Good Morning #Canada
Or should I say Bon matin! Canada has 2 official Languages and most of us speak English (75.5%) or French (21.4%). But the 2021 Census shows that we truly are a multicultural society. Excluding English and French, 4 in 10 Canadians could conduct a conversation in more than one language and 1 in 11 could speak three or more languages. Diversity makes us stronger as a nation.
I'm a former #conlanger (a #conlang is a constructed #language) which got me into #linguistics, #languages and language-learning in general. I'm in a long-term, purely cerebral relationship with #Welsh, whether it likes it or not.
In June 2022 I stumbled across the r/Asexuality subreddit and found people talking about me. Of course, they were talking about themselves, but for me it was like a second awakening. On the #asexual spectrum, I'm specifically #anegosexual (a.k.a. #aegosexual) and some flavour of grey-homoromantic I haven't explored yet.
I'm generally #sex-positive, but I spent too many years being made to feel like shit by other young #gay guys who saw themselves as the only valid way to be #queer so it doesn't always come across.
The word for "forest" in some languages.
"Forest" in English was originally a legal term, denoting (royal) land set aside for hunting, not necessarily with trees on. Apparently, that was also how the Latin word was used in the times of Charlemagne.
Of course, English also uses "woods", and French has "bois", Italian has "selva", etc. But I'm hoping these are the most directly equivalent terms in the various languages.
I FINALLY understood the #Spanish use of pronouns at the beginning of sentences to denote ownership of something deep in the middle of the sentence!!! This use of pronouns is not like French or Italian, and it has been bedeviling me for months!!! YAY, I FINALLY get it!!! #Duolingo#languages#grammar
Hi #Blind#Japanese speaking community! I recently purchased the Orbit Reader 20, and it should be arriving by tomorrow. If I'm writing in Japanese, how can I tell if I'm selecting the right Kanji? Do the candidates show up in braille in an easy to understand fashion? Also, if there are any communities for blind Japanese speakers, I'd be happy to learn about those. #A11y#Accessibility#Braille#BrailleDisplays#NVDA#NVDAJP#Languages#LanguageLearning#JapaneseLearning
Random linguistic fact. The Armenian language may seem to have nearly unpronounceable consonant clusters, like in a widespread last name Mkrtchian (spelled also Mkrtchyan in English letters). However, Armenian just omits schwas in writing. Schwa is a central vowel, much like non-stressed A in English words America, banana or delta. If we write a schwa with uh (buh-na-nuh for banana), we'll get muh-kuhr-tuh-chian, with four syllables, not one, and the only consonant cluster being "rt" which is quite easy to pronounce. The Kalmyk language, a language from the Mongolian family spoken mostly in Russia, exhibits the same phenomenon. For instance, the male first name Sodmn is actually pronounced Sod-muhn. Some languages reflect schwas in writing, though. Moksha and Bulgarian use Cyrillic letter Ъ (hard sign) for that. Interesting that this letter actually was used for a very similar sound in Old East Slavic language, a dialect continuum that spawned modern Ukrainian, Belarusian, Rusyn and Russian. #Languages
The Rosetta stone has been the key to decrypt the Egyptian hieroglyphics system, as the same text is written in three #languages: #Egyptian, Demotic and #Greek.
Random linguistic fact. some languages like Castilian Spanish, Greek, Icelandic, Dutch feature a sound called "retracted S". to a foreigner's ear it sounds something in between "s" as in "see" and "sh" as in "she". If comparing those languages and some ancient ones like Latin and Ancient Greek, we can tell that languages featuring that sound don't have or didn't have an "sh" sound, so there is no "see-she" counterpart. Basque though is a very interesting exception from this rule: not only is there a retracted S in the language, but it has a three-way differentiation between S (written Z), retracted S (written S) and Sh (written X), at least in standard language and some dialects. #Languages
I found something interesting: https://wals.info/feature/31A#2/46.1/148.9
An (incomplete) map / list of #languages and their #grammatical#gender system. It is interesting to see that many languages don't have the grammar to address different (social) genders via #pronouns. Others use gender to distinct between other things (e.g., human vs. animal vs. plant vs. thing). IMHO, looking at all these different concepts of gender is very important when trying to make languages more inclusive.
Easy to miss in Mastodon's latest update, but the most-requested features are indeed coming "soon:"
"...quote posts, improved content and profile search, and groups. We’re also continuously working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive set of moderation tools, as well as removing friction from decentralized features. Keep a lookout for these updates soon."
While I have a workable grasp of #German these days (despite still not being friends with certain parts of the grammar), the biggest problem is that I still can't be as expressive in the language as I can be in my native languages.
The end result of this, is that I can handle myself perfectly well in bureaucracy, medical situations, etc, but when it comes to more "free form" conversations, I get frustrated pretty quickly. Oddly enough, it's a lot easier when I've had a drink or two.
The word for "we" in some languages. (Being Norwegian, I am giving more details of Norwegian dialects than of other languages' dialects.) Now let's see if I can explain this in a way that won't make linguists chew their arms off...:
Pronouns are very basic elements of language, and are very often irregular. Now, in terms of meaning, English "we" and "us" are really the same word - only different grammatical forms... 1/*
I have a #big#announcement: I am accepting #contributions to JokeBot! I added support for making JokeBot translatable into other #languages, and I need some help translating JokeBot into as many languages as possible, so it can be used by non-English speakers. If you would like to contribute, please see the contributing guidelines; you will see a section linking to a localization guide in these guidelines. Also, please make sure that you open an issue before you open a PR, so others will know that a #translation is a work in progress.
Random linguistic fact: The letter W was used in 19th century French so rarely that Louis Braille, the genius inventor of the Braille code for the blind, put it to the 40th place in his table of Braille characters. So, basically, his code for French goes: U, V, X, Y, Z, then all the letters with diacritics (which are quite numerous in French), and then W. #Languages#French#Braille
Random linguistic fact: Different languages have different set of articles, and many languages don't have them at all, that's why it's quite difficult to grasp the notion of articles for a Ukrainian or a Czech person, for example, as vast majority of Slavic languages lacks articles. but even languages that have articles expose some interesting features: in Italian it's normal to put a definite article before possessives, so "the my house" or "the his family" are usual constructions in Italian. In French you say "my house", but "This house is the mine", and the article is mandatory here. In Greek and Luxembourgish it's usual to put articles before proper nouns without any specific meaning: "Where is the John?" or: "I walked down the street and saw the Mary, she was running somewhere". #Languages