Ich identifiziere mich als GmbHe/er

I remember seeing many maaaany years ago like within my first years of Tumblr, a handy post/chart for learning the differences between shared (and unshared) symbols used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and so I wanted to throw something together quick to help people learn the differences between languages using the Arabic script– they’re not all Arabic!! These are just some of the more common ones you see online.

Many many languages use a modified Arabic script, and I couldn’t possibly detail each and every one, so here are links to some info about others as well! Including:

Azerbaijani

Sindhi

Balochi

Luri

Mandinka

Arabi Malayalam

Kyrgyz

Pegon script (Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese)

whereas in South Africa we always write "250ml" or "500ml" and we'd usually say twee(honderd) vyftig mil and vyfhonderd mil when speaking Afrikaans

now, it's perfectly obvious what all of those mean, like it's all the metric system. but it's precisely these small and subtle differences which I find fascinating ! and that's probably why I enjoy the Dutch language so very much. people always talk about how similar the languages are, and it's true. if communicating is your only goal then they're almost perfectly intelligible. the classic example is wandel[en] which in Dutch means "to walk", but in Afrikaans means "to take a leisurely stroll". if communicating is all you care about, that distinction is irrelevant. the person is going on foot. but — if you're into languages and linguistics or poetry, then that's a huge difference !! (this example might actually work better in Flemish than Hollandic ? but that just adds a whole extra layer of excitement to things)

scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device

That's not a stupid question! You do literally use more words to express an idea in French (generally speaking). Translators call this the expansion / contraction ratio of languages. Translating a text from English to Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian typically makes it 20-30% longer. Other languages like Chinese or Korean will result in a contraction. Appropriately enough, the French term for "expansion ratio" is "taux de foisonnement" which has an expansion ratio of +33%.

It's a combination of factors:

word length: English uses so many monosyllabic words, unlike languages with mainly Graeco-Latin roots. It can be a headache for translators who translate online stuff because apps designed with English in mind have tiny frames and buttons meant for tiny English words and if you can't modify the layout, your language might just not fit... Same problem when you translate subtitles, or small signs in public places (“Please wait here” is 16 characters in English, vs. you need 15 characters in French just to say ‘please’ / s’il vous plaît...)

rigid syntax: in French you can't use shortcuts like "word length". You've got to say "the length of the word". We don’t have concise adjectival structures like X-friendly, X-based, X-prone, and often need to use an entire clause (“which is prone to...”) to translate them. Articles are mandatory (e.g. you would need to start this sentence with "the articles" rather than "articles"), the possessive form can’t just be a quick apostrophe (not “Mary’s friend” but “the friend of Mary”) etc.

a general preference for simple, active, direct and pared-down writing in English vs. a preference for 'diluted', passive, indirect, embellished phrasings in French. French adores grammatical emphasis / redundancy while English hates it (I saw a translation recently where the English phrasing was “This explains—”; the French one was: “C’est donc ce qui explique”, I.e. “It is therefore that which explains—”) Someone very accurately commented on my last ask “French goes on and on enjoying itself.” English style guides are absolutely obsessed with advising writers to prune their sentences, use straightforward syntax, remove 'unnecessary' words, while this really isn't perceived as evidence of good writing in French. Writing talent rather lies in “savoir manier la langue” / knowing how to wield the French language, and keeping your sentences direct and to the point doesn’t demonstrate your ability to do that...

English prefers connecting ideas implicitly rather than explicitly, which is easy to do with short, straightforward sentences. I was translating a text the other day that was full of logically-linked sentences, e.g. “This is part of a larger problem. We won’t solve it without tackling [other thing].” English doesn’t mind this staccato style but French finds it ugly and much prefers to use one long, flowy sentence, eg “Seeing as it is part of a larger problem, we won’t be able to solve it without—” or “This is part of a larger problem, and consequently it won’t be solved unless—” I remember reading a bilingual edition of a novel in which the original French went “Il s’acquitta du montant puis, après avoir froidement salué, il sortit.” The English translation was “He paid the fee, coldly bowed, and went out.” The French version says “He did X, then, after doing Y, he did Z,” while in English the ‘then’ and ‘after’ are implied by placing actions one after the other (in the first example, the ‘consequently’ is similarly implied.) French likes to add tool-words everywhere in order to keep its more convoluted sentences clear, by making all the logical connectors visible.

You think you’re tricking me? You’re the one being tricked.

contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies

dropbox containing language textbooks

contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

dropbox containing books about language learning

includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb

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If you were to walk down a street in New York City, you might encounter hundreds of fonts on a single block: everything from street signs to shop names take on distinct personalities. Urdu and its nastaʿlīq typeface, lagging in the digital space, are much more difficult to iterate on with existing technology. Where there are hundreds of thousands of Latin digital fonts — fonts so iconic that we know them by name, like Helvetica or Times New Roman — digital Urdu fonts are limited to a handful at most. The nastaʿlīq typography that you might see on the streets of Pakistan is most likely to be hand painted.

“We went on Google and typed “what are fonts, how do we develop them,” Zeeshan recalled. “We purchased software but sat on it for a long time because we didn’t know how to use it.” Produced in collaboration with a government technology board over the course of a decade, Mehr Nastaliq uses 500 characters, all handwritten by Nasrullah — a tiny fraction of the 20,000 glyphs Jamil so painstakingly wrote in the 1980s. The Mehrs are particularly proud of how light their font is: at 60 KB, it doesn’t slow down websites and renders quickly. You can elongate letters and add diacritics.

Their experience of developing Mehr Nastaliq drove home an important lesson: the need for close collaboration between the calligrapher and developer. “It is imperative that the calligrapher and developer understand each other,” emphasised Zeeshan. “Abbu understands programming too now, so he can offer a different solution when confronted with tech limitations.” Working with his parent comes with its own challenges, of course. “Sometimes, Zeeshan would say, This letter isn’t looking nice,” Nasrullah said with a chuckle. “And I’d get huffy and say, Are you the calligrapher?”

Unicode, developed in the early 1990s, is now a global standard for representing characters across language systems in computing code, which means if you write Urdu — in naskh or nastaʿlīq — on one computer, it won’t appear as a string of garbled symbols in another. But technological advances don’t automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages. Nemeth notes that the proliferation of easy-to-use design software doesn’t eliminate the need for script-specific expertise. “Designers who are not willing or able to invest the years of learning and research necessary to master a foreign script,” he says, “are led to believe that their tools and some superficial ‘borrowing’ of design elements are sufficient for successful design.”

- standard dutch doesn't allow pronoun drops. Brabant basically adds the pronouns to the verbs and can drop the pronouns, or leave them in the sentence! (For example: hedde = heb jij)

- the Brabants second Person singular pronouns are gij/ge instead of jij/je (with velar fricatives, not uvular fricatives!!) Some people also say gullie (for jullie) but I'm not sure how common that one is

- when you want to ask someone if they know something, in standard dutch you'd ask "weet jij (he)t", the Brabants version of this would be "witte gij 't" which, if said without context sounds exactly like "witte geit" (meaning 'white goat')

- for saying goodbye we say "houdoe", that's a telltale sign of a Brabander because other Dutch people bully us for it :((( just like the zachte g (soft g) which is honestly superior bc it's not as harsh :)

- we call everyone someone's person: ons mam/pap (instead of mijn moeder/vader), jullie mam/pap (instead of jou moeder/vader), menne mens (what women call their husbands)

Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of English poetry, then matches its sounds to those that appear in the Chinese language. Those sounds produce their own, separate meaning. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no languages at all, with multiple meanings that can be read multiple ways.

The international chain of smack talk!