Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
Ryusenshi
Lebom
Posts: 189 Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2017 3:31 am
Location: Montrouge, France
Post
by Ryusenshi » Wed Apr 11, 2018 3:03 pm
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
Smeric
Posts: 2244 Joined: Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:25 pm
Location: Austin, TX, USA
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by Vijay » Sat May 05, 2018 7:35 pm
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]?"
linguoboy
Sanno
Posts: 3681 Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2002 9:00 am
Location: Rogers Park/Evanston
Post
by linguoboy » Tue Jun 26, 2018 3:19 pm
"an avengance"