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   Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 18:44:20 JST Dan Drake 🦆

   The other evening I started reading Daniel Temkin's "44 Esolangs":

   https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs

   I just read the introduction and skimmed a few of the languages.

   In the following eight hours, I thought of three esolangs of my own!

   This book may be slightly deadly to my productivity...

   #programming #esolang

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   Amir E. Aharoni (aharoni@wikis.world)'s status on Saturday, 30-Aug-2025 04:19:10 JST Amir E. Aharoni

   in reply to

   In English, the head noun is usually in the end of the compound noun. Here, it's "parameter". All the words before it are modifiers.

   There is a somewhat similar construct in Hebrew, in which one noun is modified by other nouns. It's usually called "construct state" in English descriptions of Semitic languages.

   In Hebrew, however, it goes in the other direction: the head noun is in the beginning, and the modifier nouns are after it.

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   clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 23:30:58 JST clacke

   in reply to

   It seems every other language used a direct translation of the original French title, including the other Scandinavian languages.

   In Swedish, the title went for a pun instead, "En cell-sam historia", "[A pe-cellular story]" ("sällsam" means "peculiar").

   It was the right choice for sure!

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   Yoïn van Spijk (yvanspijk@toot.community)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 15:49:05 JST Yoïn van Spijk

   If you dissect the French adverb 'aujourd'hui' (today) etymologically, you get five Latin words: 'ad illud diurnum dē hodiē' (on the day of today).

   Many more Romance adverbs and prepositions were formed by combining words, already in spoken Latin or later in the history of its daughter languages.

   In the infographic you see a number of stacked words that have an interesting history.

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   Yoïn van Spijk (yvanspijk@toot.community)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:43:56 JST Yoïn van Spijk

   There are many words for women in the Germanic languages.

   In their history, some underwent amelioration: their meaning became more positive. The ancestor of 'queen' just meant "wife".

   Others underwent pejoration. Calling someone a 'wijf' in Dutch is now an insult.

   Here's more: