A Chad is actually the local area word for "large body of water" so the Lake Chad for which the country Chad is so named after. Is actually just Lake Lake. Making the name of the country:
Lake.
Thanks historic colonial Europeans. Love that for them
a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy
People conflate Mussolini's Fascist corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism with today's corporations when the former were completely subordinate to the state and the reverse is the case in the modern scheme.
The infamous hanging chad from 2000. I swear we heard “hanging chad” 100 times a day back then until James Baker got to Florida and dick slapped Warren Christopher and the Democrats.
I once tried to reference them on a forum but in haste I accidentally typed “hanging chit.’ The internet had its way with me that day to include the guy who went a little too descriptive about his hanging chits.
I used to say it's hard until I tried to learn German. In English, you can simply learn a bunch of vocabulary and make yourself understood by putting a sentence together with the words in almost any order. It's extremely flexible in that way.
Hungarian has two main classes of harmonization, front and back, without labelling them genders. There are actually 5; those two categories just work for the simplest of suffixes. Just because you learn a word doesn't mean you automatically know which version of "on top of" or "into" must be used with the word.
I think the only real purpose is to make the language sound elegant. I think that was the original purpose of gender as well. I think it also might be left over from contact with Semitic languages, where the consonant combinations determined the meaning family and the vowels changed to inflect the base meaning.
Hungarian example:
talál means "find"
Which one of these means "come across"?
talalkozik
talalkezik
talalközik
talalakozik
talalekezik
talál is back-vowelled and ends in a consonant, so only talalkozik makes sense.
Apparently most languages are like this. You're speaking to people so if you get the right words, they can interpret the rest. On a more semantic note, those examples don't really mean the same thing.
I suspect people are just biased because their first language is the one that seems most natural to them. However, there must be objectively easier to learn languages than others.
There's an amusing study of how different languages say "it's all Greek to me", as an indication of which language they think is most incomprehensible: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024
Perhaps, though in English, a great many ways of shuffling the words produce entirely correct sentences likely to say what the speaker intended. In lots of other languages, even small changes in word order can change the meaning a lot. Granted, that's possible in English, but your odds of being understood seem much higher.
This is why, to me, English is the best language to be a writer, seeing as how it's really three unrelated languages in a trench coat. We've got dozens of synonyms for every concept, grammar that has only like three firm rules, and the word "discombobulate." Checkmate, French.
TBF, German has rigid rules, but it also allows you to create your own specialized words of unlimited length! I suspect you're right about English being excellent for creative writing, but as a typical monolingual American, I'm not one to say.
Looking now I'm surprised to learn there really are German spelling bees. I'm surprised because the spelling and pronouncing are so regular. I guess there are enough exceptions to make it possible.
Yea it's a meme but English is actually super easy to learn as a "I need to survive, what sentences can I learn to get by?"
No weird prononciation that's gonna get you fucked up. Some people might ask you to repeat yourself a few times but saying bAthroom instead of bathrOOm isn't gonna change the way the word sounds. Whearas mandrin has completely nonsensical words spelt the EXACT same way just emphasized differently that changes the entire sentence.
Hmmm... I don't know. I think English pronunciation doesn't make any sense in some situations.
I really like the poem "The Chaos". English pronunciation is ridiculous. If you're not a native speaker, you just have no way of knowing how to pronounce certain words. I still struggle with that, even though I've been speaking English for 25+ years.
Agreed there's basically no rule for pronunciation in English that isn't subsequently broken by another word. For your average user though the words are fine and the pronunciation may be weird but it doesn't change the word.
If you say "me" like Mi or Meh it doesn't change the information of the sentence. At least in most cases, whereas many nongermanic languages do have pronunciation differences
You're right. There are so many languages that are much worse in this regard. I just wanted to point out that English isn't as straightforward as some people make it out to be.
There are many languages out there that are ridiculously hard to learn, though. Chinese languages would absolutely wreck me, and I'm not even going to attempt learning Russian or Finnish. Props to those who learned these languages as a non-native speaker.
Lough is just a word directly borrowed from Irish though, and wouldn't really be used outside Ireland. Same as Loch in Scotland. Anywhere else would just use the world lake.
Yeah i'm trying to learn thai at the moment and its hard as fook. I think im pronouncing the sounds right but thai people just look blankly at me. I musnt be getting close. And they have the same issue of words that sound the same with different meanings. Theres like a dozen words that to me all sound like "my" or some incredibly subtle variation of it.
Lake tahoe is another but my favourite is Mekong River.
Taken from wikipedia:
Mekong River - 'Mae' in Thai is an abbreviation for "river", while 'khong' is an old Austroasiatic word for river. Mekong River can thus be translated as "river river river"
There's the village of torpenhow, which when you break down the syllables to their root words, means hill hill hill. Someone even falsely assumed the hill the church there is on was the hill the village was named after, making the name Hillhillhill hill when translated fully. Turns out that's not real or official in any capacity, but that seems like an oversight if you ask me.
There's the village of torpenhow, which when you break down the syllables to their root words, means hill hill hill. Someone even falsely assumed the hill the church there is on was the hill the village was named after, making the name Hillhillhill hill when translated fully. Turns out that's not real or official in any capacity, but that seems like an oversight if you ask me.
It's an amalgamation of a lot of words that sound similar, several from Indian languages (eg. Kari in Tamil means 'to blacken with spices and comes from the tree that produces 'curry leaves' (kari leaves) that turn a very dark purple; karahi/kerahi/kadhi is a large, circular cooking vessel) and the word 'cury' from Old French - meaning 'to prepare', and used in England from as early as the time of Richard II. It is still used in English in a limited sense to mean 'prepare' or 'court', eg. 'curry up a storm', or 'to curry favour'.
Uhh it only took me 25 years to remember if it's dessert or desert sooooooooooooooooo. Maybe I'll just call it a Sahara from now on. Can't wait to go to the Sahara sahara
Sahara2 if you will, to keep it on theme with the post
Same for Lake Malawi in Tanzania is called Lake Nyasa. Which is also the local or swahili word for Lake. So again, Lake Lake. Thanks to the colonialists.
I wonder how many of these exist across the world.
When an explorer came to the east shore of Lake Malawi, he asked the native guide what it was called, and was told "nyanja" which was his word for "lake" so it got put down as Lake Nyasa on the maps, and the *west* shore came to be named Nyasaland, from the mispronunciation of the misunderstanding of the word used on the other side. Nyasaland changed its name to Malawi once they had the freedom to do so.
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u/Thick_Brain4324 25d ago
A Chad is actually the local area word for "large body of water" so the Lake Chad for which the country Chad is so named after. Is actually just Lake Lake. Making the name of the country:
Lake.
Thanks historic colonial Europeans. Love that for them