All posts tagged "language"

Proverbs and quotations about language in many languages »

dailymeh:

Omniglot has a list. I like these:

“The more languages you know, the more you are a person.” — Bulgarian saying.

“It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase ‘As pretty as an airport’ appear.” — Douglas Adams.

“Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations… Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generation.” — Edward Sapir.

“A sensible conclusion is that languages are ‘difficult’ in inverse proportion to the strength of motivation for learning them.” — Reg Hindley.

“The loss of languages is tragic precisely because they are not interchangeable, precisely because they represent the distillation of the thoughts and communication of people over their entire history.” — Marianne Mithun.

“The world is a mosaic of visions. With each language that disappears, a piece of that mosaic is lost.” — François Grosjean.

“A man who speaks three language is trilingual. A man who speaks two languages is bilingual. A man who speaks only one language is English.” — Claude Gagnière.

“Those who know no foreign language know nothing of their mother tongue.” — Goethe.

“Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.” — Mark Amidon.

“Usage is the best language teacher.” — Marcus Fabius Quintilianus.

“A natural language is the archive where the experiences, knowledge and beliefs of a community are stored.” — Fernando Lázaro Carreter.

“How many languages you know — that many times you are a person.” — Pavlo Tychyna.

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” — Max Weinreich.

“I speak two languages, Body and English.” — Mae West. (This one’s from here.)

These make me sad that I don’t know more languages. (Another thing that makes me sad: if I’d just committed to one for some time, I could have known several more. Unfortunately, I crave instant gratification. It’s kind of childish, really, but not in a good way. A child also craves instant gratification, but, having no other language to fall back on, must persist in learning their native tongue even when gratification is delayed.)

“Commas are probably the most misunderstood of all punctuation. They frequently dress in black, listen to sad music, and cut themselves.”

—The Fake AP Stylebook

Word-o-Matic »

Colosal. He cogido esto y me he hecho esto otro. Mis favoritos de momento:

  • Monstrocrior
  • Empestor
  • Necrophomermant
  • Demigorgir
  • Cryptobomber
  • Mayhemonium
  • Deationcy
  • Assaulthartic
  • Luciferitor

Y creo que van a ser todos ellos nombres para mis futuras mascotas o hijos. Aunque tal como pintan las cosas, que tenga hijos es bastante menos probable que que forme un grupo de black metal.

dailymeh:

Make your own Markov Chain generator. Like Norse gods or organic compounds. It works better if you have lots of words. I made one that generates names of Tumblr staff members, but there are too few names to really create anything interesting: it keeps cycling between some, like “Armentain”, “Davidani”, “Marcob”, “Chrice”, “Jaco”, and the input names, unaltered. Tumblr simply has too few employees with too few syllables in their names to make anything interesting. It was the first thing that came to my mind, but I’m sure you can think of something better. Like Biblical names, dinosaurs or US states (my third try, I got “Alas”).

Technical details here, via reddit.

me:  FTW urbanbot:  “For The Win.”An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic.Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game. urlesque: urbandictionary: Invite urbanbot@gmail.com to chat on Gmail for super fast Urban Dictionary lookups! Here’s Google’s video on Inviting someone to chat in Gmail. Useful!

me:  FTW

urbanbot:  “For The Win.”An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic.Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game.

urlesque:

urbandictionary:

Invite urbanbot@gmail.com to chat on Gmail for super fast Urban Dictionary lookups!

Here’s Google’s video on Inviting someone to chat in Gmail.

Useful!

science: This is what 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel looks like. The Rosetta Disk is “intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history.” The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’ On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

science:

This is what 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel looks like. The Rosetta Disk is “intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history.”

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Obama también sabe hablar como los negros de la calle.

bullshit:

oomb:

This is a recording of Barack Obama saying, “You ain’t my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!”

Apparently there are some choice phrases quoted in Dreams From My Father. Obama did the audiobook, and so there are now clips of him saying these things, including, also:

“Sure you can have my number, baby!”

“There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.”

“You know that guy ain’t shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker ain’t got nothing on me.”

And, perhaps best of all, “So what happens when we go out to a party with some sistahs, huh? What happens? I tell you what happens: Blam! They on us like there’s no tomorrow. High school chicks, university chicks, it don’t matter!”

From the Boston Phoenix, with many thanks to ephemeron

Play count: 15,357

simplegearl:

“Waldeinsamkeit (German): the feeling of being alone in the woods”