this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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[–] MrSilkworm@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

*cries at Greek

[–] MadBob@feddit.nl 11 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

I don't think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 1 points 54 minutes ago

Sure you can everyone in france know theirs is the only real language. Don't believe me? Just ask someone from france.

but we can all agree hungarian isn't

[–] Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 6 hours ago

You could if we had won. /s

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 2 points 4 hours ago

Ä, ö, ü, õ, š, ž are just there to allow for phonemic ortography, biatch!

Though then again, I'm fairly sure that the weird Polish letters.

Also if your native tongue DOES have phonemic ortography.... Well guess how difficult it was for 6 year old me in Estonia to start learning English where the words are clearly not written the same way they're spoken????

It gets worse hearing older people here speak English because most of them did NOT start learning the language at age 5 or 6 so uhhhh... Yeah they expect the words to be pronounced the way they're spelled. Makes your ears bleed.

[–] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 16 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.

[–] MrKurteous@feddit.nu 10 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Are you sure it wasn't "brzeczyszczykiewicz" (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha

[–] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 5 points 4 hours ago

I'm completely sure, like 100%, fully positive without a single doubt... that I misspelled it and I would never be able to access the server again.

[–] loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Can we also get some translation or something. This might shock you, but not all of us are polish.

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 hours ago

There is no translation, it's just a hard to pronounce Polish surname.

[–] ytg@sopuli.xyz 18 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?

[–] Ezek@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I remember some video where somebody was showing an example of either a word or a sentence & showed: "mbrtskvni"

this language would make you think they have to pay a fee for using vowels

[–] harcesz@szmer.info 14 points 18 hours ago

This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 195 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.

Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.

Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.

[–] Justas@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 hours ago

Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (13 children)

The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.

The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"

The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.

[–] Rinox@feddit.it 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Then there's Italian. We have less letters than other European languages (we don't have k,j,w,x,y) and we still manage to avoid shit like "thoroughly" or spamming letters. We have accents, but use them way less than in Spanish and no special accents or characters like ñ ç č ß å ø ö etc

Once you understand the rules is probably one of the easier languages to spell and pronounce

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago

Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

It's all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

  • Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
  • Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
  • English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
  • Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
  • Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩

? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that's for different reasons, same reasons as ck.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago

I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you're right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should've said "English" alone.

[–] Justas@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Just come up with new letters, Lithuanian has 9 (ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, č, š, ž) extra letters. If a small language can do it, so can English.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It's actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting "everyone" (more like "enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored") on the same page. Doubly true when it's a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there's none.

For English there's an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).

[–] Justas@sh.itjust.works 1 points 43 minutes ago

I mean, yes and no.

You are assuming that Lithuanian language became formalised when Lithuania was united under one government. Instead, most of language formalisation happened between 1880s and 1920s, when Lithuanian speaking population was actually divided between Prussian and Tzarist Russian empires. While most of the people lived in Tzarist Russia, writing in Lithuanian in Latin script was forbidden there.

Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.

That is also why formal Lithuanian is based on one ethnic dialect that was spoken in Prussia.

[–] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

English syntax hard?

There's a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they're spoken in the English alphabet. Then people wonder why they're spelled like Ledoux and sound like Lehdoo.

Romance. Romance languages are the fucking reason you word slurring tongue twats.

But hey, at least we're not Turkik.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

English syntax hard?

Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don't really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of "famous blue raincoat").

That happens because any language is complex, there's no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won't be able to get rid of it.

There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.

That's something else, the spelling. It's a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you're supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.

[–] ytg@sopuli.xyz 5 points 18 hours ago

English syntax hard?

Yes. Sequence of tenses. It's harder than Latin. As in, what the hell does "future-in-the-past" mean?
Or tenses (+aspect+mood) in general, I guess. You guys have too many of them.

As for the orthography, you know what is to blame. The Great Vowel Shift.

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[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 52 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat

[–] hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 4 hours ago

I think that "kokoa koko kokko kokoon" is a perfectly normal sentence and no one can change my mind.

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[–] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 10 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, Welsh is even more special ...

[–] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 7 points 16 hours ago

It's actually not. The Basque language has zero relationship to any other language in existence. It's totally unique.

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