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Building Solidarity - One Word at a Time

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macron trump-enlightened

Me seeing this graphic in a Youtube video

"Buddha-type valve???" monke-beepboop

(These are the three types of valves you find on bicycle tires: Presta, Dunlop and Schrader, often also called French, English and American valves, respectively)

I somehow didn't know this before and I find it really funny

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Hi, I've been learning chinese these last six months. So far I've mostly used the system font in all apps and devices, so when I switch fonts I really struggle to recognize characters, even very familiar ones, but it's probably a very good exercise I think.

Anyways, just like with dislexia (I'm not dislexic) maybe the font can make a difference when learning new words. There's a reddit post that says so but eugh

Btw, I'm still not interested (right now) in practicing manually writing characters, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone yelled at me for not doing so.

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Their translations include:

Manga:^[I cannot guarantee that each volume has been translated in full.]

  • Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch: AquaSirena Melodio - Akvo (4/5 volumes)
  • Hakuya no NightingaleNajtingalo sub la noktomeza suno (1/1 volume)
  • Urusei YatsuraĜenaj Eksterteranoj (1/34 volumes)
  • Ranma ½^[I'm guessing ½ is read as unu duono?] (1/38 volumes)
  • Mirai no FootballMirai, la estonteco de futbalo (1/1 volume)
  • Sailor MoonMaristo Luno (2/18 volumes)
  • Fullmetal AlchemistŜtala Alkemiisto (2/27 volumes)

Bande dessinée:

  • Carland Cross (3/8^[Or maybe 3/7? I'm not sure.] volumes)

Other comics / graphic novels:

  • Heartstopper by Alice Oseman → Koro-haltigisto (1/8 chapters)
  • Espera Stelo^[This is an original comic by one of Esperaĵo's translators.] (2 chapters)

Live-action films:

  • Mephisto (1981) → Mefisto
  • Somewhere in Europe (1948) → En Eŭropo ie

Animated films:

  • The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981) → Sekreto de la tria planedo^[This is the only audiovisual production translated by Esperaĵo which they have not also dubbed. Yes, these people dubbed three movies and thirteen complete episodes of Scooby-Doo into Esperanto, and it sounds ridiculously professional. God bless the Internet and God bless Esperantujo.]
  • Your Name (2016) → Via Nomo

Animated TV series:

  • Scooby-Doo! Mystery IncorporatedSkubi-Du! Kompanio Mistero (13/52 eps)

Short stories:

  • "The Vampyre" (1819) → "La vampiro"
  • "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924) → "La plej danĝera ludo"

Audiobooks:^[The audiobooks are based on older translations, not Esperaĵo's own.]

  • Alice's Adventures in WonderlandLa aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando
  • Fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen → Fabeloj de Andersen
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-ende forms many (but far from all) ordinal numbers, and sju means "seven" and tjue means "twenty", which means that sjuende means "seventh" and tjuende means "twentieth".

...Now as you might figure from the slightly different spellings, these two words are pronounced slightly differently in more conservative dialects, differing really only in the place of articulation of the first consonant. The distinction between these two sounds is however highly unstable and lost in many younger speakers, myself included, leading these two words to only be distinguishable in context, if that.

The cardinal numbers sju and tjue remain distinguishable by number of syllables, since tjue has a little schwa on the end; however when slurring, or speaking quickly in a noisy environment, this isn't always a reliable distinction, either.

All is not lost, though! For there are still the variant forms syvende for seventh and tyvende for twentieth, from the variant cardinal numbers syv and tyve. These number words can feel kind of stilted for me to use, they come from the Dano-Norwegian of old and can therefore feel a bit old-fashioned outside a few set phrases (like "{til syvende og sist|to seventh and last}"^[equivalent to "at the end of the day"] or "{syvende far i huset|seventh father in the house}"^[an old man, esp. if stubborn; in reference to a fairy tale]).

At the end of the day, though, it's generally better to be clear in one's speech than to avoid using old people words.

