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SlothfulCobra posted:
The Taiwan one is interesting to me. I didn’t know it was such a big island, I would have guessed it was like… I dunno, maybe Montenegro sized. I’ve lived in Cairo, it doesn’t really sprawl all that much since it’s 20m people, it’s actually insanely densely populated. The main thing is that everyone is in a very thin band on either side of the Nile, except for the newest districts made since the 60s/70s like 6th of October and New Cairo. The core part of Cairo from Giza to Helwan to Heliopolis is almost the opposite of sprawl if you’re considering it in terms of the number of people living there. It’d be inhumane to have it in *less* space. It takes forever to get across but only because there’s so much traffic, not the distances. At 2am you can get anywhere to anywhere within half an hour. No way doing that in LA without a rocket-propelled car, and with half the population.
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Oct 2, 2022 08:55
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Good news, they want to fix Cairo by bulldozing the old slums and building a new section that's going to be obscenely spread out after the American model for a change.
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Oct 2, 2022 09:35
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steinrokkan posted:Good news, they want to fix Cairo by bulldozing the old slums and building a new section that's going to be obscenely spread out after the American model for a change. Thats not good news at all you liar
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Oct 2, 2022 10:22
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steinrokkan posted:Good news, they want to fix Cairo by bulldozing the old slums and building a new section that's going to be obscenely spread out after the American model for a change. Yeah, well if New Capital actually gets built according to plan, then Cairo will have sprawl. Right now New Cairo is the only real "sprawl". Even 6th of October is not very sprawly -- it's a bunch of highly packed like 5-8 story concrete apartment blocks. Also for all its fundamental faults, it's actually impressive how fast the Egyptian government is building New Capital. Like the whole thing sprang out of the desert in about the same amount of time it took Neom to make a single rendering of a ski slope. I left in what, 2018? There was nothing there at all, and now it's massive and even landscaped in large parts. I mean it might be a boondoggle but it's impressive nevertheless. I mean the ancient pyramids were an insanely stupid waste to build, so this is at least an improvement from government expenditure in 2000 BC.
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Oct 2, 2022 11:24
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Saladman posted:Yeah, well if New Capital actually gets built according to plan, then Cairo will have sprawl. Right now New Cairo is the only real "sprawl". Even 6th of October is not very sprawly -- it's a bunch of highly packed like 5-8 story concrete apartment blocks. The pyramids in all likelihood were a make work project to keep the peasants from having too much free time to think about society while the soil was flooded. But you can get pretty far pretty fast by ignoring environmental impact, labour rights, health and safety and so on, especially if you have a lot of people you can set to work. See also a lot of stuff being build in China. Does anyone have the nice gif of subway systems where Copenhagen goes from 0 to 4 lines in 20 years, while some 3rd rate Chinese city goes 0 to 20 in 5 years?
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Oct 2, 2022 12:32
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 Liechtensteiners are forbidden from saying the name of the French capital. Andorrans are compelled but refuse to.
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Oct 2, 2022 12:51
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Guavanaut posted:
Paris is pronounced with a "ř"
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Oct 2, 2022 14:36
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Really makes you think if maybe the French are the ones who have it wrong.
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Oct 2, 2022 15:32
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dumb american palate is giving me trouble differentiating between the italian and slavic ways
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Oct 2, 2022 15:48
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The way France uses the alphabet is entirely unlike how any other country and language uses it, to a pretty strong degree. English has a few spelling conventions we got from the Normans and America has a lot of place names originally written by the French (often transliterated from native languages), and those are notoriously the most unintuitive and confusing spellings we have. I don't know what France's deal is. Saladman posted:I’ve lived in Cairo, it doesn’t really sprawl all that much since it’s 20m people, it’s actually insanely densely populated. The main thing is that everyone is in a very thin band on either side of the Nile, except for the newest districts made since the 60s/70s like 6th of October and New Cairo. The core part of Cairo from Giza to Helwan to Heliopolis is almost the opposite of sprawl if you’re considering it in terms of the number of people living there. It’d be inhumane to have it in *less* space. What I mean by sprawl with Cairo is that they keep making new cities on the fringes of the old city, allegedly to alleviate crowding, but in practice are just creating areas for the more well-off to move to while the central city continues to suffer. Also there's that new capital under construction to move the center of government out of reach of protesting commoners. mobby_6kl posted:I saw this video on the new capital a few weeks ago, it covers some of the more dumb stuff like they're apparently palling to build the world's tallest flagpole and skyscraper, a military HQ 8 times bigger than the Pentagon, a monorail, and of course horrible suburban sprawl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s
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Oct 2, 2022 16:22
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I got curious and found some examples (submitted by random internet people) Judge: Italian: https://forvo.com/word/parigi/#it Vision: Polish: https://forvo.com/word/pary%C5%BC/#pl Czech: https://forvo.com/word/pa%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BE/#cs Bulgarian/Russian/Ukrainian/Tatar: https://forvo.com/word/%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B6/ Zero: Latvian: https://forvo.com/word/par%C4%ABze/#lv Slovenian: https://forvo.com/word/pariz/#sl Macedonian: https://forvo.com/word/%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B7/#mk
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Oct 2, 2022 16:30
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Regarding the French language, there's a pretty cool video that explains how you can take advantage of the french roots of many English words to decode French words into (more) understandable forms. For example, éponge -> sponge forêt -> forest guerrier -> warrior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ
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Oct 2, 2022 17:03
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i do like that epaulettes are just fancy spaulders
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Oct 2, 2022 17:06
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in english we have a tendency to regard french spellings as the "fancy" way; i gotta wonder if that's a stereotype anywhere else in other langages. probably netherlands/germany but not other romance areas? edit also does the "fancy french" stereotype date from the norman aristocracy period or the early-modern cultural period?
