Ask Lemmy

In general I think Spanish is a well formed language without (or at least not much) crazy shit.

But I still don't know why we have the same fucking word for weather and time. While using the same word for different meanings is ok, these two are ridiculously common concepts used a lot and it's not hard to get into situations where it's hard to know which is which. Absolutely stupid.

(English)

So many people treat the letter S like it's special, regardless of why it's there.

Instead of Gus's, they'll say Gus' when they are talking about a possession of the singular Gus.

If the S is part of a name, it doesn't activate the plural-possessive rule for dropping the S after the apostrophe.

Burns's poems
Samus's starship
Kass's theme

Kids split words in American, too; or they join the words. We see examples like:

• Incase
• aswell
• shutdown (wrong as verb)
• backup(wrong as verb)

Or wrong splits:

• back up (wrong as noun)
• under stand

Or just plain dumb:

• emails
• till (instead of 'til)

I wish I could say it was better in English, but we're being dragged down with them.

In English, lack of second-person plural, aside from a dozen regionalisms: y'all, yinz, youse, etc.

No distinction between inclusive & exclusive 'we': if I say "we've got to go now", do I expect you to come?

Unnecessarily generated pronouns. I know 'they/them' has been used for individuals for ages, but I still find it awkward. I wish we just used one set of ungendered pronouns for every specific person.

OP, I appreciate the examples. Thanks to them, I see what you mean, and agree.

Briefly, I was thinking “I don’t want to read a word that’s as long as a sentence, no wonder people break things up”, but that wasn’t what you meant at all.

For English, what irritates me is not knowing what to do with possessive apostrophes, especially if the word already ends in “s”. I know I’ve gotten it wrong many times, but oh well.

When Swedish translators try to create a Swedish name for an English character it always ends up sounding silly. Batman was named "läderlappen" (the leather patch) for example.

Yesterday I heard that they translated Pennywise the clown as "clownen Snåljåpen", which I guess gets the literal meaning across but also makes him feel like more of a stingy old man than an actual villain.

dutch: our accent is the absolute worst thing.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying "this Wednesday" on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, "this whateverday" refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it's past or future. "Next whateverday" refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

"This Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

"Next Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

The main problem I have with English is that spoken English and written English are two different languages. Inflection and emphasis and even volume aren't carried by the Latin alphabet. We can do things like this sometimes but even that is limited.

I mean, how many of us have had English teachers tell us we can't write essays the way we speak.

Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you've encountered a classic "sær skrivingsfeil". (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called "særskrivingfeil", "sær skrivingsfeil" means "odd/weird writing error" and is itself a mistake of the "særskrivingsfeil" type.)

Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you've mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don't love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don't love it there is a perception that the langauge is "limited" or "boring". I'd love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I've come across aren't very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I'll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook's series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I'm talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn't put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren't as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that's what the genre "sounds like". I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.

The fact that it can be read so many different ways depending on the accent. I have a different accent than those around me, and it's inevitable to feel expectations violated.

Apparently people also find it funny when I say the word "envelope". "Hey it's Leni, say envelope" they might say, maybe with me responding "guys, I'm not a freaking circus seal" like Jango Fett has a secret pet in denial.

In Russian to say "I saw a video" sounds like "Ia VIDel VIDeo" which just sounds stupid too. Everytime I say it I have to rollback, find a synonym, and repeat the sentence in less stupid way

Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.

Oh no, the most I’ve dealt with a similar problem is knowing when to use porque vs. por que in Spanish. I still don’t know

All the French that's embedded in it. Stupid Normans making it sound weird if I go to a restaurant and order pig.

Actually, I find the french and double dose of viking influence quite fascinating. English etymology is a wild ride!