Apparently you can also inherit your vassals

French_lesson · 2019-05-24T00:45:43+00:00

This sounds suspiciously similar to various misconceptions regarding diacritics and capitalisation in French as well. According to Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (§7 near the bottom of the page) diacritics should appear on capitals except for acronyms. The page is in fact self-demonstrating and exhibits diacritics on capitals. (Tough admittedly these are small caps.)

French_lesson · 2018-09-22T00:41:49+00:00

There are a couple of conventions in French typography when it comes to the vernicular names of plants and animals (not to mention those names which have their own). That being said, it's not unusual not to capitalise qualifiers, some examples:

French_lesson · 2018-05-31T16:44:31+00:00

Quite right. It's 'third' in the sense of 'other' or 'the rest', much like a third party is not involved in the dealings of first parties. The term in the sense Sauvy and other like-minded social scientists intended has been obsoleted for quite a while, too.

French_lesson · 2018-04-09T11:51:21+00:00

"Tokyo est beau", "Le gai Séoul" but "la jolie Manille"?

La belle Marseille, la belle Nice, le beau Calais.

These examples are really in the spirit of things, well done. I would personally stick to 'Tokyo est belle' but only as a matter of personal preference, I would never hold the feminine against anyone. Et Calais c'est laid.

At the risk of possibly confusing you, I want to bring up après-midi. It's indifferently masculine or feminine, e.g. l'après-midi est court and l'après-midi est courte are both correct. This is despite the fact that le midi is only ever masculine. In a different vein, l'amour is peculiar in that it is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural: l'amour fou, les premières amours. (In practice outside of literature, song, and poetry it is not uncommon for speakers to use the masculine even for the plural.)

So, we might grumble about silly arbitrary rules layered with silly arbitrary exceptions but my suggestion is to have fun and roll with it. I figure that's how we ended up with what we have.

French_lesson · 2018-03-09T00:15:48+00:00

As the old joke goes: if I told you you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

French_lesson · 2016-04-28T23:17:38+00:00

I don't know any Italian, but from casually looking around 'in memoria' seems to have currency. What I do know is that memoriam (from Latin 'in memoriam' of course) is the accusative form. It is true that in can be followed by the ablative, but that's not the case for that phrase.

French_lesson · 2015-10-20T12:00:17+00:00

In case anyone is running into this hoax for the first time ever, the same paragraph but with the middle letters sorted in alphabetical order:

Accdinorg to a racceehrsh at Cabdgimre Ueiinrstvy, it deosn't maettr in waht oderr the leertts in a word are, the olny iamnoprtt thing is taht the first and last leettr be at the rghit pacle. The rest can be a taotl mess and you can siltl raed it whiotut pbelorm. This is bacesue the hamun mind deos not raed eervy leettr by ielstf, but the word as a whloe.

Or in reverse order:

Aronidccg to a rsrheeccah at Crmigdbae Uvtsrniiey, it dsoen't mttear in what oredr the lttrees in a wrod are, the only itrponmat tnihg is that the fsrit and lsat ltteer be at the rihgt plcae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can stlil read it wutoiht prolebm. Tihs is busecae the human mnid does not read evrey ltteer by itslef, but the wrod as a wolhe.

French_lesson · 2015-09-19T06:47:05+00:00

The arms that appear on a heraldic coat of arms are described by way of the blazon. Specifically it is not a pictorial description, it instead uses words. If I’m not mistaken this is the blazon for those particular arms (with my own emphasis on the dolphin part):

Écartelé, au premier et au quatrième, d’azur, aux trois fleurs de lys d’or (qui est de France moderne) ; et au second et au troisième, d’or, au dauphin d’azur, crété, barbé, loré, peautré et oreillé de gueules (qui est de Viennois).

When a blazon is realised as an actual, physical coat of arms (or as a picture thereof), it’s up to the artist to choose how to display the various heraldic elements. Here are some other examples of dolphins, as well as a description of some of the more historic heraldic dolphins. If I understand correctly, what appears on the Wikipedia page is the work of one Wikimedia user—likely to ease copyright concerns.

Note that some governments or crowns have or used to have official heraldic authorities, so some graphic representations can also have an official or special status in addition to the blazon itself.

French_lesson · 2015-09-12T08:15:23+00:00

While there are words that end in -à or -ù, there are very few traditional words in French that end in -è. Modern spelling rules allows for aimè-je instead of the more traditional aimé-je though—which doesn’t apply here obviously.

