Wanderlust support group 5

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby linguoboy » 2019-05-10, 14:22

Vlürch wrote:I'll also never get how people can seriously call West Virginia "southern" except for historical reasons... but that's kinda like Finland supposedly being in western Europe rather than eastern Europe. It's just literally not the case, so people collectively deciding that they're not geographical terms is weird when they literally are geographical terms, even if they're not used that way. I wonder how many times I've rambled about this before..

The traditional boundary between North and South in the USA is the Mason Dixon line. This line literally forms the northern border of West Virginia (with the exception of the Northern Panhandle.

Any division of a country into "north" and "south" is going to be arbitrary, but I don't know how you can say that West Virginia isn't "literally" southern when it's literally south of 8 of the original 13 colonies and at least half the US population lives north of it.
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-10, 15:31

Eh, I used to be confused about that myself. It is just south of the Mason-Dixon line, which probably seems meaningless to most non-Americans, so I can see how a foreigner might be confused about why it's considered part of the South.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby linguoboy » 2019-05-10, 16:09

vijayjohn wrote:Eh, I used to be confused about that myself. It is just south of the Mason-Dixon line, which probably seems meaningless to most non-Americans, so I can see how a foreigner might be confused about why it's considered part of the South.

Honestly, the Mason-Dixon line is meaningless to most Americans. I used to tease one of my college dormmates that I was a Southerner because I'd been born in Baltimore. When he protested, I'd point out that it lay south of the Mason-Dixon line. But to him (a Tennessean), "the South" was synonymous with "Dixie", i.e. those states which seceded; Maryland, despite being a slave state, remained in the Union. Moreover, Baltimore (a major city which industrialised early and has accepted a lot of foreign immigration) stands apart from the rest of the state anyway (in much the same way as Atlanta does vis-à-vis Georgia). So you could still consider parts of Maryland "Southern" and yet not consider a Baltimoron a "Southerner".
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Vlürch » 2019-05-10, 22:51

vijayjohn wrote:It's been varying lately, but I definitely have a light meal by 2 (usually by 12 or 1 PM) and then a bigger meal about seven hours later. So I guess the answer to your question is "between 7 and 9 (but sometimes earlier if I ate "breakfast" earlier)."

Alright, ok. Maybe I should try to eat something earlier, too, and maybe not as much in the evening. :lol:
vijayjohn wrote:At work, I always ate my main meal from 1 to 2 PM (yes, I frequently use up the entire hour, sometimes even more than an hour. :P At home, it is not uncommon for me to spend three or four hours eating one meal. Yes, you read that correctly. Three or four. Not an exaggeration) and then ate my lighter meal around 9 PM (sometimes 8).

How is that even physically possible? :o The longest I've ever taken to eat one meal was as a kid with my grandparents (my dad's parents) at our summer cottage (which my dad sold last year), when it was common for us to eat for like an hour and a half or maybe two hours but never longer than that IIRC, and it was because there were different foods over the course of the same meal and they considered it impolite to eat fast or something.
vijayjohn wrote:I get a headache if I wait too long to eat. I can stay hungry for a few hours and feel fine, but beyond that, it will surely affect me.

Yeah, same.
vijayjohn wrote:This is pretty much never true. :)

Hopefully that's the case, but there are a few users here and other language forums who will never reply to any of my posts even if I reply to their posts and it's 100% about languages, and it's clear they're intentionally ignoring me (and at least one openly said he's ignoring me), which is fine but if the reason is that they think I'm an alt-righter or whatever... well, I don't want people to think I'm one because I'm not (even if I could've become one if it wasn't for a handful of issues I could never agree with them on and they could never compromise regarding).

Then again, insisting that I'm not one will only make them think more and more that I am one, so... :para:
vijayjohn wrote:It happens. There was a time I didn't really understand Indian complaints about racism in the US, and it showed, on this forum.

But at least that's an issue you (at least could) have a personal attachment to, meanwhile I mostly raved on and on about things I knew nothing about and that didn't affect me in any way. For example all my paranoid rants about Uyghurs, which sounded like Chinese government propaganda or something (and almost certainly the origin of the claims I based it on was exactly that, but I didn't even think of that until it was pointed out). There are probably literally like ten Uyghurs in Finland, who've fled from genocide, and here I was posting about how they're supposedly all violent extremists...

I'm so ashamed of those posts. The fact that I've since come to feel compassion and love for the Uyghurs seems disingenuous because of my past idiocy, because I also can't really stress about how I now support the rights of Uyghurs and wish they could gain freedom since in practice I don't do anything to support them, and besides I have zero connection to them and have never actually interacted with a single Uyghur in my life AFAICR except like commenting on a video on Youtube and the uploader replying to my comment like a couple of days ago, but obviously that doesn't count as actual interaction.

