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.
Being from where I am in the world, my words for ingredients are in Malay, Teochew, Hokkien, Tamil (there’s no order to which food items are in which language. They simply.. are. Some fish we use the Malay names, some fish we use the other names. Same with veggies)
And now that I am in N America I am re-learning some words in Cantonese
I thought I couldn’t get ‘kang kung’ here but learned it’s actually called ‘ong choy’
I stayed at a hostel earlier this week which had this whiteboard in the dining area with the greeting “welcome!!” in
various #languages. I was a little tempted to ask them to change “Aloha!!” to “Welina mai!!” which would be a better translation of #welcome. “Aloha” is more of a generic greeting. But, at least most people will recognize #aloha! #OleloHawaii#LearnHawaiian#hawaiian
What would happen if natural languages behaved like programming languages?
I’m no expert in programming languages, but I know enough to realize that the slightest mistake can mess up hundreds of lines of code. Luckily for us, speakers of natural languages are better at deciphering messages, even those abound in morphosyntactic blunders.
Irish names you’re probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them
'Do you know your Gearóid from your Gobnait? Your Fearghal from your Muirgheal? To the untrained eye, Irish names can seem like a daunting ambush of rogue consonants and surprise vowels.'
One of the funniest things when I was living in Indonesia: because Malay and Indonesian are so similar, I kept saying things to the motorbike taxi drivers that to me were just things like ‘hello’ and ‘I’ and ‘brother’. I was wondering why everyone kept giving me their phone number. Those words, very neutral in Malay, were actually total come-ons and flirty language in Jakarta.
Don’t say ‘aku’ and ‘abang’ to strangers in Jakarta.
If there's no stronger argument for the need to learn how to read Chinese, it is this! Two characters can have the same pronunciation and tone but mean slightly different things. I learned the character for person (rén) 人 and its radical version 亻as a kid, and now I know 仁 which means "humane", and the way the components fit together is rather poetic.
@henrikjernevad@thejtoken My formal specification journey is as follows, parentheses indicate dabbling only:
CDL -> SEDL -> Z -> B-Toolkit -> FDR2 -> (TLA+)
CDL (Common Design Language) and SEDL (Software Engineering Design Language) were IBM internal languages. CDL was taught in the Software Engineering Workshop that was rolled out across IBM. SEDL was a superset of Ada!
B-Tool's specification language was Abstract Machine Notation.
FDR2 was based on CSP.
NASA Unveils Design for Message Heading to Jupiter’s Moon Europa
The moon shows strong evidence of an ocean under its icy crust, with more than twice the amount of water of all of Earth’s oceans combined. A triangular metal plate on the spacecraft will honor that connection to Earth in several ways.
What's the best way to learn languages casually and socially? (as much as I hate being social...)
I've been seriously neglecting my Japanese practice :neocat_laugh_sweat:
I'm interested in lots of other languages too, currently Chinese (mandarin)
It would be so cool to be able to speak every language in the world tbh #languages#languagelearning#japanese#chinese
My brain melts when I try to switch between Slack, which uses Enter-to-Send and "Control-Enter" for a newline, and Jira, which uses "Enter for newline" and "Control-Enter" to save. It's tough be bilingual between dissonant human interface design languages.
Then I come to post on Mastodon have newline anxiety where I'm not sure if pressing enter will start a new paragraph or send a half-written post.
Long and fiery winter night it is ! User:Dragons_Bot is importing frequency lists in 500 more #languages from Unilex into #Lingualibre. Dragons Bot script is running tonight, editing Lili persistently. We then will have common words list for 1001 languages, ready for you to record. At step 3 of the Recording Studio, click "local list", then search List:{your_iso}/Unilex and you are good to go ! If your community's languages aren't there you can let me know below. 🎉 https://lingualibre.org/wiki/Special:RecordWizard