Here's a #linguistic fun fact, the #Arabic word for constitution دستور is borrowed from #Persian. And the Persian word for constitution قانون اساسي is borrowed from Arabic.
Japanese has undergone some titanic shifts. And it continues to undergo far more gradual shifts in meaning and usage. As an example, we need look no further than what the youth of Japan have done to the word egui (エグい).
A lot of us get stuck in learning Japanese or other languages. We get bogged down in the tedium of memorizing new words or studying dry grammatical explanations. Learn how sentence mining can help break you free from that drudgery and revive your love of language learning.
When a was peerie a loved learning Shetland dialect - what a didn’t know was just how many accents exist in this island group of ~23,000 folk!
If you’re interested in #shetland dialect check out the link to hear the various accents & sound files! It’s really interesting & I find it really comforting and soothing to listen to. #scotland#scots#uk
Is the #mondly language learning app any good? They have a very cheap offer right now, but they support a huge amount of languages which is suspicious.
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Languages: "Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”
This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.
The rise of the internet, alongside decades of American hegemony, made English into a common tongue for business, politics, science, and entertainment. More than half of all websites are in English, yet more than 80 percent of people in the world don’t speak the language. Even basic aspects of digital life—searching with Google, talking to Siri, relying on autocorrect, simply typing on a smartphone—have long been closed off to much of the world. And now the generative-AI boom, despite promises to bridge languages and cultures, may only further entrench the dominance of English in life on and off the web."
Japan maintains an "official" list of kanji. But some "unofficial" kanji are also in common use - and chances are you know a few. Here are some of the most popular that most people use and know despite being on the naughty list.
There are very few choices of online translation services that offer translations from and into #Tagalog (sometimes listed as #Filipino even though they are not exactly the same).
How few? #Bing and #Google are the go to online translation services; and that's about it. Popular neural translation services like Naver Papago, DeepL, and Reverso, are yet to offer Tagalog and Filipino translations.
However, there is one that is actually doing it better than Bing and Google, that is Yandex Translation — https://translate.yandex.com.
Translating Tagalog into another language.
So far, my only gripe is that Yandex translates it into past tense. It appears that Yandex still doesn't understand the Tagalog tenses in this translation direction (it does understand tenses when translating into Tagalog).
If you don't understand Tagalog, you also will not notice the tense was changed because the translation into your own language is correct as far as past tense is concerned.
Translating another language into Tagalog.
This one is good. At least based on what I have tested, tenses were preserved. Depending on the source language, the choice of words might be weird, but it makes sense regardless, from a native Tagalog speaker (maybe not for someone learning Tagalog, or Filipino).
Here are sample texts:
First, this is how it should be in Tagalog (compare the translation to this one if you're not familiar with Tagalog or Filipino):
> Hiniling ni Rielene kay John na bumili ng kanilang lingguhang pangangailangan sa supermarket kahapon. Pumunta siya sa pinakamalapit na supermarket ng isang mall; at pagkatapos ay binisita niya ang sinehan ng mall para tignan ang pinakabagong mga pelikula.
>
> Ngayong araw, ang mag-asawa na sina Rielene at John ay masayang magkasamang nanonood ng sci-fi movie na pinamagatang, “Hollow Earth of the Apes: The Scar Wars”.
English (source):
> Yesterday, Rielene asked John to go buy their weekly necessities in the supermarket. He visited supermarket of the nearby mall; and afterwards, he visited the mall's cinema to check the latest movies.
>
> Today, the couple, Rielene and John, are watching the sci-fi film entitled, “Hollow Earth of the Apes: The Scar Wars”, and are enjoying their time together.
Korean (through Naver Papago):
> 어제 릴렌은 존에게 슈퍼마켓에 주간 필수품을 사러 가자고 했습니다. 존은 근처 쇼핑몰의 슈퍼마켓을 방문했고, 그 후, 최신 영화를 확인하기 위해 쇼핑몰의 영화관을 방문했습니다.
>
> 오늘, 릴렌과 존 커플은 "속이 빈 지구: 흉터 전쟁"이라는 제목의 공상과학 영화를 보고 함께 시간을 즐기고 있습니다.
