A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe – “KEE-va”
Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah” Méabh – “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV” Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith – OR-la Odhrán – O-rawn Sinéad – shi-NAYD Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
Merriam-Webster poked at the Trump administration through its Twitter feed, appearing to take senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to task for saying that press secretary Sean Spicer was offering up “alternative facts” about the crowd size at the inauguration.
“A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality,” the dictionary company said in a pinned tweet that linked to a Merriam-Webster posting about how lookups for the word “fact” spiked after Conway’s comment.
Conway, counselor to Trump, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday morning that Spicer was offering “alternative facts” when he told reporters Saturday night during an impromptu briefing that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” (Aerial footage and Metro ridership statistics show that attendance was down significantly from President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.)
“Alternative facts are not facts,” Todd responded. “They’re falsehoods.”
Merriam-Webster also noted on Twitter on Sunday that the word “feminism” was getting a lot of attention in the wake of the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday.
“’Feminism’ is our #3 lookup right now. It’s been trending all day,” the company wrote.
After someone asked on Twitter why the company is pointing out its No. 3 lookup, and not its No. 1 lookup, Merriam-Webster had a ready comeback:
“Our #1 lookup is ‘fascism’, which has been trending consistently for the past few months. We report trends when they’re new.”
When you have to remind the fucking president what a fact is.
I know I should be on my hiatus but this is something I really need to share with you all; those who are intermediate can relate. Some guy called Marco Benevides visually demonstrated what it’s like to only understand 80% of a text
Here is 98% comprehension
You live and work in Tokyo. Tokyo is a big city. More than 13 million people live around you. You are never borgle, but you are always lonely. Every morning, you get up and take the train to work. Every night, you take the train again to go home. The train is always crowded. When people ask about your work, you tell them, “I move papers around.” It’s a joke, but it’s also true. You don’t like your work. Tonight you are returning home. It’s late at night. No one is shnooling. Sometimes you don’t see a shnool all day. You are tired. You are so tired…
bold = uncomprehended 2%
Here is 95% comprehension
In the morning, you start again. You shower, get dressed, and walk pocklent. You move slowly, half- awake. Then, suddenly, you stop. Something is different. The streets are fossit. Really fossit. There are no people. No cars. Nothing. “Where is dowargle?” you ask yourself. Suddenly, there is a loud quapen—a police car. It speeds by and almost hits you. It crashes into a store across the street! Then, another police car farfoofles. The police officer sees you. “Off the street!” he shouts. “Go home, lock your door!” “What? Why?” you shout back. But it’s too late. He is gone.
bold = uncomprehended 5%
Here is 80% comprehension
“Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…
And this really sums up how ***** annoying it can be to be an intermediate speaker. To be able to get the basic of gist of what’s happening, but never be able to get any kind of finer detail. I don’t think I’ve seen such a good illustration of intermediacy in a long time.
This reminds me of how I found reading A Clockwork Orange an interesting way of practising reading when you don’t know all the vocabulary. I haven’t done the numbers, but I’d say the first paragraph is between 95% and 80%, maybe around 90% comprehension:
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie,
and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our
rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though
dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers,
have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these
days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much
neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no
licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the
new vesches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
velocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other vesches which would
give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy
Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you
could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you
up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we
were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.
The interesting thing is that, because the book is a fictional version of English, you can trust as a reader that the author will make the story somehow comprehensible even though you don’t initially understand some of the words. (Although the book has been out for a while and I’m sure someone has made a glossary by now, that wouldn’t have initially been available.)
Whereas with a book in a language you’re still learning, you’re used to understanding basically everything when reading in your first language, so sometimes you’re tempted to go look every single word up, which takes ages and makes the story less fun.
So reading Clockwork Orange many years ago was the thing that made me stop reading books in French with a dictionary in hand. Instead, I started reading a chapter or more at a time and then going and looking up a much shorter list – the words that had appeared often or importantly enough that I still remembered them and yet hadn’t managed to figure them out from context. It was much easier to retain these words because by the time I looked them up, I already remembered what they looked like in French and had formed a couple loose hypotheses about their meanings. The ones that didn’t stick in my mind by the end of the chapter, I probably wouldn’t retain them even if I did look them up.
my copy of Clockwork Orange had a glossary included in the back, it wasn’t a first ed but it was a pretty early printing so that’s been included since way back, which doesn’t detract from the relevance at all it’s just… where’d you get a copy without the glossary
Science fiction and Fantasy readers have to learn a lot of slang and vocab from context. They have to learn cultural norms of the fictional world from context. I strongly believe that speculative fiction prepares those who read it for making connections from context in real life that is very useful for traveling or even just starting a new job.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
One day I was in the kitchen and I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for can opener. I asked my mom and she said “abrelatas” and I was like “no there has to be a more proper word. You can’t just call it the ‘opens cans’”
This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it.
I don’t get it
Please explain ;_;
There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” – cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” – failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" – signifying a gift.
OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.
The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.
Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.
If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.
Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary.
I also just want more. ^_^
Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).
It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected.
And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).
Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.
And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.
Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” 😉
Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on.
It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making.
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe – “KEE-va”
Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah” Méabh – “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV” Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith – OR-la Odhrán – O-rawn Sinéad – shi-NAYD Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
One of those has 9 superfluous letters.
Irish orthography is actually 100x superior to and makes much more sense than English once you understand how it works. You’ll pretty much never come across a situation where the same vowel combination is pronounced 560986095865 different ways [for example: heard, beard, heart, fear, dearth]. ‘’aoi’’ is always ‘’ee’’. ‘’
ái’’ is always ‘’aw’’. Now you can read those few words in the above list you can pretty much read 2/3rds of Gaeilge words correctly, even if you don’t know the meanings of the words yet.
This message brought to you by the National Committee for Please God Shoot Me When Monolingual English Speakers Talk About My Language.
at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents
Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.
whAT THE FUCK
I’m too tired for this
Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.
T’ be or not t’be, y’all.
Fun fact: Same thing happened with the French accent. French Canadians still have the original French accent from the 15th century.
Êt’e ou n’pô zêt’e, vous z’auts.
I’ve been trying to find this post for months. I’m freakishly obsessed with this and want the truth of what early colonists sounded like.
myblog 