this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

*cries at Greek

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

but we can all agree hungarian isn't

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago

You could if we had won. /s

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Ä, ö, ü, õ, š, ž are just there to allow for phonemic ortography, biatch!

Though then again, I'm fairly sure that the weird Polish letters.

Also if your native tongue DOES have phonemic ortography.... Well guess how difficult it was for 6 year old me in Estonia to start learning English where the words are clearly not written the same way they're spoken????

It gets worse hearing older people here speak English because most of them did NOT start learning the language at age 5 or 6 so uhhhh... Yeah they expect the words to be pronounced the way they're spelled. Makes your ears bleed.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 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] 10 points 6 hours ago (2 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] 4 points 3 hours ago

I'm completely sure, like 100%, fully positive without a single doubt... that I misspelled it and I would never be able to access the server again.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours 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] 14 points 17 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] 192 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 17 points 9 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] 35 points 23 hours ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (10 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 2 hours ago (1 children)

Then there's Italian. We have less letters than other European languages (we don't have k,j,w,x,y) and we still manage to avoid shit like "thoroughly" or spamming letters. We have accents, but use them way less than in Spanish and no special accents or characters like ñ ç č ß å ø ö etc

Once you understand the rules is probably one of the easier languages to spell and pronounce

[–] [email protected] 1 points 26 minutes ago

Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

It's all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

  • Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
  • Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
  • English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
  • Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
  • Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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 1 hour ago

I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you're right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should've said "English" alone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 9 minutes ago

It's actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting "everyone" (more like "enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored") on the same page. Doubly true when it's a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there's none.

For English there's an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 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] 4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 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] 5 points 17 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 22 hours ago (1 children)

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

The alternative is Czech.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 21 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] 8 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, Welsh is even more special ...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

I think that "kokoa koko kokko kokoon" is a perfectly normal sentence and no one can change my mind.

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