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oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs

KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???

for example

(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)

(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)

("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)

So for example. I speak Spanish, and i was taught to address everyone formally unless specifically invited otherwise. People explained to me that "usted" was formal, for use with strangers, bosses, and other people you respect or are distant from, while "tú" is used most often between family and good friends.

That's pretty straightforward, but it gets interesting when you see people using "tú" as a form of address for flirting with strangers, or for picking a fight or intimidating someone. In other languages I've sometimes heard people switch to formal address with partners, friends or family to show when they are upset. That's just so interesting! You're indicating social and emotional space and hierarchy just in the words you choose to address the other person as "you"!!

Not to mention the "what form of address should I use for you...?" conversation which, idk how other people feel about it, but to me it always felt awkward as heck, like a DTR but with someone you're only just becoming comfortable with. "You can use tú with me" always felt... Weirdly intimate? Like, i am comfortable around you, i consider you a friend. Like what a vulnerable thing to say to a person. (That's probably also just a function of how i was strictly told to use formal address when i was learning. Maybe others don't feel so weird about it?)

And if you aren't going to have a conversation about it and you're just going to switch, how do you know when? If you switch too soon it might feel overly familiar and pushy but if you don't switch soon enough you might seem cold??? It's so interesting.

I speak Icelandic. Icelandic doesn't have titles or last names or everyday use of a formal plural or any other obvious markers of formality and intimacy. Formality is still marked, just in non-grammatical lexical terms...but because it's not marked in ways I as a L1 English speaker recognize, it's harder for me to reproduce.

1. For folks who don't know, Japanese words/grammar change depending on formality, the genders of the speaker and listener, the age of the speaker and listener, etc.

2. But English words/grammar ALSO change depending on the above contexts described. It's just not formalized in grammar books. Consider the differences:

A. "The honor of your presence is requested for dinner this evening."

B. "I would like to invite you to dinner."

C. "Do you want to get dinner together?"

D. "Wanna grab a bite to eat?"

E. "Yo, bro, you want a burger?"

Etc. People will be like "it's wild that Japanese has different words for 'meal' depending on formality!! Gohan? Omeshi? Crazy!!!" But ENGLISH IS THE SAME WAY.

And this actually makes it harder for speakers of languages like Japanese to learn natural English, because they've been taught that there's no difference in tone between telling a waiter "I'd like a coffee" and "I want coffee." Since one of those feels easier to learn, they'll choose the option that makes them sound weirdly dickish to the waitstaff.

So fuckface would turn into Facefucker. Buuuut. That changes the meaning entirely! It implies that the target… let’s call him Wulfric, is a fucker of faces. However og Fuckface means Wulfric’s face is the face in need of a thorough fucking, and definitely on the receiving end. Poor (lucky?) Wulfric. So would that still make it a true exocentric compound noun? Since it doesn’t keep its meaning? SO FASCINATING!!!

As an aside, the German word for Fuckface is Backpfeifengesicht, meaning a face in need of a slapping. While less severe, it’s endlessly more delightful and pleasing to say.

Map of the World’s Writing Systems

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

I'm an English speaker. German sounds similar, I can even find cognates sometimes. Mandarin Chinese sounds completely alien, but I can understand that it is a language.

But Dutch, Dutch sounds hilarious. Dutch sounds like a clown version of English. I wonder why that is.

Aw shucks, thanks darling! Here’s some stuff:

Books:

Children’s books

Short stories

Graphic novels/comics

Poems

Fairy tales

Classic literature by century (2/2 is still in progress)

Free ebooks websites (I like Wikisource)

If ya queer

If ya black

My personal favourites

Online, not books:

Social media

Subreddits

Fanfictions

News

MOOCS

Blond = a male with blond hair

Blonde = a female with blonde hair

Blonds = more than one male blond or a mixed gender group of blonds

Blondes = and all-female group of blondes

Very few people follow this rule anymore. I doubt anyone but the worst pedant would dock you points for it if you got it wrong. But technically the rule is there. And I notice it. And try to get it right in my prose.

(Yes it applies to brunet vs brunette too)

I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some

UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w

so as an example, the ancient egyptian word for "cat" was written like this:

or, using unicode characters your device may or may not display correctly, "𓏇𓇋𓅱𓃠". this was pronounced something like /mi(ʀ)juw/, transliterated as mjw (the similarity to "mew" is not a coincidence.)

this word consists of a sequence of four characters. the first three represent the three consonant sounds in the word, with the first character covering the first two consonants together. then the fourth character is a cat, because this word means "cat".

Basically, in 2013, they sent an Italian restaurant a warning notice (which is standard procedure when a business doesn't respect the law) for having Italian words such as antipasto, calamari and even pasta in their menu instead of the French equivalent

And it basically generated public and international outcry ("Quebec wants to ban the word pasta!" etc) and it ended with the head of the language police resigning partly because it was just such a ridiculous complaint and partly because it had also come out that the oqlf had been harassing business owners for years