spanish" vocabulary jumping board. So, I thought of sharing this interesting book , written shortly after WW 2, so that's got to count for something of course, but the author made a similar...

The spoken language(s) of the Indus Valley civilization and some readers if the seals are indeed language and they had a script.

In Devanagari, the 'top bar' is written after the letters themselves have been written -- i.e., it's an added final step in Devanagari which other (related) Indian scripts don't have. Minor nitpick, while the order of writing the characters and drawing the line after the word is completed is correc...

What would be interesting is how the index is called in languages where it's impolite to point fingers at something/someone. Is it still the "pointing finger", since that seems to be very common, too? Well, it's impolite in German culture and even more so in Russian culture (in German culture, it's...

Tamil:
ஆள்காட்டி விரல் (Person-pointing finger)
நடுவிரல் (middle-finger)
மோதிர விரல் (ring finger)
சுண்டு விரல் (tiny/coiled finger = little finger)
கட்டைவிரல் (stump/plank-finger = thumb)

I knew, that my translation from Bengali would be messed up by false friends from Hindi. নিলাম in Hindi means auction, and আদি which means source also means ancient which is the more common (virtually the only) sense when the word is used in Hindi. But @Aeetlrcreejl, what does "আসল" mean in the pass...

Done. Sent on to jmcd. This was weird.

Zayk wrote:Maybe I'm just being impatient, but I submitted my translation a month and a half ago.

Well, I signed up for this two months ago, and still haven't seen my text, so no, I don't think you're being impatient

not really -- vegans are denying food to animals. That's absurdly stupid. And, there is at least an argument to be made that stunning and painlessly killing an animal raised on a farm is better than both, factory farmer animals tortured all their lives and killing animals in a strange brutal way by...

Why is a cultural heritage considered inherently valuable? I agree that culture is always in flux anyway, and trying to preserve dying cultures when the "inheritors"/"descendants" are willingly abandoning is an activity which needs to be justified. However, I think the process of having a historica...

That doesn't really seem as likely to me, because Korean does have phonemic aspirated stops. Yeah, but the thing is english doesn't mark aspiration orthographically, so a lot of L2 learners (especially if their native languages have aspirated/unaspirated pairs which are written differently just lea...

It probably also has to do with the fact that english initial <p>'s are /p^h/, which makes it sound closer to /f/ to speakers who are used to hearing only unaspirated <p>.

Aeetlrcreejl wrote:I might be a little late in translating - the place where I am doesn't have Internet.

Hurry up Aeetircreejl, I'm going to be travelling on Thursday and Friday. Let's try to finish it by month end.

I think I'm going to forget all the Bengali that I brushed up for this thing before I get the text.

brandrinn: My point was sort of based on my experience of English in India. I think the problem is that mimicking "native" pronunciation is often seen as an end unto itself in a lot of ESL courses, which I've never felt as being worth the amount of effort that people seem to put into it. This extrem...