My own idiolect also mergers /i/ and /y/ and has completely collapsed the pitch accent system, and also deletes some schwas here and there. These features may be a result of growing up bilingual. These idiosyncrasies of my speech lead me to merge words such as {tidlig|early} and {tydelig|clearly}, {å sykle|to bike} and {å sikle|to drool}, and more problematically I have merged the names of the letters I and Y, which makes it a bit harder to spell things out loud.

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I used to have an app called Mearka, which was a trilingual dictionary between Norwegian, North Sámi, and Norwegian Sign Language, notably including uniquely Sámi variants of signs.

However, I uninstalled Mearka at some point, and when I went to re-install the app, I found that it had been taken off the Play Store. Statped reports that "development on the Android version of Mearka has ceased", so... shame that I don't have an iPhone, then!

This means that for Android users, there is evidently only one offline NSL dictionary left, namely Toleio, which has a lot fewer features than Mearka, and also has a lot fewer entries in its dictionary. I can only assume this is because Toleio is a Duolingo-style app with a dictionary feature "on the side", and more specifically Toleio is a reskin of a whole series of apps teaching different sign languages — thus to keep the curriculum more or less the same between the different apps, each app avoids culturally specific signs, and expectedly doesn't teach "vulgar" signs, either. Nor does Toleio include signs like COVID-19, in fact I don't think a single NSL dictionary, online or offline, paper or digital, does — most NSL dictionaries, it seems, haven't been updated in nearly a decade!

And like, you wouldn't think it would be so much to ask for, to have

  1. An offline NSL dictionary app for Android, that
  2. Lets you scroll through all entries, rather than needing to search for the specific sign you want to see;
  3. Lets you slow down videos, favorite them and share them;
  4. Includes signs unique to Norwegian and Sámi culture, as well as place names and name signs, vulgar signs, and regularly-updated new signs for current issues.

And if I may be so choosy as to include features I've seen in some NSL dictionaries that I would like to see combined into my dream NSL dictionary:

  1. Includes still photos and diagrams, and photos of a sign's referent, rather than just videos;
  2. Lets you search for signs by feature rather than just by gloss;
  3. Includes glosses in both Norwegian and North Sámi;
  4. Includes Sámi variants of signs.

And venturing outside the world of things I've seen in extant NSL dictionaries, it would also be pretty freaking sweet for dictionary entries to have explanations of the etymology and the actual definitions of each sign, like how Wiktionary does for ASL.

And of course, all of this would ideally be FOSS.

Some of these issues are the result of the particular difficulties in making a sign language dictionary compared to a spoken language dictionary, but most of the issues, and the fact that the sign language-specific issues haven't been overcome, is really just a result of the lack of institutional support for sign languages. Like the existing dictionaries for Norwegian Sign Language, woefully incomplete and lacking in conveniences as they may be, are still far more than most sign languages in the world ever get to have the luxury of.

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Only done a few lessons and it's much better than the previous app I tried, Mango Languages (it was free through my library). Hello Chinese is much more holistic in its approach, and starts with more simple sentence structure and repition.

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这个多少钱?

{本|běn}:这个{苹果|píngguǒ}多少钱?
{店员|diànyuán}:{三块五|... 3.50 yuan ...}。
本:那个呢?
店员:五块。
本:这个{香蕉|xiāngjiāo}多少钱{一斤|per half kilo}?
店员:{两块二|... 2.20 yuan ...}。
本:那个香蕉呢?
店员:三块。你买不买{呀|ya}?
本:不买。我在学中文。

。。。
我:我也在学中文。

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As an exercise in thinking about a language, I like trying to translate something a bit silly, that I can't just look up. Even if the result is bad, it tends to lead in interesting directions as I try to move beyond rote memorisation and end up discovering some new aspect of the language.

Today's target was "beanis".

What I came up with for Japanese was お{荏々|じんじん}. As far as I can tell, this is not in dictionaries, but sounds like an existing word, おちんちん, with extra voicing on the leading consonant, and has "bean" in it, though jisho.org gives some other meanings to the kanji.

I have no idea whether this works or is (more likely) just gaijin nonsense, but I can't think of anywhere else I could possibly post this.

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(brief pause while I google this)

Mein Gott, I almost found one.

