4 comments

  • robin_reala4 hours ago
    The title’s a pun on a legendarily bad English phrasebook <i>English as She Is Spoke</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;pedro-carolino_jose-da-fonseca&#x2F;english-as-she-is-spoke" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;pedro-carolino_jose-da-fon...</a>
    • andrepd2 hours ago
      All your base, but in 1855 Portugal instead of 1991 Japan.
  • unnah56 minutes ago
    So apparently the Elvish spoken in the Peter Jackson movies is as far from the language imagined by Tolkien as the famous Portuguese-English phrasebook is from natural English. That&#x27;s one childhood fantasy broken. What about the Klingon spoken in Star Trek movies?
    • NoGravitas32 minutes ago
      The difference is that tlhIngan Hol was created to be spoken in movies and shows, not just to explore the parts of language development that were interesting to the creator. So <i>usually</i>, the tlhIngan Hol used in Star Trek movies and shows is about as good as it&#x27;s going to get. Sometimes the actors have terrible pronunciation, and sometimes the writers make up names for people and places that aren&#x27;t actually possible in tlhIngan Hol phonology and we have to just roll with it. And modern Star Trek shows have mostly done a better job than the classics, because they bother to have a Klingon language consultant on staff (I was gobsmacked when in ST: Starfleet Academy they used &quot;qeylIS&quot; and &quot;Qo&#x27;noS&quot; rather than &quot;Kahless&quot; and &quot;Chronos&quot;) . But unlike Quenya or Sindarin, you can have an actual natural conversation in Klingon, as long as you avoid topics for which the Klingon Language Institute hasn&#x27;t developed vocabulary.
  • kqr1 hour ago
    Today I learned what a <i>kenning</i> is. I have encountered them many times before (to a foreigner, Finnish seems chock full of them) but I never knew they had a name. I love them!
    • Sharlin5 minutes ago
      Kennings are different from normal compound words (which Finnish as a synthetic language is full of, just like German). They&#x27;re poetic&#x2F;metaphorical synonyms for existing standard words for things, whereas something like <i>tietokone</i> (lit. &quot;knowledge machine&quot;) <i>is</i> the standard Finnish word for computer. There&#x27;s actually no kenning tradition in Finnish, it&#x27;s more of an Old Norse thing.<p>As an aside, a fun exercise (for some values of fun) is to come up with English compound words that are <i>not</i> compound in Finnish. The first one that comes to mind is &quot;lighthouse&quot; – &quot;majakka&quot; (borrowed from Russian <i>маяк</i>).
    • pixl979 minutes ago
      First there was kerning, then there was keming, now there&#x27;s kenning. When will the madness stop.
  • squeefers39 minutes ago
    more terse than an actual tolkien book