Polish (through DeepL):
> Wczoraj Rielene poprosiła Johna, aby poszedł do supermarketu kupić cotygodniowe artykuły pierwszej potrzeby. John odwiedził supermarket w pobliskim centrum handlowym, a następnie udał się do kina w centrum handlowym, aby sprawdzić najnowsze filmy.
>
> Dziś para, Rielene i John, ogląda film science-fiction zatytułowany "Wydrążona Ziemia Małp: Wojny Blizn" i cieszy się wspólnie spędzonym czasem.
Hebrew (through Yandex):
> אתמול ביקשה רילין מג ' ון ללכת לקנות את צרכיהם השבועיים בסופרמרקט. הוא ביקר בסופרמרקט של הקניון הסמוך; ולאחר מכן, הוא ביקר בקולנוע של הקניון כדי לבדוק את הסרטים האחרונים.
>
> היום, הזוג, רילין וג ' ון, צופים בסרט המדע הבדיוני שכותרתו "ארץ חלולה של הקופים: מלחמות הצלקת", ונהנים מהזמן שלהם יחד.
I’m looking for testimonials from Chinese people regarding their experiences with oral production during #languages classes. It’s to help 1 of my learners, I’m teaching French to adults in Canada. He has a PhD in maths and holds a management position. He arrived here at 12 y. learned English and has lived there for +20 years. With his position he must learn French. I think there is a cultural blockage (?) linked to being afraid of making mistakes, not knowing and it’s very hard for him to speak.
Please, #bookstodon and everyone else , recommend your very favorite books and other #information to me. I'll read anything, audio or ebook or maybe even paper #book, #website or recurring graphics or whatever.
Feed me.
Oddly many #indigenous#languages do not have gendered #pronouns and are highly likely to #misgender you on accident because its not an important thing to them. My partner has a friend in the Philippines who can't get her head wrapped around the pronoun discussion and why its such a culture war here. Many indigenous folks are now gendering themselves as they/he or they/them just as a protest against colonizer forced gendered pronouns.
♲ monads.online/
Looking for literature on German in the Netherlands for a sociolinguistics class next semester!
I'm especially interested the German-speaking communities abroad (who is part of it, what languages do they speak) & language ideologies around German in the Dutch context. Thanks! ☺️
Atlas Obscura's Dan Nosowitz set out to determine what the fastest language in the world is, and immediately encountered a problem: What does that mean? Number of syllables spoken in a set amount of time? Amount of information conveyed? Language that can be understood when cranked up to the highest speed? He spoke to quantitative linguist Francois Pellegrino about how experts measure all this, and together, they came up with an answer.
Are you starting to learn Japanese? Are you wondering whether you should learn with romaji (Roman characters) to help simplify getting started? Don't do it, you fool. Here's why.
"In a Native American language of California called Atsugewi (now extinct), if a tree was burned and we found the ashes in a creek afterward, we would have said that soot w’oqhputíc’ta into the creek. W’oqhputíc’ta is a conglomeration of bits that mean “it moved like dirt, in a falling fashion, into liquid, and for real.” In English, we would just say “flowed.”"
"A good, basic beginner’s Japanese textbook can lay a strong foundation for future success. And there’s one book that I’ve found stands head and shoulders above the rest."
Read our author's recommendation on this and other must-have Japanese language learning books below.
“Learning a different way to speak, read & write helps people discover new ways to see the world [...],” Matsakis writes. “No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.”
If someone calls you a ビッチ in Japanese, you may feel insulted. But are you being insulted for the right reason? Here's how some common "false friends" between English and Japanese may force you to re-learn your own language.
I’ve been listening to #Taiwanese language (Taigi) podcasts while running to help me stay in touch with the part of my brain that innately understands southern Min languages as a first language. I feel like I’m losing touch with it. Anyway, interesting content not available in English: heard a story investigating how the Taiwanese railway bento isn’t an ‘ancient’ food tradition like it’s perceived but rather one that came from Japanese colonialism AND food safety concerns. #Food
There’s a theory that if you say ‘tea’ or ‘thé’ for tea, instead of ‘cha’ or ‘chai’, you know the Hokkien word for tea already: teh
That those countries with this word for tea got tea first from Fujian ports; while those who say ‘cha’ or ‘chai’ got their tea through the northern land route.