Linguistics Thread

bybb

Japanese is interesting. Take Chinese, use it as one character set, derive another character set from that and then make another character set. Voila! You have Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana.
Whilst I can read / write Katakana and Hiragana fairly well, I am very bad at reading and writing Kanji.
There's 2000 of them and I'm not making much progress…
Oh how I wish I could learn it faster

Game Over
You'll find me on @LastContinue from now on.

WindOctahedron

bybb wrote:
Whilst I can read / write Katakana and Hiragana fairly well, I am very bad at reading and writing Kanji.
There's 2000 of them and I'm not making much progress…

I'm glad that I am using an alphabet… the largest one is Khmer (it can actually be considered an abugida), and it has only 74 letters.
And if we count the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), then there are 165 different sounds (my estimate).
That is 12 times as less!

Last edited by WindOctahedron (Aug. 9, 2019 15:07:38)

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WindOctahedron

Compared to English, Czech pronunciation is regular.
For example, if you see “e”, you always pronounce it as /ɛ/. “C” is always /ts/ and “h” is always /ɦ/, except when c is before h, when it is pronounced /x/.
Everything is nice and predictable. Irregularities are rare, and a lot of them are just changing the voicing…

…Unless there are transcribed loanwords, which bring unnecessary letters like “q”, “x” and “w”, and make everything more English and irregular.

Last edited by WindOctahedron (Oct. 23, 2019 13:30:56)

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-ShadowOfTheFuture-

I speak Mandarin Chinese at home with my parents, but I've had very little formal education, and I mostly only know some household vocabulary.

I study Latin at school; I'll be taking Latin II in September. There's a lot of endings to remember, but coming up with random sentences is fun.

██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
███     ███   ██   ████   ██   ███     ███
 █████████     █████  █████     █████████

“Though the seasons come and go, and sunshine turns to snow, we will always have tomorrow up ahead.”

-ShadowOfTheFuture-

CatsUnited wrote:
igbo is the best language that google translate has

Somali

██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
███     ███   ██   ████   ██   ███     ███
 █████████     █████  █████     █████████

“Though the seasons come and go, and sunshine turns to snow, we will always have tomorrow up ahead.”

bybb

WindOctahedron wrote:
Compared to English, Czech pronunciation is regular.

English is one of the most irregular languages.
Remember, you can't spell Slaughter without laughter

The “ough” is pronounced differently in every word:
Though
Thought
Through
Thorough

Last edited by bybb (Aug. 11, 2019 07:03:23)

Game Over
You'll find me on @LastContinue from now on.

WindOctahedron

bybb wrote:
The “ough” is pronounced differently in every word:
Though
Thought
Through
Thorough

"Ough (orthography)" on Wikipedia:
“A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode, coughing and hiccoughing, thoughtfully through the streets of Scarborough.”

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WindOctahedron

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
CatsUnited wrote:
igbo is the best language that google translate has

Somali

I know that I asked this question before, but…
Why do you think so?

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-ShadowOfTheFuture-

WindOctahedron wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
CatsUnited wrote:
igbo is the best language that google translate has

Somali
I know that I asked this question before, but…
Why do you think so?

Somali >> ii ii ii ii ii ii ii ii
English >> for me

██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██            ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
██       ██  ██     ██     ██  ██       ██
███     ███   ██   ████   ██   ███     ███
 █████████     █████  █████     █████████

“Though the seasons come and go, and sunshine turns to snow, we will always have tomorrow up ahead.”

Morimop

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
WindOctahedron wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
CatsUnited wrote:
igbo is the best language that google translate has

Somali
I know that I asked this question before, but…
Why do you think so?
Somali >> ii ii ii ii ii ii ii ii
English >> for me

“” for me
basically “nothing for me”
google translate is stingy

Last edited by Morimop (Aug. 11, 2019 18:15:13)

i literally have nothing to write here. huh.

WindOctahedron

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
Somali >> ii ii ii ii ii ii ii ii
English >> for me

I typed “ma”, then wanted to type “xa”, but didn't delete the M and found out that “mxa” means “what”.
Not an edit: Wait, mxa? I accidentally typed “maxa”! But it still means “what”.

