i still turn on the subtitles when watching some anime because i can’t really understand *everything* i hear in japanese but how are the crunchyroll subs for nichijou wrong on the simplest things sometimes

getting back to mahjong #hell

George Mayerle's "international eye chart" (negative) ca. 1907. Invented by an immigrant living in 20th-century San Fran, the chart was intended to allow anyone to do an eye test regardless of nationality. Buy a print here: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/george-mayerle

"Languages are natural products. Alphabets are artificial products. Languages are made by man; alphabets by men." (Hulbert 1892 in The Korean Repository 1.1)

words i always misspell when typing - dissect (always write “disect” as i pronounce the first vowel long; spelling that one with two s’s is extremely unintuitive) - pt alcoólico ‘alcoholic’: there are two o’s in the spelling but you only say one, which makes me want to accent the first o

investgating

also: fine-toothed comb ("fine toothcomb" is a later reanalysis) male [pattern baldness], not male-pattern baldness

after some time you get used to it but japan having two major cities and one is named "tokyo" and the other one "kyoto" is some mario and wario-ass naming

thinking about that time my french coworker thought that Kyoto was just verlan for Tokyo

still thinking about the legendary tweet that joked that you could spell <itadakimasu> with 我必食鴨

eu não coloco porque eu simplesmente deixo as pessoas descobrirem. é meio óbvio

I wrote up my personal philosophy on translating ancient texts, as informed by being raised in a religious environment that had a very unhealthy relationship to its texts. https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/translationphilosophy/ #classicalchinese #translation #localization #philosophy

"writing system invented for proto-celtic" is so many layers of wrong i can't even explain it. if the language has proto- in its name it's unattested bruh

もう1年半くらいこの感じがするけど日本語がだんだん下手になってると思わざるを得ない

My favourite correction:

japanese spelling be like go out of your way to spell とりにく as 鶏肉 but you can't spell やきとり with 鶏

a lot of transcriptions into chinese are like really longwinded and have way too many syllables but some are surprisingly short. scientology (i am obsessed with scientology speedruns how can you tell) is transcribed to 山達基 shandaji that isn't even scientology it's just centogy

tem igreja da cientologia aqui no brasil? queria marcar uma speedrun com uns amigos

i chuckled at "europe she-be'asia"

best hieroglyph, hands down → 𓂸

lembrando de uma vez que o meu pai simplesmente esqueceu a existência da palavra lorde e disse a seguinte frase o matias é um lady [sic] eu e a minha mãe olhamos um pro outro . olhamos pra ele . e dissemos que é lorde

o espaço semântico da palavra lorde em português é fascinante. lord em inglês é senhor (senhor de alguma coisa, tipo mestre, etc). agora em português fora o caso de lordes britânicos a única coisa que pode ser lorde é um lorde das trevas

キャベツは英語のcabbageからの古い外来語だけど全然英語のように聞こえなくてむしろ唐音のほうに聞こえる…本当にそうだったら絶対連綿語でこれが漢字

TIL (I think?)

My favourite convention is when Dutch children refer to <v> and <f> (which are merging to /f/ in hollandic) as 'short v' and 'long f', à la 'short ei' and 'long ij' (both [ɛ̞i̯]). This is despite the fact that the letter names of <v> and <f> would already be pronounced differently, [fei̯] and [ɛf]

there's a lot of local/colloquial names for the letter を in japan and a few of them are quite funny

sometimes i wish i had an imagination as prolific as people like this

pronouncing foreign words more nativized than i specifically do: uncultured pronouncing foreign words less nativized than i specificially do: pretentious

isso é muito coisa de (pseudo)classicista chato mas epentizar é feio e epentetizar é o certo

como é possível meu pai me acordar duas vezes no dia porque vai "entrar em ligação com o support de uma empresa que ele quer contratar o software" e simplesmente não entrar na dita ligação

se eu dou quote em inglês em post que tá em português é porque eu não quero engajar com o op. eu tô tuitando pro void mesmo

yes the pandemic was serious yes it happened yes people died but you can't just explain away a drop from 28m followers to 9m with the pandemic

Vivemos uma era bem mais atual

what was going on in the mind of the japanese script reformers "characters have too many strokes" "yeah we should simplify them" "not all of them though. only simplify like 2k" "... sure? yeah let's do that i guess" "‹範疇› is spelled *like that* now though, shouldn't that be ‹範畴›?" "no. ‹範ちゅう›"

I downloaded a duck and I think I messed up. #pokemon #textmode

not true in my minuscule department

the past tense of tweet is fine as tweeted but quotetweet has to be quotetwote because it's funnier

i just realized completely accidentally that 約 means both cóntract and contráct; you're welcome if it only clicked for you with this post as well

北海道（英：North Zealand、蘭：Noord-Zeeland）

ココア（慣用音。本来は「コーコー」）

「等」は「など」「とう」の2つの読み方があるけど「〇〇、〇〇等」みたいに漢字で書いた「等」を見るとどっちの読み方が普通？「など」は普通ひらがなだからたぶん「とう」だけど誰も発音するのを聞いたことがないから今まで読み方がわからない…

In the early stages of my Ancient Greek lessons at school (with the Athenaze textbook! oh, the nostalgia breaks my heart!) I remember learning this word and being amazed that the same 'geo-' I knew from 'geography', 'geology', 'geostationary', etc. had been hiding in 'George' all along

Up to the early 20th century, Spain was often yclept GREAT LUZON in Sinitic languages: Tōa-lū-sòng / Daai6leoi5sung3 大呂宋. A case of the colonial power being called after the colony, not the other way round😁

Russian and Portuguese sound the same because they’re both next to Galicia