[insert witty linguistics pun]

I'm Cal (again) and this is a languages blog for languages people learning languages. available confidently in 🇬🇧🇳🇱🇫🇷🇮🇹, wonkily in 🇪🇸🇧🇷🇩🇪🇸🇪 and embarrassingly in 🇯🇵. ask questions and i'll do my best to answer! main: calalac

christophoronomicon:

natalieironside:

one-time-i-dreamt:

cwicseolfor:

robin-in-a-hoodie:

lesbiankiliel:

une-danse-macabre:

makeitdewey:

propitlikeithot:

bane-of-technology:

somecunttookmyurl:

russlangblr:

punkacebitch:

feministfront:

kafkaesque-meat:

superamatista:

transsexuallesbian:

distressedphilosopher:

Honestly “thanks I hate it” is one of the funniest phrases in the English language

i one time told my italian professor “grazie lo detesto” and she lost her shit, so it’s not just english

“¡Gracias! ¡Lo odio!”

“Danke, ich hasse es.”

“Merci, je déteste”

Tak, jeg hader det.

Bedankt, ik haat het.

Спасибо! Я это ненавижу.

go raibh maith agat, is fuath liom é

どうも! それが嫌い。

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411 Writing systems of standard forms of languages

.شکریہ! مجھے اس سے نفرت ہے

(shukriah! mujhay isay nafraat hai.)

kiitti! mä vihaan tätä.

תודה! אני שונא.ת את זה. Toda! Ani sone.t et ze

谢谢,我厌恶它!

Takk, jeg hater det.

Hvala, mrzim to.

Dankon! Mi malamas ğin.

Ευχαριστώ, το μισώ.

Gratias tibi ago; id odi.


squareallworthy:

squareallworthy:

squareallworthy:

squareallworthy:

squareallworthy:

Do kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts?

Well, you see, kids, almost twenty years ago Apple produced a portable audio player called – wait, I need to go back further.

Okay, so in the 20th century, the new inventions of radio and television were known as broadcast media – no, wait, that’s not really the start either –

Broadcasting originally refers to throwing, or casting, handfuls of seeds onto prepared ground, typically used with grain crops, which, uh –

– the Agrucultural Revoution, which begain circa 10,000 BC in the Levant, was when humans began preserving seeds for replanting –


[ french ]

[ english ]

apostaterevolutionary:

apostaterevolutionary:

I’ve always found it funny that every native speaker of any language will always tell learners how awful their language is to learn so question time

Do you think your native language is The Worst to learn?

Yes it sucks so much

No but only because a specific one sucks more

No but it is pretty bad, probably top 5

Nope it’s like medium at worst

Nah it’s easy why doesn’t everyone learn it

Other? (Explain in tags/replies)

See Results

Also if you reblog pls tag with your language and answer cause I’m really curious to see

Quick summary of the notes so far:

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[ I've gathered from learners that english is definitely Not That Hard it's just the irregular pronunciation of everything that gets in the way ]


petermorwood:

weaselle:

theheartspeaksloudest:

neue-muslim-lekture:

marthajefferson:

the origin of the letter 🇦

(from the documentary The Odyssey of the Writing, 2020)

Documentary is called “The Secret History of Writing” done by BBC

https://youtu.be/hbmyXjqXlEY

this has always fascinated me. I first learned it about 25 years ago, and ever since, every time I see a capital letter A  a tiny voice inside me goes “bull!” 

Fun to see an actual scholarly version of this, because I first read it as explained (-ish) by one of Kipling’s “Just So Stories” a very, very long time ago…


[ it's true ]

stenchkow:

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Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

I had this at my first job at a translation agency (one of the big global ones). When I first started there, post-editing (editing a machine translation) was about… 40% of the translation work we did. By the time I left four years later, it was more like 95%. I worked in house so I was salaried and this didn’t affect my pay, but we also had an enormous pool of freelancers who were being paid significantly less per word for post-editing jobs, even though they were frequently just as time-consuming as translation from scratch, cause you had to repair all the engine’s mistakes, which any half-decent human translator would never have made. And yeah, sometimes it would take less time and effort to just re-translate a sentence from scratch yourself

On top of that it was just boring - one of the joys of translation is struggling for a while with a tricky phrase or sentence that doesn’t quite translate into your target language, and then finally coming up with a clever solution that ticks all the boxes. If a machine has already done half of the job for you, you often miss out on that satisfaction

[ translation ai work ]

[ (vak)tijdschrift probably wouldn't include the vak in informal conversation ]

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