About Languages

I mean, that’s nice and all, but isn’t that a lesson we all learn as children, when learning our first foreign language?

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Sometimes something is so obvious and internalized that some people feel like it’s an epiphany when they think about it.

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-united-states-accents-and-dialects-180983591

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Interesting…

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Additional information, links:

‘Savvy’ shortcuts produce near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages

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It is sad that not all schools in all countries teach children a foreign language.

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bongjoonheaux

Me. Don’t ask me which ones. All of them.

dancinbutterfly
That was excruciating. Was that painful for anyone else?

sepdet
Since my grandfather’s first language was Yiddish with a Texas accent, and his Spanish caused Mexicans to call their friends over so they could hear him talk, no, it’s nostalgic.

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That was hilarious.

I went to see The Hunt for Red October with a friend who’s father was Russian, and I asked her if Sean Connery was actually speaking Russian, and she said yes, but with a Scottish accent.

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Anyone have a non-login-required way to link that to several polyglot loved ones?

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As road signs go, this one never fails to make me smile. It elicits the mental image of doofuses galumphing up and down the road.

Caution - Dips Ahead Signs , SKU: K-5888

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All I did was copy the vid’s link from tumblr.
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_sny1wxhm5 P1rpcwyj.mp4
Copy the link & remove the space I put between the 5 and P.

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It was, um, interesting to hear my boss Tante Inge speaking French with her Rosenheim Bavarian accent. I couldn’t reproduce it were my life to depend upon it.

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This was painful to listen to. I can now imagine this is how my english sounds to an english native :laughing:

Also his french was truly atrocious.

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iuliaolmeda

iuliaolmeda
Russian handwriting

notcrazyiswear
I’ll forever be amused at the Russian word “deprived” (лишили) in cursive, which looks like

esoanem

for people wondering how the hell that works

shieldfoss
I still don’t know how the hell that works.

counterclockworkminds
See, to me it looks a lot like ‘minimum’ in English cursive:

Ok not so bad right? But it gets worse…

Like… what even is this?

Can’t tell me that’s a word right? But it is! Sure you could dot the i’s, but would it really help?
source here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Handwriting/comments/1hgsc8/write_minimum_in_cursive_without_dotting_the_is/

shieldfoss
Yes. Yes it would.

squareallworthy

Wikipedia: Minim (palaeography)

barbaric-gentleman
Why the fuck would language evolve in such a completely illogical way like this

tuulikki
Humans invented writing as a way of communicating information and it’s pretty great on the whole but we maybe did not adequately prepare for depreciation in legibility

pudimdosubmundo
@official-linguistics-post ?

sztupy

merelygifted
I have a gift for languages, am of above avg intelligence, and took Russian at Wayne State University for two semesters. The easiest part was learning to create the many sounds which do not exist in English, nor in any of the three foreign languages I’d already studied. Learning an entirely new alphabet was not easy. Having to deal with a case system again, after studying Latin and German, was not easy. Learning to write Russian in cursive was a major bitch.

Mom stood over me as I did my Russian homework one day, looking at the textbook as I wrote my answers in cursive. She was astonished, so I turned a couple pages in my notebook, and wrote down each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet as they’re printed, then the cursive letters - upper and lower case - next to each one for her. She was suitably horrified.

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1000012498

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It’s all Greek to me:

Similar differences in how the language is written were too much for my 10-year-old brain to handle. :child:t5: :face_with_spiral_eyes:

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Regarding mediscript… in the Newton (the apple PDA released in the 90’s) community there were several doctors who kept using the device up until the mid-late 00’s at least (some time/date bugs started appearing after that) because the Paragraph Handwriting recognition engine (starting NOS 2.0) was so good that once trained it could recognize their shorthand scribbles with almost perfect accuraccy, and nobody released anything similar after the newton series.

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