А. Z. Fоrеmаn: Seriouѕ Рhіlоlоgy, Ѕіlly Веhаvіоr

Diglossia absolutely rules

@LightYagami2435 That's just my being sloppy and not proofreading after finger-writing the characters on my trackpad.

@azforeman Is the use of 廡 here deliberate? Is it a quote from a text? 無 would be the natural character here.

Classical Chinese can be ridiculous sometimes. 牛廡不食草者 (Lit. "Of cows, there are none who do not eat grass.") All that to say "All cows eat grass."

Eeep. I mean 無

Zhang Ruoxu's 春江花月夜 may be the most beautiful thing ever written in Chinese and it is completely impossible to translate. It's not just the conventions of what the moon means and how it relates to longing. It's that so much of its beauty lies in the fact that you don't know the relationship of speaker to the text, whether the woman in the 樓 is the one who wants to travel with the moon, or whether it's the man in the 扁舟, and whether the speaker is or is not the latter. All you get is images and feelings. To some degree that's an issue with translation of all classical Chinese poetry. But the referentially underspecified nature of the scene is what really makes the poem go so hard. Because the referents don't matter. It's something beyond who and what you are. Everything, even those apart, is joined in this moment.

It can be used in a casual context with coworkers or sometimes even with someone you don’t know (like an Uber driver) but in a formal context with a workplace superior whom you don’t know well it can sometimes come across as sarcastic or mocking. But how it is received also depends a lot on the kind of person other people think *you* are and (in professional settings) whether they know you well enough to have formed an impression of you.

@esrtweet yupは仲良い人に使うみたいなイメージであってるのかな？？

アメリカの兄弟達 日本人なんであんまりわかってないんだけど 英語のyesとyupは意味ってほとんど一緒？？

@BigBlobApe @W_T_Han They should do more translations of the Zhuangzi. That text was like half of what made me work to learn to read Classical Chinese. (The other half was Li Bai.)

@W_T_Han imagine if they at least tried the Mencius or the Analects, which are at least as foundational and have some cultural cachet (the old semi-racist joke, "Confucius say", is a testament)

There seems to me an obv issue w market: Daodejing is a text ppl already know about so there’s a market for it, so translations keep appearing. General readers haven’t heard of, say, the Guliang Zhuan, so there’s no demand.

Sometimes people do have principles though. Mormons have a decent track record of supporting religious freedom for other people even when it requires crossing political faultlines. It’s why Orin Hatch supported the right of Muslim community developers to build an Islamic community center near ground zero.

@iwsfutcmd These exist. I’ve seen a version of Hebrew that developed as a minority language among Turkic speakers.

i feel like the conlang (or... spec-lang?) people are really sleeping on areal features & sprachbunds like, how would English end up if it ended up in the Altaic sprachbund, and developed SOV, case & postpositions, and vowel harmony?

Guy who doesn’t want to follow Beit Shammai be like “I will die on this Hillel”

Proposals like this are why nobody trusts LessWrong people

@phono_logical To me it is heterosyllabic in English but not when I speak French.

Huh, I syllabified ‘bourgeoisiesque’ as /bʊɹ.ʒwɑː.ziː.ɛsk/ but dictionaries generally assume that medial /ʒw/ is heterosyllabic

@JLingPystynen @avzaagzonunaada Heck, even Chatgpt can handle it

I don’t really think that’s entirely true though. The truly vowelless historical Semitic writing systems are not the easiest thing in the word to read and most modern Semitic writing systems do represent vowels to one degree or another. You could represent English in the Arabic script with roughly the same degree of partial vowel-representation that Arabic has and it wouldn’t be all that hard for native speakers.

@notremadame Yo prefiero la 2

Me llama la atención que todos los hombres prefieran a la 3 que a la 2. No encuentro explicación lógica y necesito que me fundamenten la respuesta.

@crackalamoo This isn’t a major language. It’s Romani.

@azforeman Frontier LLMs speak every (somewhat major) language pretty well

Damn. I was not familiar with ChatGPT's language game.

I was today years old when I learned that "agiary" (the term for fire-temple) was actually pronounced /agjari/. I had always pronounced it /eɪdʒiɛri/ (to rhyme with "plagiary").

Why do the English eat like the Germans are still flying overhead?