Alex Jones lawyer: "he's playing a character!"

[Kugelfisch]

So Kugel any personal reason you hate the English people?

Hate them? I pity them.

[Le Redditeur]

So Kugel any personal reason you hate the English people?

Probably the Battle of the Marne.

[wildmage]

How does a country develop a culture?

Hard to explain to monolingual English speakers. But I think Russians may get what I'm talking about. And it fits really well with the craftsmanship being "eh, that's good enough".

And Spaniards are completely moronic, just like their language.

Being a Slav that lives in Spicland I don't know how to feel.

In any case I'll give you my two cents on the Romance languages. First of all, context: Latin, the mother language of all civilized languages (fuck the moon runes) has 6 cases. In short, when you have a word ending in a or in ae, you determine right from the start whether that word is the agent initiating the action or receiving it. The word adapts to the rule.

After a couple of millenia, turns out that teaching 18 variations of the same word with different endings was stupid, so the spanish language (and french, and italian and romanian) decided to flip the rule on its head and instead, leave the substantive to change only whether the word is maculine or feminine (fuck you krauts with your neutral gender), plural or singular but instead create a sleught of pronouns in front (or behind) of the word to determine the construction of the sentence. In short, the rule adapts to the noun. What happens then? That we have more exceptions than rules based on trying to match the latin cases to the pronoun structure.

And from the back end, the way it went was the same: two meanings to the same word was considered retarded, so the rule that has been going on for the las 500 years was "the first meaning of the word has to be signifficantly different from another existing word to be considered a stand-alone". That was the theory, and academics with a vocabulary of 15k words could make use of it but average joe in the XVII century was content with 2k words for his daily life. Which is why our sentences are a combination of nouns stringed together with many "des" "desde" "del".

What is the role of culture in all of this? Well, average joe will not be part of the Academisia de la Lengua to know the propper technical name of their watering hole, so his word pool would have to be made of regional words used in his village. And I use the watering hole example because it's fucking universal. You go to Vigo, a grey, depressed, economically shitty part of the north of Spain where the place to drown your sorrows with sawdust on the floor and shitty drinks is called a "Furancho" while Asturias, another grey, depressed, economically shitty part of the north of Spain calls it a "Chigre" and. The kicker? These are neighbouring fucking counties.

Which is why language, culture and national identity go hand in hand in some of this places. I shit you not that you, sometimes, can't start a public policy (to add fluor to the water, whatevs) without having consultants from the regional culture studies groups because otherwise the bill won't pass.

And don't get me started on the Madrid vs Barcelona feud that has been going for the past quarter of a century; the Vasques blowing up schools until as recent as 10 years ago just because they didn't feel a part of Spain and if you know what the Basque language is, you'd easily see why.

In conclussion: flipped rule structure leads to an explosion of wild regional variation which in turn leads to two ideologically opposed factions, those who are in favour of 1 unified form of speaking (why have 7 different words for the same fucking thing) and those that will call you a fascist (erasing 600 years of my culture because you fucking want your way of speaking neat and tidy). Neither side is wrong.

The only upside is that you pronounce what you see on paper, no bullshit attached.

And for tomorrow's lesson: why there are 8 different past and future tenses

Tl;dr: linguistical autism and Kugel is jealous because german is robospeak.

[Kugelfisch]

Like I said, completely moronic.

[wildmage]

Like I said, completely moronic.

Says the man with just 4 cases.

[Kugelfisch]

Like I said, completely moronic.

Says the man with just 4 cases.

No more are needed.

[Le Redditeur]

German was on its way to become the world's lingua franca (replacing the French after 1872), but then the Marne happened, and the timeline where Japanese incorporates German words to it's vocabulary was aborted. Which is a shame, because I'd love to know how they would bastardize the Germanic-equivalent to pasokon (from "personal computer"). It would have been hilarious.

[Le Redditeur]

Speaking of Nihonese, I noticed that Google Translator has now a "Japanese handwritting" tool, where you can draw whatever moonrune you want to translate, and it recognizes it with astonishing precision. The dream of finally being able to play vydia gaems entirely written in moonrunes draws near!

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

So I can play Super Robot Wars without memorizing runes and looking up hiragana on occasion? Neat.

And don't you worry, German has already infected the Japanese language.

(Is there any language out there that actually has its own word for "kindergarten" aside from French? It's really not that hard to translate.)

[Le Redditeur]

So I can play Super Robot Wars without memorizing runes and looking up hiragana on occasion? Neat.

And don't you worry, German has already infected the Japanese language.

(Is there any language out there that actually has its own word for "kindergarten" aside from French? It's really not that hard to translate.)

Haha, forukusuwāgen is now my favorite imported Nihonese word, forever.