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Oct 2, 2022 17:08
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Angepain posted:Vision:
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Oct 2, 2022 17:45
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Llamadeus posted:Wait, none of these are the ʒ in vision (they're all voiceless even). I guess the map maker hosed up. Yeah, it's a bit unclear. Some of them sound a bit borderline to my ears, but the Czech and Bulgarian ones in particular just sound like "sh" in "shut". Might be different dialects or my untrained ears. Or an internet map is wrong.
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Oct 2, 2022 18:01
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i say swears online posted:in english we have a tendency to regard french spellings as the "fancy" way; i gotta wonder if that's a stereotype anywhere else in other langages. probably netherlands/germany but not other romance areas? danish has a number of words from french, but its about 50/50 whether using the french spellings would confuse people, eg. miljø (milieu), kontor (comptoir), or be considered fancy, eg. sauce vs sovs, boutique vs butik
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Oct 2, 2022 18:19
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Llamadeus posted:Wait, none of these are the ʒ in vision (they're all voiceless even). I guess the map maker hosed up. Or maybe forvo.com doesn’t have a comprehensive database of the correct pronunciation in every language lol. The character in Bulgarian and Russian is ж which is pronounced as ʒ.
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Oct 2, 2022 18:22
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Starks posted:Or maybe forvo.com doesn’t have a comprehensive database of the correct pronunciation in every language lol. The character in Bulgarian and Russian is ж which is pronounced as ʒ. I checked wiktionary for IPAs and they have it as ʃ and ʂ for Bulgarian and Russian respectively (and ʒ for Ukrainian). It seems like this is a standard feature of most of those languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing#Slavic_languages
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Oct 2, 2022 18:30
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Carthag Tuek posted:danish has a number of words from french, but its about 50/50 whether using the french spellings would confuse people, eg. miljø (milieu), kontor (comptoir), or be considered fancy, eg. sauce vs sovs, boutique vs butik Same in Czech, lots of the "sophisticated" words (as opposed to their more commonly used equivalents) are French, but adapted for Czech spelling. Meanwhile German-derived words are usually considered to be colloquial, vulgar.
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Oct 2, 2022 18:36
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SlothfulCobra posted:The way France uses the alphabet is entirely unlike how any other country and language uses it, to a pretty strong degree. English has a few spelling conventions we got from the Normans and America has a lot of place names originally written by the French (often transliterated from native languages), and those are notoriously the most unintuitive and confusing spellings we have. Short version (based on my memory, so I expect corrections): French spelling solidified quite early, leading to a divide between written and spoken language. This was coupled with French being right on the border of romance, meaning it got influenced by a lot of speakers with non-romance first languages and thus changed a lot more than, say Italian or Spanish. This meant that you got spelling that stuck to some arbitrary point in time where the words were in fact pronounced more or less as written, but the actual language changed away from that. At a guess, they also had some novel sounds that they decided to use digraphs for instead of making new letters. That's always terrible (looking at English th here in particular). Plus, it's the French, they probably hosed it up on purpose to seem more fancy.
