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   clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 15:40:40 JST clacke

   The Torpenhow Hill etymology was imitated in the etymology of a city in the Dragaera fantasy novels:

   tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said…

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 15:40:40 JST clacke

     in reply to

     /via a discussion about the below exchange:

     >>>>> The 'cuttle' in 'cuttlefish comes from the Old English word cudele, meaning 'cuttlefish'

     
     >>>> *sets entire english language on fire*

     >>> Thereby showing that the phenomenon that gave use gems like “PIN number” and “ATM machine” (also known as the self-demonstrating RAS syndrome, i.e. “redundant acronym syndrome syndrome”) is actually age-old 😀.

     >> This is fantastic

     > In french, the very innocent word “aujourd’hui’, (=“today”), litterally means “the day of hui”, “hui” being an old word for “today”. It’s just like we’d say : “todayday”

     > This becomes hilarious when you think it’s pretty common to say “au jour d’aujourd’hui”, which can be translated by “the day of the day of today.”

     > French people really trying hard to live in the present.

     tumblr.com/frapoleng/160124188…

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 15:40:43 JST clacke

     in reply to

     Chinese does this to itself all the time. Most words are two-syllable, two-character words. Often when you look up the meaning of the first character it literally means the same thing as the two-character word.

     That's because over the course of 2000 years of language evolution, loss of tones and phonemes from Classical Chinese and the addition of new words in the vocabulary, that first syllable has become too ambiguous in the spoken language.

     In an analogy, to tie it back to the top:

     - do you mean cuddle, the act of physical intimacy, or cudele, the sea creature?
     - yeah I meant the cuttle fish
     - ok, got you

   • Embed this notice
     LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 17:18:34 JST LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}

     in reply to
     @clacke Do I recall correctly that there's an old Chinese script and a new one? Does this apply to both?
   • Embed this notice
     Elias (eliasr@social.librem.one)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 18:23:11 JST Elias

     in reply to

     @clacke In French there is also the common phrase

     "qu'est-ce que c'est?"

     which meane

     "what is it that it is?" 🙂

     clacke likes this.
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 18:23:11 JST clacke

     in reply to
     The poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" (Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ) was used by *both* sides as an argument for and against replacing Classical Chinese with pinyin (Latin-lettered phonetics) and later also for and against introducing Simplified Chinese writing.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 18:23:11 JST clacke

     in reply to

     The argument against latinization or simplification is "you can't preserve this kind of nuance" and the value of heritage.

     The argument against Classical is "look at the kind of nonsense you have to put up with". People who studied European languages may recognize this as "tell me again why I have to learn Latin".

     The movement to "write as we speak" won, and whether you use pinyin (early school, input methods, instant messages), Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) or Simplified (Mainland, Singapore) you are writing to some degree either as you speak or as Beijingers speak.

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 18:23:12 JST clacke

     in reply to
     See libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1… , there are at least three ways of writing modern Chinese, but either way almost all of your nouns and verbs will have two syllables.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 18:23:12 JST clacke

     in reply to
     (Classical Chinese is a different spoken and written language that is no longer in general use since the 1950s)
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     veer66 (veer66@mstdn.io)'s status on Saturday, 05-Aug-2023 10:57:07 JST veer66

     in reply to

     @clacke Many Thai words have two syllables with the same meaning.

     clacke likes this.
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 05-Aug-2023 15:05:25 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • veer66
     @veer66 It happens in Chinese too. And I don't know about Mandarin, but a common construct in Cantonese verbs is also verb+noun as a two-syllable verb, e.g. sleep-sleep, get-up-body, and some adjectives are noun+adjective, e.g. stomach-hungry.