Random language thread 6

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-11, 14:43

Filed this under: "Horrible German Language". I had to read it through three times before I finally got the joke.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Saim » 2019-03-11, 16:00

Is the implication that they eat lots of dessert ("dessert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

edit: why does it have two s
Last edited by Saim on 2019-03-11, 16:49, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-11, 16:09

Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of desert ("desert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

No, you've got it.

Randomly, Schublade was a word I misparsed for ages. I thought it was an assimilated French borrowing like Barrikade and I pronounced it /ʃuˈblaːdə/. Then one day it finally dawned on me that it was a native compound of Schub "shove" and Lade "drawer; chest".
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Car » 2019-03-11, 17:44

Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of dessert ("dessert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

edit: why does it have two s

French.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Saim » 2019-03-11, 19:06

Car wrote:
Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of dessert ("dessert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

edit: why does it have two s

French.


But in French it has /s/. :lol:

linguoboy wrote:
Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of desert ("desert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

No, you've got it.

Randomly, Schublade was a word I misparsed for ages. I thought it was an assimilated French borrowing like Barrikade and I pronounced it /ʃuˈblaːdə/. Then one day it finally dawned on me that it was a native compound of Schub "shove" and Lade "drawer; chest".


I also would have assumed Polish szuflada is a Gallicism, but it turns out it's from German Schublade and there's no chuflade*. :P I wonder why the Polish has b > f... it doesn't seem like /bl/ would be disallowed, because there's blisko, blask, blady, blond.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-11, 19:15

Saim wrote:I also would have assumed Polish szuflada is a Gallicism, but it turns out it's from German Schublade and there's no chuflade*. :P I wonder why the Polish has b > f... it doesn't seem like /bl/ would be disallowed, because there's blisko, blask, blady, blond.

Perhaps it came through Low Saxon? Modern Mecklenburger Platt has Schufflaad.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Car » 2019-03-11, 20:34

Saim wrote:
Car wrote:
Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of dessert ("dessert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

edit: why does it have two s

French.


But in French it has /s/. :lol:


It's English, what do you expect? :lol:
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-11, 21:15

Car wrote:
Saim wrote:
Car wrote:
Saim wrote:Is the implication that they eat lots of dessert ("dessert drawer") or am I still parsing it wrong?

edit: why does it have two s

French.

But in French it has /s/. :lol:

It's English, what do you expect? :lol:

It's just run-of-the-mill voicing assimilation:

/dəˈsərt/ > /ˈdsərt/ > /ˈdzərt/
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Linguaphile » 2019-03-12, 0:52

linguoboy wrote:Filed this under: "Horrible German Language". I had to read it through three times before I finally got the joke.
► Show Spoiler

Thanks for posting. I absolutely love this type of wordplay (somewhere I have a whole list of wordplay based on misparsing of compounds), but I hadn't seen this Nach(t)tischschublade one. :D

► Show Spoiler
(spoiler tags for large images so they don't take up to much space in the thread)

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Saim » 2019-03-14, 14:28

(eo) kie jukas, tie ni gratas

It's such a weird feeling coming across an Esperanto example sentence where one of the verbs is a German word (jucken) I've learned relatively recently and the other one comes from a French word I also looked up today (gratter; I'd heard it several times but today is the first time I looked it up).

linguoboy wrote:Perhaps it came through Low Saxon? Modern Mecklenburger Platt has Schufflaad.


That's probably it, thanks!

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Saim » 2019-03-15, 12:18

What's with the Catalan-speaking internet lately? It seems in pretty much any Facebook group or comment section there's some weirdo nationalist ready to jump out and correct perfectly good Catalan because it doesn't reflect medieval, French or Italian usage.

For example, recently in a Facebook group someone corrected a Brazilian for using the word sentit to mean "meaning", instead suggesting "seny" or "significat". Except the IEC dictionary (generally considered normative), only has seny as being a synonym of sentit when meaning "sense" (as in sense of smell, hearing, etc.), and marks this sense as archaic. And of course significat doesn't exist in either Occitan [significacion] or French [signification], so I'm not sure what criterion this correction is based on other than this fellow's personal feelings on what "looks kind of Spanishy".

On Twitter someone corrected an Andalusian for suggesting that llevar (remove) and treure (take out) are synonyms. They generally aren't in Balearic or Valencian usage, but in Catalonia using treure instead of llevar is ubiquitous in both informal and formal language and is, again, accepted by the DIEC. This also isn't a Hispanicism, since Spanish makes a pretty clear distinction between quitar and sacar. So again I'm left perplexed at what the point of any of these corrections is.

I've seen prescriptivism before but rarely do you have purists suggest to ignore not only modern vernacular usage, but also the main prestigious dictionaries and pretty much the entire modern corpus of the language. It's especially egregious when you're giving foreigners "corrections" that are actually completely incorrect, unless they're studying medieval Catalan or some sort of Catalanoid conlang that models usage on French or Italian rather than, shock horror, actual Catalan as it's spoken and written by real, living-and-breathing Catalan-speakers. I don't know how many Andalusian or Brazilian learners of Catalan want to sound like they're a character from Tirant lo Blanc, I suspect quite few.

Of course, there's no shame in not wanting a minority language to be so massively influenced by the dominant language it's subordinated to that its entire grammar starts to dissolve, I would consider that legitimate resistance to language shift. But they'd be better off studying Occitan, French and Italian, and trying to reduce their consumption of Spanish-language media, rather than hyperfocusing on random lexical shibboleths to crusade against on Facebook and Twitter.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-15, 14:15

My copy of After the wake by Brendan Behan includes a surprisingly extensive glossary. It seems every bit of Irish in the text (which includes everything from random anglicised words to entire sentences) is translated there. But the first story I chose to read, which concerns itself with a Hiberno-Hispanic family in Ireland, contains extensive passages in Spanish, not a word of which appears in the glossary. It's an odd omission and I don't know what to make of it.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2019-03-15, 19:25

I always have to pause a second to tell whether I'm looking at the surname 萩野 (Hagino) or 荻野 (Ogino). The memory aid I use is to check if the main part of the first character is 秋 (aki). If yes, I must be looking at Hagino, because Hagi sounds slightly more similar to "aki" than "Ogi" does.
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Kafka

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-19, 15:44

Random Language Question: What does "landlocked" mean to you?
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Car » 2019-03-19, 17:16

No access to the sea.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby md0 » 2019-03-19, 17:22

I guess the controversy is whether lakes count?
My first reaction is that they shouldn't count. Eg Uzbekistan is a marked case of being landlocked.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2019-03-19, 17:26

Nope. I'm actually coming across recent usage examples where the intended meaning is "surrounded by water". (If you google "landlocked by water" you'll see what I mean.)
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby md0 » 2019-03-19, 19:04

That's totally new to me. But if lakes count, why not entire seas :hmm:
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Osias » 2019-03-20, 1:15

I was telling my brother about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez existence and said "tem uma nova política nos EUA..." and he thought it was a policy, not a politician.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Ciarán12 » 2019-03-20, 11:40

Osias wrote:I was telling my brother about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez existence and said "tem uma nova política nos EUA..." and he thought it was a policy, not a politician.


Yeah, that's what I would have thought too. How did you clarify that, by the way? Did you have to say somethibg like "Não, quero dizer que é uma mulher que trabalha como política"?


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