UniLang

Vlürch wrote:So I just realised that I might have overestimated the freeness of Japanese word order in a brain fart moment, but I'm not 100% sure. Is a sentence like 猫の熱狂的に足を掴む (to mean "enthusiastically grab the cat's paw") grammatical? This isn't the exact sentence that made me question it, but the order and "form" of it is the same. In hindsight I'm pretty sure it's not acceptable, but tbh it was in some really shitty lyrics I wrote and it didn't sound fitting in a normal word order no matter what, and I also wrote a line in Russian that I absolutely butchered the pronunciation of, so I figure it doesn't really matter anyway... but I'd want confirmation that it's not an acceptable word order... right?

For what my confirmation is worth, no, it's not. I can't thinknof many examples where you can separate the "posessed" object of the noun preceding the の from the の itself like that.

So I've massively fallen behind on drilling my vocab list for Portuguese. I've been keeping a spreadsheet with every new word and expression I've come across in Portuguese since about October 2017, it's at about 5100 entries now. I had been pumping them into Memrise and drilling them regularly until a few months ago, I've kept the habit of noting the words and expressions down in the sheet but not of actually memorising them. Every attempt to catch up has lead to me giving up due to the volume and the tedium.
I'm taking a new tack - I've found a free text-to-speech service that produces decent output and is free up to 5k characters a day (about 100 entries in my list, it would seem). I'm going to take them in batches of 50 and create mp3s for them and listen to them rather than drilling them in Memrise. I feel like it will be more convenient as well as much faster to get through them all that way.

One of my friends just called Talk Like a Pirate Day "Talk Like a 19th-century Welshman Day" and I had to take him to school.

Did you take him personally or hired a uber?

Wait. Is 'hired' correct or is it still under the 'did' umbrella?

Osias wrote:Did you take him personally or hired a uber?

Wait. Is 'hired' correct or is it still under the 'did' umbrella?

I think I would always ‘get’ or maybe ‘take’ an uber. You’d also ‘take’, ‘get’ or ‘call’ a taxi.

Saim wrote:

Osias wrote:Did you take him personally or hired an uber?

I think I would always ‘get’ or maybe ‘take’ an uber. You’d also ‘take’, ‘get’ or ‘call’ a taxi.

Since the app you use is on your phone, we often speak of "calling" an Uber/Lyft/etc.

If you "call" a taxi it means you are phoning a dispatcher. If you signal one as it drives by, you are "hailing" or "grabbing" it.

Thanks. So I should say 'get' a uber, and not 'got', because the 'did' still applies.

Now seriously, how did you "take him to school"?

Osias wrote:Thanks. So I should say 'get' a uber, and not 'got', because the 'did' still applies.

You should.

Osias wrote:Now seriously, how did you "take him to school"?

The figurative meaning of "to take someone to school" is pretty much the same as "to school someone", i.e. to teach them a lesson, generally in a harsh or emphatic way. (It can even mean to beat someone up, but I don't use it that way.)

Yeah, Osias, linguoboy didn't literally mean he took him to a school! It's an expression.

I know, I know. But the lack of an equivalent in my language made me wonder what exactly it meant. We have "ensinar uma lição" but it has that violence connotation of "to beat someone up".

Probably either by car or by The El

Osias wrote:We have "ensinar uma lição" but it has that violence connotation of "to beat someone up".

Same with "teach a lesson" in English.

ObRandom: I had my first comment reported for "violation of community standards" on Facebook. A friend posted a picture of himself in Munich eating “New York Style Cheeseburgers" which he described as "open face on a half a garlic baguette that must be eaten with fork and knife like we do all the time in NYC". I replied "Die spinnen, die Amis", which is a play on the German version of Asterix' "Ils sont fous, ces Romains!" You could translate it as, "They're crazy, these Yankees". So even if you missed the underlying joke completely, it's really the mildest form of disparagement imaginable.

There are some fraaaaagile snowflakes in Menlo Park.

OldBoring wrote:Probably either by car or by The El

O certo é ir de van escrito 'transporte escolar', Rogerinho.

linguoboy wrote: I replied "Die spinnen, die Amis", which is a play on the German version of Asterix' "Ils sont fous, ces Romains!" You could translate it as, "They're crazy, these Yankees". So even if you missed the underlying joke completely, it's really the mildest form of disparagement imaginable.

There are some fraaaaagile snowflakes in Menlo Park.

Or maybe they think like the guy in/on this meme:

Not necessarily Menlo Park, it was probably reported by users.

OldBoring wrote:Not necessarily Menlo Park, it was probably reported by users.

I'd be surprised, knowing his friend group. Our German friend thought it might be an AI.

Update: The review is complete and Facebook apologised for "getting it wrong".

linguoboy wrote:I had my first comment reported for "violation of community standards" on Facebook. A friend posted a picture of himself in Munich eating “New York Style Cheeseburgers" which he described as "open face on a half a garlic baguette that must be eaten with fork and knife like we do all the time in NYC". I replied "Die spinnen, die Amis", which is a play on the German version of Asterix' "Ils sont fous, ces Romains!" You could translate it as, "They're crazy, these Yankees". So even if you missed the underlying joke completely, it's really the mildest form of disparagement imaginable.

Could it be that it was misinterpreted as being a death threat or something in English? It's a short enough sentence that maybe the die was all that was picked up by some algorithm, or maybe someone saw it and thought Amis was a misspelling of "Amish" and ignored the word spinnen entirely, thinking it was some kind of anti-Amish slogan?

Probably not, but...

Vlürch wrote:Probably not, but...

Probably not, but probably yes.

Vlürch wrote:Could it be that it was misinterpreted as being a death threat or something in English? It's a short enough sentence that maybe the die was all that was picked up by some algorithm

This actually sounds like the most likely possibility. The user whose page it was is primarily English-speaking and the post was in English, so it could be the 'bots just weren't expecting German in that context.

In A description of Abun: a West Papuan language of Irian Jaya, I have found the following sentence (page 68):

Fredik bari-wa git yetu, and the meaning is... "Fredik does not want to eat people"