Drako

@drakonis

idk wahts goin on

heavy metal scientist. sometimes literally. fountain pen enjoyer. queer and more than old enough to remember when you couldn't use the internet and your home phone at the same time

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Drako @drakonis12/16/2022, 9:59 PM

colin @vogon

colin @vogon12/16/2022, 9:04 PM

a thing I often get sniped into thinking about is the phenomenon of multilingual people leaking information about their native language when speaking in languages they acquired later

e.g. in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5oSy1Cik50, Clem repeatedly refers to oxalic acid as "oxal acid" and my mind immediately went to "is 'oxalic acid' 'Oxalsäure' in German?"

turns out, yep! language is a set of interacting systems and it's fun to think about the hidden implications of it

#language #it's also fun that the word for acid in german is cognate with sour and I like it a lot

full-quack webbed developer @Webster12/16/2022, 9:15 PM

this has happened to me in reverse. when i was learning the words "viento" and "ventana" in spanish i was like "OHHHHH it's called a WINDOW because the WIND goes through it!"

colin @vogon12/16/2022, 9:20 PM

holy fuck

also me when I learned about cheval and chevalier in high school french and suddenly a lot of words like "cavalry" and "cavalier" made a lot more sense

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in reply to @vogon's post:

@lexi12/16/2022, 9:06 PM

i am ~trilingual and it gets worse the more languages you learn

@lexi12/16/2022, 9:08 PM

(also, this also works in the opposite direction: "literally" directly translated literally means something completely different in german, but my dumbass sometimes says the more direct translation which completely misses the point but any english speaker gets it lol)

Sherliz Holmes @JhoiraArtificer12/16/2022, 9:07 PM

yeah I loved editing technical white papers because this happened a lot and it was fun to guess the other languages of the people writing based on the 'mistakes' they made

I left Cohost, see bio for details @AriaSalvatrice12/16/2022, 9:09 PM

i've always been ruthlessly killing every possible hint of my native language in my english, fr-en is the worst combo for awkward unidiomatic wordings, english nobles spoke french for so long they stole a ton of words, but their meanings drifted over centuries

colin @vogon12/16/2022, 9:12 PM

remembering the day in high school french class when we all learned what préservatif meant

Big Mick Energy @possumskull12/16/2022, 9:34 PM

HAH i had no idea, that's great

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat12/16/2022, 9:43 PM

or embarazado in spanish

Chamomile🐑@chamomile12/17/2022, 2:32 AM

Ahh, false cognates. Always fun!

David Smith @Catfish-Man12/16/2022, 10:36 PM

I love when the English version of a French word is like… a weirdly specific subset of its French meaning. Like "sortie" being "exit a fortification to attack" instead of just "exit".

@secrets12/17/2022, 5:05 PM

Little history lesson in itself that all our good war words are from the French

in reply to @Webster's post:

Ace🔭(They or þei 🏳️‍⚧️)@BlueEarOtter12/16/2022, 9:16 PM

omg how have I never made the connection between window/wind OR viento/ventana

Soph @sleepygf12/16/2022, 9:24 PM

Likewise, I didn't get why it was a parasol until I learned paraguas.

colin @vogon12/16/2022, 10:11 PM

oh my god

I had put together that parasol was "for sun" but I never thought to assume that there was a "for water" counterpart

Ace🔭(They or þei 🏳️‍⚧️)@BlueEarOtter12/17/2022, 1:03 AM

It actually comes from the imperative form of parar (to stop). Paraguas stops water. Parasol stops sunlight. Parabrisa (windshield) stops air (lit breeze)

colin @vogon12/17/2022, 1:52 AM

TIL! thank you!

assorted fruits @peachblow12/17/2022, 2:44 PM

i love it!!!

i find it funny that umbrella is the word english uses for umbrella, even tho it SHOULD mean parasol. it is a little shade

Kameron @kameronspottyfox12/16/2022, 9:25 PM

What's even weirder is when you find languages that don't even have a word for "to have".

Like in Japanese: you don't really say "I have a cat" it's more like "As for me, there is a cat."

Or in Irish/Welsh...it's not "I have a cat" but "there is a cat at me."

Keeble @Keeble12/16/2022, 10:47 PM

In fact, “window” is not a word with Romance language roots; it’s an old Norse root word that was competing with another Anglo Norman derived word that IS a cognate for “ventana”: “fenester”, which is still used in the context of the English word “defenestration”

full-quack webbed developer @Webster12/16/2022, 10:58 PM

So "window" and "ventana" both have striking similarities to their language's words for wind just through sheer serendipity?

full-quack webbed developer @Webster12/16/2022, 11:29 PM

Wiktionary claims that "window" comes from the Norse "vindauga", combining "vindr" and "auga", meaning "wind eye". So both words having an association with the wind doesn't seem like a total coincidence.

in reply to @vogon's post:

Gretchen Leigh @gretchenleigh12/16/2022, 9:31 PM

Japanese having loan words added in a patch via katakana (originally for Buddhist monks to transliterate Indian texts!) is still wild to me.

ash @hierarchon12/16/2022, 10:08 PM

"okay, so hydrogen is Wasserstoff in German, like 'water-stuff'... wait, hydrogen..."

Zircus @zirc12/16/2022, 10:10 PM

For me, it was learning the Japanese words for "new" (新しい) and "newspaper" (新聞). The two words sound nothing alike in Japanese, so I only made the connection upon learning the kanji spellings and seeing they both had "新".

Emily Pixels @emly12/17/2022, 5:12 AM

One is seeing someone use “Peoples” as a pluralization

avery @ruler-of-elves12/18/2022, 9:05 PM

I speak english and (some) german and was extremely confused when someone mentioned offhand that "defenestrate" was a weird word. and eagerly tried to explain, no, it makes sense, because de- means remove and fenster is obviously window - in german. oops.

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