Of course it's the same with all other human rights issues and such, I've never done anything to help anyone. I'd like to, but honestly my mental health is so fragile that I'd get extremely depressed if I got into activism of any kind and had to deal with the suffering of others. And I can't really afford to donate to charities or anything (and I'm sure the government wouldn't like that, since I live on welfare), so... :para:
vijayjohn wrote:I'm so lazy about learning Central Asian languages other than Tajik.

Heh, for me it's the exact opposite: I'm into all of them except Tajik. :P

Well, it's not like I'm actively trying to avoid learning Tajik or anything, and I have once in a while read about its grammar and looked up a couple of words and whatnot, and I love the letters <Ӣӣ Ӯӯ>, and its relationship with Uzbek is interesting to read about (even if sometimes the information out there is contradictory), and I could listen to this song by Shabnami Sobiri any time (although I don't understand 99% of the lyrics, that doesn't bother me at all since I enjoy music based on how it sounds, not what it's about), and its phonology is nice, but it just doesn't hold my attention the same way the Turkic languages do.

Strangely enough, considering Uzbek is the Central Asian language I'm second most interested in (after Kazakh), it logically "should" segue into an interest in Tajik... and it often does, but my focus will still be on Uzbek.

If/when Kazakhs start using the new Latin alphabet on social media, I'll probably mostly lost interest in learning Kazakh and my interest will shift almost exclusively to Uzbek since at least it looks as cool in the Latin alphabet as it does in Cyrillic even with the apostrophes and digraphs. The Uzbek alphabet is balanced out just right imho... but they're also reforming it, so soon it won't have all those apostrophes and digraphs. At least their reform won't make it worse; it will lose its unique charm, but well.

I sound so bitter when it comes to orthography reforms of other languages, but then would demand one for Finnish in the next sentence... :lol:
linguoboy wrote:The traditional boundary between North and South in the USA is the Mason Dixon line. This line literally forms the northern border of West Virginia (with the exception of the Northern Panhandle.

Huh, I remember hearing/reading about some division like that before but I thought it was weird. Because it was such a nonsensical line to use for geographical terms, I could never remember which states were supposed to be southern and which northern based on it... but if it's a clear line that doesn't go all over the place, then I don't know why I was always confused by it.
linguoboy wrote:Any division of a country into "north" and "south" is going to be arbitrary

True, yeah. I won't argue with that.
linguoboy wrote:but I don't know how you can say that West Virginia isn't "literally" southern when it's literally south of 8 of the original 13 colonies and at least half the US population lives north of it.

Maybe it makes no sense, but to me it looks like it's more in the north than the south. I've always used the fairly straight line across the US that forms the northern border of North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona as the defining point for the geographical division between the north and south (and imagined the line continuing across Nevada and California so that it went from coast to coast; it'd end south of San Francisco). Some states north of it would be "geographically northern" but still southern for historical/political reasons, of course, and I mostly remember which were Confederate and that the border was farther north than that line.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-14, 5:24

Vlürch wrote:How is that even physically possible? :o

Maybe if you eat every single little morsel of a bony fish?
Hopefully that's the case, but there are a few users here and other language forums who will never reply to any of my posts even if I reply to their posts and it's 100% about languages, and it's clear they're intentionally ignoring me (and at least one openly said he's ignoring me), which is fine but if the reason is that they think I'm an alt-righter or whatever... well, I don't want people to think I'm one because I'm not (even if I could've become one if it wasn't for a handful of issues I could never agree with them on and they could never compromise regarding).

Then again, insisting that I'm not one will only make them think more and more that I am one, so... :para:

Well, we can't control what other people think, only what we do. Sometimes it just takes time for people to tell for sure that we're not as dangerous as we might seem, though. :)
But at least that's an issue you (at least could) have a personal attachment to, meanwhile I mostly raved on and on about things I knew nothing about and that didn't affect me in any way.

Well, OK, I also used to be pretty darn misogynistic, although I didn't dare to actually say what I was thinking back at that time. Then I came to realize that I'm such a shut-in that most of the women I'm exposed to outside this forum are basically my mom and her friends, who are pretty terrible. :P
I also can't really stress about how I now support the rights of Uyghurs and wish they could gain freedom since in practice I don't do anything to support them, and besides I have zero connection to them and have never actually interacted with a single Uyghur in my life AFAICR except like commenting on a video on Youtube and the uploader replying to my comment like a couple of days ago, but obviously that doesn't count as actual interaction.

That's more than I do, but I still talk about stuff like that. There's only so much we can do. That's not your fault.
vijayjohn wrote:I'm so lazy about learning Central Asian languages other than Tajik.