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Oct 2, 2022 20:57
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BonHair posted:Short version (based on my memory, so I expect corrections): French spelling solidified quite early, leading to a divide between written and spoken language. This was coupled with French being right on the border of romance, meaning it got influenced by a lot of speakers with non-romance first languages and thus changed a lot more than, say Italian or Spanish. This meant that you got spelling that stuck to some arbitrary point in time where the words were in fact pronounced more or less as written, but the actual language changed away from that. Don't they have literal language cops to keep everything as messed up as possible?
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Oct 2, 2022 20:58
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Carthag Tuek posted:danish has a number of words from french, but its about 50/50 whether using the french spellings would confuse people, eg. miljø (milieu), kontor (comptoir), or be considered fancy, eg. sauce vs sovs, boutique vs butik mobby_6kl posted:Don't they have literal language cops to keep everything as messed up as possible?
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Oct 2, 2022 21:06
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BonHair posted:At a guess, they also had some novel sounds that they decided to use digraphs for instead of making new letters. That's always terrible (looking at English th here in particular). þ
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Oct 2, 2022 21:08
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I think English might actually be unique in not having language cops, at least for a major language. jeremy corbyn's labor party
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Oct 2, 2022 21:11
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Yeah, that's half my point. The other half is ð
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Oct 2, 2022 21:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The difference between sovs and sauce is whether there's enough.  tru
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Oct 2, 2022 21:22
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On the plus side a moderately-literate native French speaker can read and understand 14th-century texts, so that's pretty cool.
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Oct 2, 2022 21:38
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The specific job of the language cops of France is to adjudicate all new words, and they specifically want to prevent the use of any loanwords, which I'm not sure how successful they are at actually controlling the language most people speak. The country has had a lot of success at suppressing minority languages though. English does have some dictionaries that maintain themselves as the authority over the language, but they tend to be really open to adding words, sometimes a little trigger-happy. There's always some new words that they add that don't actually catch on. Additions this year are "sponcon" and "damfino". Also there's the major split between American and British English so there's not much point to either Oxford or Webster taking a hardline approach, because the other sill keep developing.
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Oct 2, 2022 21:49
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i say swears online posted:in english we have a tendency to regard french spellings as the "fancy" way; i gotta wonder if that's a stereotype anywhere else in other langages. probably netherlands/germany but not other romance areas? I'm just reminded of the Strange Case of "bijou" in Dutch. "bijou" (singular) or "bijoux" (plural) just means small jewelry. In case you don't know, in Dutch, the "ij" is a common digraph, it has a vowel sound somewhat similar (but not quite) to German "ei" or English "y". While "ij" is common, the letter y is very rare in Dutch and only appears in loan words. Unlike other digraphs in Dutch, "ij" is often considered a single letter, especially in handwriting or for phone book sorting.  There's a town in the Netherlands called IJmuiden. That's right, the IJ as a whole gets capitalized, as if it were a single letter. No other Dutch digraph has this property. The ij is WEIRD. Anyway, this leads to a situation where Dutch people KNOW the "ij" is unique to their language, and that the 'equivalent' to "ij" in other languages is "y". So, a Dutch person sees the French loan word "bijoux" somewhere and thinks: 'that must be wrong. French has no "ij". Someone wrote that down wrong, it must be "byoux"', not realizing that in bijoux, it's not even a digraph. It's a two syllable word, bi-joux. But this overcorrection does lead to kitschy jewelry stores that try to seem fancier than they are putting the nonsense word 'byoux' on their signs. 
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Oct 2, 2022 22:04
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excellent post, ty
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Oct 2, 2022 22:08
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mobby_6kl posted:Regarding the French language, there's a pretty cool video that explains how you can take advantage of the french roots of many English words to decode French words into (more) understandable forms. For example, Interesting. I'm a French speaker but noticed the é to s switch or heard anyone mention it but yeah seems really reliable. The hat one is commonly taught in French-English classes and books (hotel / hostel / foret / forest / arret / arrest), iirc there's some good explanation for it existing in the first place, but not for French not having eliminated the circumflex over the past 500 years since it's basically just an etymology marker and not meaningful in any direct way. The gu to w is interesting, like going from guêpe to wasp, but I think he might have overplayed his pattern there, since "gu" is not a very common starting word in French and like... none of them besides Warrior and Wasp actually make sense with the "W" when translated into English ( https://en.pons.com/translate/french-english/-/gu ). Like a "guépard" is a leopard, not a wepard. Unless maybe it was a wepard in Middle English. And a "guide" is still a "guide" and not a "wide". I can find close W synonyms for some of them, like Guichet --> Window, but ... that's still pretty far and probably not the same root word. But I don't speak Middle English so maybe some of these have really clear analogues.
