this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 38 minutes ago

Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I don't think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago

You could if we had won. /s

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Are you sure it wasn't "brzeczyszczykiewicz" (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Can we also get some translation or something. This might shock you, but not all of us are polish.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 32 minutes ago

There is no translation, it's just a hard to pronounce Polish surname.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I remember some video where somebody was showing an example of either a word or a sentence & showed: "mbrtskvni"

this language would make you think they have to pay a fee for using vowels

[–] [email protected] 11 points 12 hours ago

This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.

[–] [email protected] 180 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.

Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.

Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 hours ago

Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 19 hours ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

See, those are essentially the raw goods now. Finished goods are entertainment and the internet.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago

How long until internet slang/lingo snowballs out of control and becomes an actual language? I mean, it's already constantly spawning words and a diverse enough environment.
I notice sometime I lack an optimal word to describe a concept IRL that an internet term would fit perfectly but would be cringe or meaningless unless the listener was also terminally online. There's also stealing terms from other languages that catch on, but that don't work offline(IE. Zeitgeist, pantsdrunk, kawaii) that get spread around enough to be generally know, even if a bit odd.

Yes, including brainrot. Especially brainrot. It's not all pleasant.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, Welsh is even more special ...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago

It's actually not. The Basque language has zero relationship to any other language in existence. It's totally unique.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (6 children)

The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.

The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"

The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 40 minutes ago

Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩

? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that's for different reasons, same reasons as ck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Just come up with new letters, Lithuanian has 9 (ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, č, š, ž) extra letters. If a small language can do it, so can English.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

English syntax hard?

There's a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they're spoken in the English alphabet. Then people wonder why they're spelled like Ledoux and sound like Lehdoo.

Romance. Romance languages are the fucking reason you word slurring tongue twats.

But hey, at least we're not Turkik.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

English syntax hard?

Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don't really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of "famous blue raincoat").

That happens because any language is complex, there's no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won't be able to get rid of it.

There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.

That's something else, the spelling. It's a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you're supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

English syntax hard?

Yes. Sequence of tenses. It's harder than Latin. As in, what the hell does "future-in-the-past" mean?
Or tenses (+aspect+mood) in general, I guess. You guys have too many of them.

As for the orthography, you know what is to blame. The Great Vowel Shift.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

The alternative is Czech.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

A Polish colleague of mine once accidentally picked Czech in an online work training exercise and then spent the next 30 minutes giggling to himself. I asked him afterwards what was up "Czech sounds like baby talk"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

So I've heard. The feeling is mutual, oddly enough.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

Czech babies just out there speaking English. This is why we’re falling behind. We’ve gotta stop starting our babies on Czech

[–] [email protected] 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.

Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you're trying to spell/pronounce in order to get ... oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Ah, what you're saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.

For example, here's how to ask a yes/no question in...

  • Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for "yes", but still has this sort of question.)
  • Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
  • Polish - start the sentence with "czy".
  • German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
  • English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support "do", then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that "do" instead. Noting that semantic "do" also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support "do", yielding questions like "did you do this?"

Then there's the adjective order. In Latin for example it's just a "...near the noun? Whatever, just don't be ambiguous." Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don't you dare to switch them - "your famous blue raincoat" is a-OK, but *"your blue famous raincoat" makes you sound like a maniac.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

In Latin for example it’s just a “…near the noun? Whatever, just don’t be ambiguous."

It doesn't need to be remotely close to the noun lol

Though Latin syntax can get annoying sometimes (when do I use the subjunctive? What's the correct negation? Perfect or imperfect… maybe pluperfect? Which noun is this random genitive modifying?), it does make sense eventually. I guess that is also true for English, but I still mess up the tenses sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol

You can, but it isn't that common, it's even considered a form of hyperbaton (messing around with word order).

Note that those distinctions that you mentioned (subjunctive vs. indicative, the right negation, perfect vs. imperfect) are all handled through the morphology in Latin, not the syntax (as in English). And yes Latin morphology can get really crazy, just like Polish or any other "old style" Indo-European language.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 19 points 21 hours ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

drinks your einstock

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Lithuanian: Palaikyk mano alų.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 21 hours ago (2 children)
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