Sorry guys but look in the cut for video's and pictures of the press conference

( Pics + Video )

I think they doesn't like it because i rarely find Japanese in international community website such as LJ, FB, and DA. Is it just because they have their own community and doesn't need the international ones? or because they hate English?
You know, I'm just curious, because I think Japanese is a smart nation. They can build robots and all. Surely they can learn language like English?

A poster on an online forum I read said the following:

"There is far more dialectal variety in Britain than there is in the US, and except for African and Yiddish imports American English hasn't innovated very much."

Is he right? I find it hard to believe. I know there are many regional accents in the UK, but it would seem like there'd be even more in the US. But even if I'm wrong about that, it can't be true that African and Yiddish words are the only contributions to American English. We (in the US) have immigrants from all over the world, and words from their languages have made their way into common US-English usage. What about all the other Europeans (not English) who emigrated here? People from Asian countries? American Indians?

I'd love to hear some opinions on this, as well as any statistics (or references to online information) on various linguistic influences on American English. Thanks!

I've done some Google searching, trying to find a decent, reliable Hindi to English dictionary. All the ones I find are really subpar... the best one I've found offers a dozen different translations for simple words without any indication whatsoever of why or in what context they would be used. I look up house and get karkhaanaa, kul, kothii, gruh, and then FINALLY I get to ghar (before twelve OTHER entries), which I found out was the word I was looking for since I thankfully know a couple of Hindi speakers. ALL of these entries simply say "house" and the part of speech. All but five are nouns.

This is useless. Does anyone know of any better resources for looking up Hindi words online? Something like WordReference, maybe, where they actually appear to be trying?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I found these lyrics from an otherwise Estonian song and the context implies that it's Japanese:

Anataga hoshi
Subetega hoshi
Mitetekuretano

Anataga hoshi
Subetega hoshi
Ubarate kokoro

Basically, I'm curious if this really is Japanese or just sounds like it, and if it is then what it says.

Hello, fellow linguaphiles!

I've got a random piece of text that goes something like this: "estebe nozem vex".
Does anybody have an idea what language it is and what it means?
Or is it just gibberish?

Thanx!

I know again i am very evil and not posting anything for you to see but its a huge post so i will add all the media to the cut where all the pics, videos and screenshots i took are

( Pics, video's and screenshots inside )

Does vosotros have a place in a first-year high school Spanish class in the United States? How about vos? Would your answer change if it were a first-year Spanish class at the university level?

a co-worker is trying to get help in translating the following into french:


This person is traveling from Seattle/ Tacoma (SEA, United States) to Warsaw (WAW, Poland) on December 4th /5th with a plane change in Paris (CDG). If she has given you this letter then she is in need of help.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t speak English (speaks polish only) and would be extremely thankful for any help during her transit stay at the Paris Airport.
Any help you can give to help her get to Seattle/Tacoma (information about the flight bellow the letter) would be sincerely appreciated.
If any problems occur please inform one of the following people:
VB (daughter) – USA phone number:
CB (son in law) – USA Phone number
We both speak English and Polish and would appreciate any help you can provide to TK.



i don't know french, so cannot help him a whit. would anyone be able to help out with this? many thanks!

eta: looks like he found someone to help, so please disregard :)

I've recently become obsessed with Jason Derulo (two dots on top of the "u"), but I can't figure out what his last name means or where it's from. Any ideas?

Hi!

I recently acquired a dress from a japanese brand, and the print includes some hebrew blurbs (go figure).
Could anyone kindly tell me what they mean?

( pictures! )

Sorry for posting something so thoroughly boring in the midst of all these interesting discussions, and thank you for any help you can provide ♥

Answered, thanks!

A friend recommended this community as a place to find help with a Turkish word that's baffling us. It's used on the German soap that we translate -- we can handle the German, and usually with the help of Google translator + context we can figure out the Turkish, but this one is just a puzzler.

In context, one character is complaining about her family and her boyfriend says he could get his brothers to beat everyone up, and she replies "then the [shöpaz? çepaz? shöpas?] would be over." So we're thinking it's something like "drama" or "idiocy" or "trouble", but none of those meanings are churning out anything remotely close. Here's the 15 second sound clip where they use it. Repeatedly. (Note: this conversation is mostly in German -- the word that we're trying to figure out is used at the end, and repeated several times. I included the conversation around it for context.)

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

ETA: Thanks for all your help -- you folks are amazing! We're thinking that it's a mispronunciation of 'Spaß'.

Hi!
Could anyone recommend good universities in Romania and/or Slovakia. I'm interested in linguistics (esp. pragmatics).

Thank you all in advance!

I've sometimes seen modern concepts translated into Latin, usually for humorous purposes. Such are my purposes.

