vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


twitter (inactive)
twitter.com/vogon
bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

vogon
@vogon

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


Webster
@Webster

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!"


vogon
@vogon

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


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @vogon's post:

(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)

in reply to @Webster's post:

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."

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”

in reply to @vogon's post:

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".

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.