The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby JackFrost » 2018-05-06, 16:15

vijayjohn wrote:True, but Houston is even bigger and more cosmopolitan than Austin is...and also used to be the state capital. Both before and after it changed to Austin. :P

Yeah, only because they realized it went against the American tradition of choosing small cities as state capitals.

You know, just to confuse the Europeans.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-05-06, 19:26

Nah, the history of Texas is way sillier than that. I mean, it involves a former Senator from Tennessee who dressed as a hunter and ran off to Texas without his kids just because he lost an election! :lol:

Basically, two brothers no one knows or cares about anymore got Texas to use Houston as its capital. Then this huge asshole who happened to be the first vice president (and second president) of Texas was like "no, let's move it to Austin instead!" Unsurprisingly, lots of people were pissed off at him, and the first president regained power but kept moving the capital. Finally, the fourth president and Congress went "fuck it, let's just keep it in Austin," and it's been in Austin ever since.

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby Naava » 2018-05-06, 19:42

Apparently Spanish moss is called naavatillandsia in Finnish. Hmmm...

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby linguoboy » 2018-05-22, 21:50

(en-us) case quarter a single 25¢ piece as opposed to a combination of coins totalling 25¢

This is an odd word to me, since IMD "quarter" means only "25¢ piece", not any equivalent combination of coins. That is, if I asked someone for "a quarter" and they gave me, say, a dime and three nickles, I'd assume they (a) hadn't heard me or (b) had and were being passive-aggressive.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-05-22, 23:35

The same is true IMD. I guess I would have either assumed they didn't actually have a (case) quarter and were making up the difference with the change they did have, or just been puzzled (but perhaps taken it anyway. I suppose it depends on context :P).

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby JackFrost » 2018-05-22, 23:52

That's a way to think of it... Like, if I were asked if I have a quarter, but I don't have a single coin worth that much, I'd try to make it up combining smaller coins together. Practically the same thing.

I'd assume they (a) hadn't heard me

Yet, they gave you 25 cents nevertheless. Sounds like they understood well enough.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-05-23, 0:44

JackFrost wrote:Like, if I were asked if I have a quarter, but I don't have a single coin worth that much, I'd try to make it up combining smaller coins together. Practically the same thing.

Not necessarily. For example, don't some pay phones only accept quarters? Besides, coins have other purposes besides just paying for things. For example, today at work, I had to replace the batteries in my keyboard. The way we have to do this is by using a coin to open up the part of the keyboard with the batteries in it (I'm not really sure how to explain this, but trust me, you need to use a coin if you want to replace the batteries! :P).

I'm pretty sure the first time I had to do this, I asked my manager for help, and he said, "Do you have a quarter?" In that context, if I'd instead given him a dime and three nickels, he would have been justifiably unimpressed. (To be fair, though, it would probably still be possible to use any one of those coins).

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby Olinguito » 2018-05-27, 17:07

get-at-able
(adj)
accessible

Apparently it’s a British informal word, but I had literally never heard of it before, only learning about its existence in the course of trying to solve a cryptic crossword (“Buy something at a furniture shop within easy reach (3-2-4)”).
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby linguoboy » 2018-05-30, 16:44

(en-us) subtweet
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby linguoboy » 2018-06-04, 20:00

(en) curtilage
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby linguoboy » 2018-06-29, 18:00

(en) dark pattern
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby Naava » 2018-06-29, 18:35

(fi) kurri - skimmed milk

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2018-07-02, 18:22

linguoboy wrote:(en-us) subtweet
I learned the real meaning of this one recently after having heard it before and mistaking it as simply "a reply to a main tweet" instead of something more like vaguebooking.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-07-02, 18:34

I had to look up both subtweet and vaguebook because I don't have Facebook and my dad blocked Twitter on my computer years ago and never understood that he forgot to unblock it. :P

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby linguoboy » 2018-07-02, 19:20

Another Internet term I learned recently is submarining, which is kind of the opposite of ghosting.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2018-07-03, 11:38

Lately I've realized I love London Multicultural English and have learned too many words from it to list, but my favourite has to be mandem for "them (m.)" and gyaldem for "them (f.)".
linguoboy wrote:Another Internet term I learned recently is submarining, which is kind of the opposite of ghosting.
I've learned to be more tolerant of this behaviour because IME it often has to do with some kind of mental health issue. Of course, sometimes it's just attributable to being a fuckperson who doesn't care about the feelings of others.
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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby Michael » 2018-07-09, 16:29

(nap) trascuratézza procrastination
(it) trascuratezza id

mōdgethanc wrote:Lately I've realized I love London Multicultural English and have learned too many words from it to list, but my favourite has to be mandem for "them (m.)" and gyaldem for "them (f.)".