The message above may contain wrong information, rude remarks, or something embarrassing to my current self. In this case, please ignore it and remember that I likely wrote it back when I didn't know what “respect” truly meant. I really hate thinking about it again.

Morimop

WindOctahedron wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
Somali >> ii ii ii ii ii ii ii ii
English >> for me
I typed “ma”, then wanted to type “xa”, but didn't delete the M and found out that “mxa” means “what”.
Not an edit: Wait, mxa? I accidentally typed “maxa”! But it still means “what”.

woa what

i literally have nothing to write here. huh.

WindOctahedron

In Czech, there are three types of consonants:
Hard: h, ch, k, r, d, t, n.
Soft: ž, š, č, ř, c, j, ď, ť, ň.
Those that are both: b, f, l, m, p, s, v, z.
Whenever there is an /ɪ/ or /i: /*, it depends on the hardness of the preceding consonant if you write i/í or y/ý.
You must:

Write y/ý whenever the consonant is hard;
Write i/í whenever the consonant is soft;
Follow some rules that determine what letter to write if the consonant is both soft and hard (more here).

*(I have to write with a space, or it will turn into an emoticon.)

Last edited by WindOctahedron (Aug. 11, 2019 19:09:26)

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WindOctahedron

So what are those rules?
It's simple: always write y/ý in these words (and any words derived from them):
být, bydlit/bydlet, obyvatel, byt, příbytek, nábytek, dobytek, obyčej, bystrý, kobyla, býk, Přibyslav.
Anyway, there's a similar list for every letter in the third group.
The funny thing is (and the reason why I posted this), the list for F is incredibly short:
fyzika (physics)
And that's it. Nothing else.

Last edited by WindOctahedron (Aug. 11, 2019 19:12:25)

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moresnet

bybb wrote:
Whilst I can read / write Katakana and Hiragana fairly well, I am very bad at reading and writing Kanji.
There's 2000 of them and I'm not making much progress…
Oh how I wish I could learn it faster

I taught myself Cyrillic and I can read/write it pretty well. I aim to someday learn one of those wacky Caucasian languages with like 80 different phonemes and barely any vowels

WindOctahedron

moresnet wrote:
I aim to someday learn one of those wacky Caucasian languages with like 80 different phonemes and barely any vowels

There was a language called “Ubykh” (it's extinct) that had at least 76 consonants (all pulmonic), and at most 6 vowels.
I wonder if there is a natural language that is the opposite: a lot of vowels, but a few consonants.

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moresnet

WindOctahedron wrote:
moresnet wrote:
I aim to someday learn one of those wacky Caucasian languages with like 80 different phonemes and barely any vowels
There was a language called “Ubykh” (it's extinct) that had at least 76 consonants (all pulmonic), and at most 6 vowels.
I wonder if there is a natural language that is the opposite: a lot of vowels, but a few consonants.

Oh yeah, that one! Exactly what I was thinking of.

WindOctahedron

moresnet wrote:
WindOctahedron wrote:
moresnet wrote:
I aim to someday learn one of those wacky Caucasian languages with like 80 different phonemes and barely any vowels
There was a language called “Ubykh” (it's extinct) that had at least 76 consonants (all pulmonic), and at most 6 vowels.
Oh yeah, that one! Exactly what I was thinking of.

At least it has only 3 or 4 grammatical cases…
Tsez has 64 of them!*
*It's a Caucasian language, too.

The message above may contain wrong information, rude remarks, or something embarrassing to my current self. In this case, please ignore it and remember that I likely wrote it back when I didn't know what “respect” truly meant. I really hate thinking about it again.

WindOctahedron

Let's bring this up…
There are two long “u”s in Czech - ú and ů.
If you want to correctly determine when to write what letter with as few exceptions as possible, you have to know Russian.
If there's “о” in the Russian word with the same meaning, write ů, if there's “у”, write ú.

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Lingual_Friendulum

WindOctahedron wrote:
I've noticed that the farther in history, the less are languages changing. Am I wrong?

That's because once the written form of language becomes commonplace, languages are less likely to change because they become (at least somewhat) standardized. When a language is only spoken people are more likely to mishear words and change their pronunciation or the context that they are used in.

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