How would I say, "[computer] programmer beware"? I'm thinking "caveat scriptor" (with the added bonus that "scriptor" sounds like leetspeak.) Any other suggestions?

has anyone ever managed to buy this? is it really on CD-ROM and does it ever ship?

What do you think of language immersion preschools? Does anyone have any personal experiences with them?

"And thirdly, why man alone hath grey hairs; whereas it cannot escape the eyes, and ordinary observation of all men, that horses, dogs, and foxes, wax gray with age in our countries; and in the colder regions, many other animals without it." (Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1672. Book I. Chap. VI. - My italics.)

1.) grey / gray? I know these are variants, but in one and the same sentence? Is there more to it? EDIT: Probably my edition is to blame.
2.) ...many other animals without it?: Does that mean "apart from horses, dogs, and foxes"? EDIT: Gawd, I'm stupid: with age - without it.

Thanks in advance!

Note: "man alone": That is, according to Aristotle. Browne (erroneously) assumes that A. claimed such a thing.

What is Ja Twa? I saw it as a language option while filling out a form on the Los Angeles website. I tried to look it up but just got people asking how to spell bastardized French words.

I'm doing an acoustic analysis for my Phonetics class. Part of my instructions are telling me:

Get total bandwith: Go to [Edit]; Query> Get spectrum info; Record total bandwith (e.g. 11025 Hz). This is the ‘Nyquist frequency’ of your sound which is half of your sampling rate.

Whatever it is, I haven't yet found the option mentioned and have no idea what to do. Help?

A man who speaks Miami (Myaamia) came to my class today to speak about language revitalization. He was wearing a t-shirt that said "Akalaaŝhimaataweehsiiwaani teehŝi" (I think; I'm not claiming to know Miami, but I wrote it down from his shirt). Someone inevitably asked him what his shirt meant and he said "I don't speak English only."

He thought it was particularly appropriate to wear the tshirt to our class, since Oklahoma is about to pass an English Only bill next year.

So, just for fun, how do you say this phrase in your language? Something like this would be a great ad campaign against such laws.

So even though I've been learning spanish for about 5 years now, I was never formally taught the difference between Por and Para or the difference between Bueno and Bien. Since I've started writing in Spanish now, I actually have a need for knowing the difference. If somebody could maybe explain it to me I'd be really grateful.

¡Gracías!

In Hungarian, what is the implications of the determiner egy-egy ?

I understand it seems to make a correlation between a group of individuals and another distinct argument to lessen ambiguity:

Minden gyerek olvasott egy könyvet = every child read a book (ambiguous, either there was one book that all the children read or each of them read their own)

but:

Minden gyerek olvasott egy-egy könyvet = every child read a book (non ambiguous, correlates a single book for every child)

Its grammatical to say:

A lányok olvastak egy könyvet = The girls read a book (ambiguous)

But is it possible to say(and this is my question):

A lányok olvastak egy-egy könyvet = The girls read a book (non ambiguous)

Thanks for anyone who can shed light on this unusual determiner...

On a radio show the other day, this guy was giving the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At one point, he said:

All three religions are monotheistic.

Which he clarified by saying:

They all worship the same God of Abraham.

[Please, keep any religious Pandora's Boxes closed - Just using the situation to illustrate my question...]

To say that any number of religions are monotheistic, in my opinion, is to say that they each worship only one god.

However, is there a term (in any language!) to describe multiple monotheistic religions worshipping the same deity?

[Edit] As I did some more research on non-Abrahamic monotheistic religions... The list only seems to be <1 item long, and that pseudo-item is Hindu. Nonetheless, given the lacking presence of non-Abrahamic monotheistic religions, I guess the closest term I'll find will end up being Abrahamic Monotheism...

Hi!

I am currently assisting with a primary school where we have recently started a language learning course for the children - in this case, with French. However a lot of the children are really struggling with learning it and so I am looking into ways of helping them outside of class.

One of the ideas we have had is to basically steal the Kumon idea (which for those who do not know basically gives children a short worksheet to do every day in which they have to answer repetitive questions to do with either maths or english) but relate it to French instead. So for example there could be a small workbook with a page of words in English, and the children would be asked to write the word in French. Once a week they would come and hand their workbooks in, and we would be able to help them with anything they didn't understand or with things like pronnounciation in that time.

Would something like this have been helpful for you?
Alternatively, do you have any other ideas we could use? The language lessons themselves are very short and as we have to do them exactly how the school says we don't have much room for any outside help - the most we can do is an extra optional hour after a school each week, really.

The children are aged between 5 - 10.

Hi!
I'm translating a poem by Dylan Thomas', "There was a saviour", and I have problems with these lines:

Now see, alone in us,
Our own true strangers' dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house.

I just can't get what did he mean. May be, there are some colloquial or phraseological things I simply don't know about. Would you be so kind to help me in deciphering these lines?

Obviously, you might need the whole poem, so I place it behind cut.

( Read more... )

Thanks in advance!