The Innovative Usage Thread

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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Ryusenshi
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Ryusenshi »

Yesterday, a student saw me through an open window, and said to her friends: /temajaki, temajaki/.

No, this isn't the name of a Japanese dish. This is slangy French for "lookit who's there".
  • /tema/ is Verlan for matez. In my idiolect, mater is a colloquial word for "to gaze, to ogle"; but teenagers use it to mean "to look".
  • /ja/ is y'a, a common short form of il y a.
  • Il y a qui is more common, in colloquial French, than the standard qui est là, "who's there".
As you see, oral colloquial French and written standard French sometimes feel like two different languages...

Vijay
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Vijay »

A conversation at work today reminded me that the euphemistic term for a corpse in Malayalam is the English phrase dead body.

The other term for a corpse is the Sanskrit loanword [ɕəˈʋəm], which nowadays is apparently considered crude. So instead of asking "[ɕəˈʋəm en̪d̪iˈjeː]?" 'where is the corpse?' people say, "[ɖɛɖ̚ ˈbɔːɖi jen̪d̪iˈjeː]?"

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linguoboy
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by linguoboy »

"an avengance"

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