Language

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

If you pronounce them in early modern/shakespearean english, i.e. pre-vowel shift, they rhyme perfectly and even the number of syllables is accounted for.

Even though Blake is post vowel shift, I do see the occassional poem in the 1700s and 1800s where pre-shift vowels are used. It's possible that they are imitating "old" poetry or folk songs which may have been sung the same way throughout the vowel shift era, or perhaps there were areas where the vowel shift didn't fully affect dialect speech until much later. The modern cornish accent, for example, sounds like it is mid-shift.

I'll ask my sister because she knows way more about this stuff than me.

 

[omzdog]

Once again, Iacob's correct.
Its called a slant rhyme. It's an inside joke.
But it's supposed to get you to think and provoke you.
Instead of casually consuming the stanzas.

 

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

Alsatian and American communicating in German dialects. pretty cool

 

[kurczak]

Once again, Iacob's correct.
Its called a slant rhyme. It's an inside joke.
But it's supposed to get you to think and provoke you.
Instead of casually consuming the stanzas.

Uhm, isn't Jacob something different?

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

I feel dirty for immediately getting that joke.

 

[kurczak]

Huh You're giving me more credit (?) than I deserve. It was just an absent-minded brain fart. I meant to write that he is saying something different, of course.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

I now feel even more dirty. That'll teach me to post **** on a late night after a concert.

 

[ColonicAcid]

The modern cornish accent, for example, sounds like it is mid-shift.

Met, theys still living in the middle ages down in the kern.

 

[Anarion]

An interesting thing I found out while looking in an Old Norse dictionary, I think it says something about how words travel and acquire new meanings.

There is an Old Norse word, fíll, which means elephant. It still means elephant in Icelandic, but in the Scandinavian languages it has been replaced by elefant. It came to Old Norse from Persian via Arabic, and the Persians had borrowed the word (pīru) from Akkadian, an extinct Semitic language. It could be related to the Egyptian word for elephant, as both Ancient Egyptian and the Semitic languages are Afro-Asiatic. Or maybe the Akkadians borrowed the word from the Egyptians. The Greeks may also have gotten their word elephas from the same source, and in that case fíll and elefant could be said to be distant relatives.

And there's more: there's also an Old Norse and Icelandic word, úlfaldi, which means camel. It was also once found in Old English as olfend, also meaning camel, in Old High German as olpenta, and in Old Saxon as olbundeo. It seems the word must have been borrowed into the Germanic languages from latin elephantus, which we of course recognize, and somehow it came to mean camel.

I got most of this from Wiktionary honestly, I didn't look it up in etymological dictionaries or anything. Here are the links, it's really quite interesting.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/f%C3%ADll#Old_Norse
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%92%84%A0%F0%92%8B%9B#Akkadian
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BAlfaldi#Old_Norse
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/olfend#Old_English

 

[Areze]

language is a globalist conspiracy

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

It is though. If you want to be a true libertarian you need to invent your own language and charge people money to use it. Memetics are theft.

 

[crodio]

A true libertarian communicates in bitcoin

 

[Anarion]

I noticed you're memeonizing instead talking about etymology.

I tried to look up elephants and camels in etymological dictionaries, but I only found one entry on the Greek word.

As usual, it's vague and boring.

 

[Weaver]

Also found this

 

[Anarion]

Nice! Seems a little outdated but interesting, it says that fíll is a loanword from "some oriental source" through Slavic. I wish it'd elaborated on the latter, it doesn't seem to offer any Slavic forms apart from slon and velibadu/velibladu. Also noticed cawrfil in Welsh but apprently that's from cawr (giant) and mil (animal).

 

[Lumos]

A question about English. Perhaps due to the influences that the German language has had on me, I often find myself placing the preposition of a phrasal verb at the end of the sentence - naturally, when it's not wrong to do so. E.g. "I had to set the complicated project up". This is all fine and dandy in most cases, but I realised just now that I'm not quite perfectly clear with how... er... prepositions operate with complicated sentences. Not only in phrasal verbs, but I've simply been applying similar logic (and my English in general has always been intuition first, explicit formality second) to prepositions in general.

So here's this convoluted sentence that I just posted elsewhere:

All the small children appear to have phones to play touchscreen minecraft all day long and call their mums five times an hour on.

Intuitively, the "on" is perfect where it is, since both fragments joined by the "union" (the "and" particle... what do we call the whole thing in English again?) require it. ["play <games>"/"call <someone>"] "on <the phone>". Great!

But what happens when we've got other fragments with other verbs (that require different prepositions) in the union? Off the top of my head, we can take "record videos" ("with <the phone>", though "on" also sounds acceptable) and "use" (doesn't require a preposition). How is the same sentence supposed to look like for different configurations of these?
1. X / PREP or PREP / X?
- "... phones to use and call their mums five times an hour on."
- "... phones to call their mums five times an hour on and use."
Both sound fine, but I'd go with the first one, because the preposition at the end sounds more sensible (as was previously established. )
The second one always sounds like it needs a "then" before the verb, or that the verb would fit better with "or" instead of "and" as the union. (The first verb I had in mind without a preposition was "dismantle" instead of "use", but that sounded very final, which means that it makes more sense to place it second... with a "then" before it.)

2. PREP1 / PREP2 - both?
- "... phones to call their mums five times an hour (on) and record ridiculous youtube videos with."
Switching them around appears to make no difference here. But we can't omit any of the proverbs, right? That would just be... wrong? Or could we skip the first one and let only the sentence-ending preposition stand?

Of course all of this assumes we ignore the "rule" that prepositions are not words to end a sentence with.

 

[Bluehawk]

The further away the preposition is from the verb, the better it sounds to use "on which/with which" etc. and avoid ending the sentence with the preposition.

"All the small children appear to have phones with which to play touchscreen minecraft all day long and call their mums five times an hour."

Spoiler

Yes, I am ignoring the heart of your question.

 

[Calradianın bilgesi]

EU English style guide or common vocabulary errors by French/German speaking Eurocrats

Fiche is a useful word, but it is French.

Foresee
People find it inexplicably difficult to use this word properly, so maybe the safest policy is to avoid it. If you do insist on
using it, bear in mind that it may not mean what you think and that many people find its misuse unreasonably annoying.

‘Modality’ is one of those words which people (a) swear is correct and (b) say they have to use because the Commission
does so (the example below is a case in point). The trouble is that it is not English – at least not in the meaning applied
in our texts.

 

[Dryvus]

They left out 'mixing up how and what'? What was this, a rush job?

 

[Anarion]

Makes me wonder how English speakers think about the words I use and wether or not it sounds off.

In school I was taught that EDL speakers often have an easier time communicating with each other than with first-lanugage speakers.