<record stops playing>
Wait, what? :o
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
Every human being is hostage to their own deeds.

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby IpseDixit » 2018-07-09, 17:09

Michael wrote:(it) trascuratezza id


Uhm no. It means carelessness, negligence.

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-07-09, 17:30

Michael wrote:
mōdgethanc wrote:Lately I've realized I love London Multicultural English and have learned too many words from it to list, but my favourite has to be mandem for "them (m.)" and gyaldem for "them (f.)".

<record stops playing>
Wait, what? :o

I may be wrong, but I think London Multicultural English is mostly based on something called "UK West Indian English" or something like that, which in turn I basically think of as Jamaican Creole/Patois/Patwa as spoken (by Jamaican immigrants and their families) in the UK. I think I could see something like this happening in it.

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Re: The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

Postby ceid donn » 2018-07-09, 22:29

vijayjohn wrote:
OldBoring wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
OldBoring wrote:Or maybe the directors wrote "crick" in the script and the actor followed what was written.

Maybe he was possessed by the spirit of an old-timey prospector who'd died on the very spot they later built the soundstage just for the time it took to say that one word.

Are you trolling or what? Isn't it likely that authors of a sitcom or movie directors aren't that accurate when portraying a character's dialect/accent, and so they write the script, and actors are supposed to follow the script?

It can be, but it's perhaps not very likely in this case since crick apparently is found in Texas, too.

To be fair, though, I'm not sure I would say Galveston is rural per se (it is the 68th biggest city in Texas), though it is much, much smaller than Austin (for example). Houston is obviously not rural, being the biggest city in the state.


I know this was from a couple months back but I read through this and was just wtf-ing through the whole thing and now I just gotta vent.

1) Galveston, where I attended middle-thru-high school, is definitely not rural. It's a port city. It is part of the greater Houston area shipping and fishing industry. It has a large UT medical center and a marine biology research center. It has its own Mardi Gras. It has beach-side condos, surf shops, public transportation and plenty of civil planning. It's small because it's built on a freaking sand bar. How many people can you realistically expect to live on a sand bar?

2) There is no significant difference between Houston (where I went to uni) and Galveston accents. However, Galveston is somewhat distinct from Houston because being so much smaller, the cultural presence of African Americans, Cajuns and Creoles, and various immigrants (when I lived there this included Jamaicans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese and even Greeks and Serbians, among others, but I'm sure the make-up of the immigrant communities have changed a lot since) is more visible and has more influence over the city's dominant culture than in Houston and this does influence local speech there. The reason why I never (thankfully) picked up a proper (*cough* white American) "Texas" accent is largely because I spent so much of my younger years here in Texas hanging around people who were not of that dominantly white and dominantly US-born demographic.

3) In all the time I lived in East Texas I don't think I've ever heard any born-and-raised East Texan say "crick." Even Kelley Lancaster from Nacogdoches County, Texas (or "the sticks" as Kelley like to called it), one of my more colorful neighbors from when I was living in Montrose, Houston, didn't say "crick" and he had the most "rural" East Texas accent humanly possible. The only people I've met here in Texas who say that were from either Missouri and somewhere in the Ohio Valley--this was something I usually take note of because when my family moved from Southern California to Columbia, Missouri for a couple years, I was confused by how some people there used "crick" and it's always been an oddity to me. I have no idea why writers and producers would want to interject that pronunciation into TBBT except maybe they thought it would play well to their audience's preconceptions of a "country bumpkin" stereotype that apparently Sheldon Cooper's family is suppose to be. You think those people care more about accuracy than laughs? Please. :roll:

Ok, you folks can have this thread back. I'm done here.


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