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Oct 2, 2022 22:19
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the danish authority is mostly about maintaining the official dictionary and grammar, which are continuously updated as habits change. one major change was going from the aa digraph to å and dropping the capitalization of nouns in the late 1940s (likely encouraged by anti-german sentiment, but it had been a thing in certain circles for decades). they also tried making the spelling of mayonnaise to majonæse valid in i think the 1990s but people got really mad so its back to the french spelling. so yeah, very much descriptive, not prescriptive. also im annoyed that EB Garamond doesn't have the ij-digraph, since it is used in older danish handwritten texts. it basically looks like a ÿ (y with dieresis) when handwritten, but is clearly an i-j combo from the text contents Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Oct 2, 2022 |
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Oct 2, 2022 22:19
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e: window is from norse "wind eye" (we say vindue in danish) so it wouldnt fit the gu- -> w- pattern from french to english
Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Oct 2, 2022 |
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Oct 2, 2022 22:22
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Carbon dioxide posted:There's a town in the Netherlands called IJmuiden. That's right, the IJ as a whole gets capitalized, as if it were a single letter. No other Dutch digraph has this property. To add to this: the IJ is a ligature, i.e. I and J in this case are considered to meld into a single glyph, kind of like Æ in Danish and Norwegian and Œ in French. Hence: IJsland (Iceland), IJsselmeer, IJmuiden. Even many native speakers make spelling errors against this though and write things like 'Ijsland'.
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Oct 2, 2022 22:36
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Saladman posted:Interesting. I'm a French speaker but noticed the é to s switch or heard anyone mention it but yeah seems really reliable. Thanks for chiming in! He mentions that gu->w is definitely the weakest one, though in the example cases it does help understand the word even if they're still quite different. I studied french for a year or two in high school but sadly don't remember anything useful, so I'm trusting you here 
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Oct 2, 2022 22:38
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i say swears online posted:in english we have a tendency to regard french spellings as the "fancy" way; i gotta wonder if that's a stereotype anywhere else in other langages. probably netherlands/germany but not other romance areas? I'm not a scholar of the language but I recall seeing this discussed in a few places. It is from the period of Norman rule, and it shows in how many words in English come from French if they're legal stuff or fancy rich-people stuff, vs how many are of Anglo-Saxon derivation if they're things that the peasants would be dealing with. For example, marriage (the legal status) vs wedding (the ceremony), or how many meats are referred to by French-derived words on the table (beef, pork) vs the live animal that eats and shits (cow, pig). For a long time, the nobility didn't even speak English.
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Oct 2, 2022 23:05
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mobby_6kl posted:Thanks for chiming in! gue -> w is pretty common in spanish but i think it depends on the accent Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm not a scholar of the language but I recall seeing this discussed in a few places. It is from the period of Norman rule, and it shows in how many words in English come from French if they're legal stuff or fancy rich-people stuff, vs how many are of Anglo-Saxon derivation if they're things that the peasants would be dealing with. in the 80s my parents owned a christian toy store called Noah's Toy Shoppe. i haven't thought about your other examples, those are neat edit actually is shoppe middle english i say swears online fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Oct 2, 2022 |
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Oct 2, 2022 23:08
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Pope Hilarius II posted:To add to this: the IJ is a ligature, i.e. I and J in this case are considered to meld into a single glyph, kind of like Æ in Danish and Norwegian and Œ in French. Hence: IJsland (Iceland), IJsselmeer, IJmuiden. Even many native speakers make spelling errors against this though and write things like 'Ijsland'. i always thought IJ was a digraph but not a ligature? Æ is a ligature (two letters A & E bound together into one letter), IJ is a digraph (two letters I & J written together, but counting as one). i guess the broken U variants in some fonts would be a ligature
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Oct 2, 2022 23:15
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm not a scholar of the language but I recall seeing this discussed in a few places. It is from the period of Norman rule, and it shows in how many words in English come from French if they're legal stuff or fancy rich-people stuff, vs how many are of Anglo-Saxon derivation if they're things that the peasants would be dealing with. also i think thats when "legal twins", ie cease and desist, terms and conditions, etc showed up in english, because they are often the romance & the germanic terms. otoh we also have them in danish where both terms are norse/germanic and in general use so idk if that would the sole reason, probably it just sounds good and makes it less likely that some 8th century sovereign citizen will go "oh but you didnt say free, i thought you meant i could clearly ..." or some bullshit
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Oct 2, 2022 23:23
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