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Beware of occasional liberalism but yeah, I was binging through these, they were pretty easy to follow along on even with only a rudimentary knowledge of Esperanto. I notice that the channel originally consisted of what seems to be short segments of actual radio news, before it went inactive for three years, and then started posting new videos in this format about five months ago.

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only posting this because i want people to reply with "wow, you don't even use <really good app that I didn't know existed>?"

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57995993

Hitting the day streak of the year we’re in feels worth sharing for me.

And yes, I’ve actually been learning with Duolingo, along with some other language apps, and speaking with people in the languages I’m learning, particularly Spanish.

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Muzzy in Gondoland was originally created by the BBC for teaching English as a second language. The Esperanto version was published by the International Esperanto Institute in 1995.

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I learned this from this video (Note: contains 2000 year old bronze phalli) — although it seems like 祖 used in the sense of penis/phallus is a bit of a formal, literary usage, which is seemingly unattested in Sino-Xenic, so this information won't be of much use to you if you're, say, studying Japanese rather than Chinese. So it's only in Chinese where 祖 can mean penis, and only as a very sort of delicate and academic desexualized term for it in compounds like {铜祖|tóngzǔ} ("bronze phallus"), which was the term used in the video. That's my understanding, at least.

It is interestingly enough apparently believed (as one theory among several) that the right half of the character 祖 may in fact originate from an old pictogram of a phallus, "the symbol of the male ancestor"; on the other hand, the radical on the left-hand side (radical 113) on its own already carries a meaning of "ancestor" or "veneration", coming from an old pictogram of an altar.

As for readings, Middle Chinese tsu^X^ bears Standard Chinese and Cantonese zou^2^. For other readings and other meanings of the character (which are also interesting!) you can check Wiktionary — I've regurgitated enough of that site in this post already.

In any case, "ancestor" and "penis" sharing a character in Chinese reminds me of how in Arabic (and proto-Semitic), "memory" and "penis" share the same triliteral root, ḏ-k-r — that triliteral root, incidentally, gives us the name Zechariah through the Hebrew for "the Lord has remembered", and the Islamic term dhikr through the Arabic for "remembrance".

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To be or not to be? Arabic simply said :bugs-no: to verb to be :gigachad-hd:

Yes, we don’t use verb to be (in the present tense).

 

In Arabic, we have two types of sentences:

If a sentence begins with a noun (or pronoun), that’s a nominal sentence.

If a sentence begins with a verb, that’s a verbal sentence.

 

Let’s talk about the nominal sentence. It refers to the present tense, and does not require verb to be. It consists of two parts:

مُبتَدَأ

mubtada’ the subject of a nominal sentence (literally means the noun that starts the sentence)

خَبَر

khabar the predicate of a nominal sentence “the comment”. The word also means a piece of news.  

Examples:

أَنتَ أَحمَد

You [are] Ahmad ‘anta ‘aHmad

 

عَلي سَعيد

Ali [is] happy عalii saعiid

 

More examples

هَذا كَلب

This [is] a dog hazaa kalb

الكَلب سَريع

The dog [is] fast al-kalb sariiع

 

Arabic doesn’t have an indefinite article fyi.

Think of it this way: when you read or hear a sentence that begins with a noun, that is a "setup" and so you'd just wait for the "punchline" i.e. the predicate (خبر, comment, news).

This means you can express a lot in Arabic without knowing any verbs :cool-bean:

 

Verbal sentences:

 

A verbal sentence starts with a verb, and has this basic word order: verb + subject + object or complement.

فَتَحَ الكَلب الباب

The dog opened the door fataHa al-kalb al-baab

 

كَتَبَ الوَلَد اِسمه

The boy wrote his name kataba al-walad ‘ismh

 

More examples

وَجَدَ الكِتاب

He found the book wajada l-kitab

وَجَدَت الكِتاب

She found the book wajadat al-kitab

   

Choose the correct answer

خَ + ل + م + مَ + ف = ؟

1) جَلممَف

2) خَلممَف

3) خَاممَف

4) خَلمَّف

Transliterate your answer.

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