Heh, for me it's the exact opposite: I'm into all of them except Tajik. :P

I know! I'm into all of them, too. I just never learn anything (much) in them.
I could listen to this song by Shabnami Sobiri any time

Nice song! Post it in the Persian songs thread! :mrgreen:
although I don't understand 99% of the lyrics, that doesn't bother me at all since I enjoy music based on how it sounds, not what it's about

Yeah, that's how I used to be with Persian music for a long time, too.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby linguoboy » 2019-05-15, 15:48

Reading Lapcharoensap is making me wanderlust a bit for Thai. At the stealth Thai restaurant last night, I was avidly listening to the chatter behind the counter, but I could only make out the occasional stray word.
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-19, 0:48

What is a "stealth Thai restaurant" again?

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-05-19, 15:53

Georgian!

Those ejective sounds. How do I even begin to pronounce them?

Also, Georgia is interesting and I've been chatting to a Georgian who's made me really curious.

There's just not a ton of material available, nor do I know many native speakers (only some Georgian Jews whose command of Hebrew and Russian is probably better than their Georgian).

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby linguoboy » 2019-05-20, 14:52

vijayjohn wrote:What is a "stealth Thai restaurant" again?

"Japanese" restaurants that lead with their sushi selection (and nowadays often promote their ramen as well) but are run by Thais and have Thai dishes buried somewhere in the back of the menu.

I'm also regretting not doing more to keep up my German. A friend is in town from Köln and I keep fucking up when speaking to him.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Ciarán12 » 2019-05-20, 16:23

(pt-Pt)

The accent is starting to grow on me...

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby voron » 2019-05-20, 17:37

(it)

Watched this interview in Italian with Mahmood, the runner-up at this year's Eurovision, and understood it well. The song is nice too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kinWmbPNFxs

It's ironic that I wasn't even particularly keen on learning Italian during the year I was in Italy. I just watched a lot of DVDs which I borrowed from a local DVD shop, with Italian dubbing and subtitles, and it sank in.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-24, 7:05

n8an wrote:Those ejective sounds. How do I even begin to pronounce them?

Someone I went to grad school with (I actually forgot who exactly it was) once suggested that native speakers of English actually do this naturally at the end of an utterance (or was it word? I forget) way more often than they realize they do.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby voron » 2019-05-24, 9:52

(it)

Again. I bumped into an Italian in my office building. He was talking over the phone in Italian, and as soon as he finished, I started a conversation with him. We had a nice chat, and I was able to speak quite confidently even after several years without any practice.

Fun thing: I had hard time remembering how to say "yes" in Italian. He said something, and I reacted with "eh", just like in informal Turkish and in Syrian dialect, then "erê" from Kurdish appeared in my mind, and after a second of delay I finally produced: "Siiii!"

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-05-24, 10:29

vijayjohn wrote:Someone I went to grad school with (I actually forgot who exactly it was) once suggested that native speakers of English actually do this naturally at the end of an utterance (or was it word? I forget) way more often than they realize they do.


Probably!

I think I can KIND OF pronounce them in isolation (badly). But I'm pretty sure that I can't make it sound natural or use them in sequence with other sounds.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-25, 5:21

I think of it as being kind of like making a glottal stop just after the sound, e.g. [pʼ] is kind of like [pʔ].

Of course, in theory at least, you could do what I did and learn it under duress. I learned it from an Ethiopian girl named Ribk'a when she was just a little kid because she wouldn't quit poking me until I pronounced her name right. :lol:

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby OldBoring » 2019-05-25, 16:02

voron wrote:(it)

Again. I bumped into an Italian in my office building. He was talking over the phone in Italian, and as soon as he finished, I started a conversation with him. We had a nice chat, and I was able to speak quite confidently even after several years without any practice.

Fun thing: I had hard time remembering how to say "yes" in Italian. He said something, and I reacted with "eh", just like in informal Turkish and in Syrian dialect, then "erê" from Kurdish appeared in my mind, and after a second of delay I finally produced: "Siiii!"

Informally we do say "eh" to a conversation as "yeah, I'm listening", different from the sì which means yes as an affirmative answer.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-05-25, 16:24

In Malayalam, a lot of people say "oh" to mean 'yes'. (I think it probably is a variant of [uˈʋɯ]).

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Lur » 2019-06-08, 7:45

Norwegian, Swedish, Karelian, Baltic languages, Russian and other Slavic, Mohawk, Nahuatl

The call of the north and the cold, with an exception
Geurea dena lapurtzen uzteagatik, geure izaerari uko egiteagatik.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-06-14, 0:11

Are you just sick of the weather? :P

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Luís » 2019-06-14, 9:56

Just came back from a few days in Budapest, so now I'm wanderlusting for Hungarian.

I bought a couple of books as well:

Image

Image

I know that realistically I will never learn Hungarian in my life, though... :P
Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales


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