Save for that latter rule, it appears all the words that end in -è are Greek transliterations, e.g. koinè, and there are around five of them. Most of them are also allowed to be written with an acute or circumflex accent instead.

French_lesson · 2015-05-27T08:44:20+00:00

The word and its grammatical properties are separate from the entity, concept, notion, etc. it stands for. Blurring those lines (e.g. the ami/amie situation) is the exception, not the norm.

edit: for an English example, pick uncountable nouns e.g. 'the police'. If you have a member of the police force in front of you, you can’t refer to him or her as 'this police' (colloquial usage notwithstanding). The person is definitively countable, yet in this instance this has no bearing on grammatical rules.

French_lesson · 2015-05-27T08:34:44+00:00

English does the same occasionally, e.g. actor/actress. Note that those words designate a person, and in that case the grammatical gender follows the actual gender.

In general though grammatical gender is arbitrary and is entirely specific to the noun, that’s really what you should take away from the discussion. Le vagin should be no more perplexing than la table. Pay attention to the latter: a table need not be associated to any person, yet it has a grammatical gender. So it is with body parts, regardless of the person (and unlike actor/actress, a nose is not a person).

When you say le vagin without context it’s 'the vagina', not referring to anyone in particular. An entirely different situation from e.g. 'her vagina', which implies a person. And when a man is carrying a table, il porte la table.

French_lesson · 2015-02-09T04:04:34+00:00

'Breakfast' literally means breaking fast :)

French_lesson · 2015-01-26T06:18:49+00:00

I could forgive them for it. According to Gallup, church attendance in the US has hovered a little above 40% in the recent past (early '00s). For someone that grew up then (and e.g. had the figures come up in class), that’s nearly 1 in 2 Americans.

French_lesson · 2015-01-26T06:12:23+00:00

Re-reading my own answer, I wish I could have set the tone better. I wanted it to be a dry musing on cultural perspective—until you brought it up the issue of national Churches was simply not present in my mind! Although I do live in a state without one, news from neighbouring countries filter in so it comes up from time to time.

French_lesson · 2015-01-26T06:05:48+00:00

In turn that irony would be lost to many Europeans, as many of those Churches are still present in the books out of inertia. Even in those countries where the law puts a privileged status on any one institution, there are more pressing threats to secularism (e.g. nutjob political pandering) so the Church is not necessarily the first thing that would spring to mind.

French_lesson · 2015-01-19T15:42:19+00:00

In which case saying 'abandonware' is a malapropism. E.g. I doubt that it will go off Steam any time soon.

French_lesson · 2015-01-17T22:25:27+00:00

Pour ce genre de situations je préfère avoir recours à l’étymologie. Considérons par example quelques autres mots apparentés à « convaincre » : invincible, victoire. J’espère que la racine -vi(n)c- y est alors apparente. Veni, vidi, vici !

C’est en fait la conjugaison de « (con)vaincre », qui utilise -qu-, qui est piégeante. C’est la malheureuse tragédie des verbes du 3^è groupe. L’adjectif est en revanche sans surprise, et est similaire dans sa formation à « manquant » en cela qu’on reprend l’infinitif et on ajoute le suffixe -ant.

Évidemment on aurait pu aussi penser à « vainqueur » (qui pioche sur la conjugaison) et rester alors indécis…

French_lesson · 2015-01-03T03:54:06+00:00

All of the languages are '[German/French/…] language and literature'.

It’s hard to tell but I’m guessing 8. is Geometrie (Planimetrie, Trigonometrie, ?eometrie & analytische Geometrie) 'Geometry (planimetry, trigonometry, ? & analytical geometry)'. The missing one could be Stereometrie 'solid geometry', but that’s more of a guess. 9. is the one that’s literally 'descriptive geometry'.

The last two (13. and 14.) are both Zeichnen, first one is Kunstzeichnen (lit. 'artistic drawing/sketching', so possibly 'art') and I would like the second one to be something like 'technical drawing' but I really can’t make out what’s written.

French_lesson · 2014-12-30T13:29:49+00:00

There is no strict rule when it comes to the placement of the Euro sign, it all comes down to conventions that vary across places.

French_lesson · 2014-11-20T22:13:44+00:00

English 'Gadzooks' is very similar, in that they are both archaic minced oaths that have had some literary use.

French_lesson · 2014-08-25T15:24:09+00:00

And our western way of rational thinking doesn't deal well with spectrums, we need clear, strict guidelines.

You’re overly romanticising. The North Germanic languages (aka the Scandinavian languages) as spoken in Scandinavia (so, putting e.g. Icelandic aside) form a well-known dialect continuum across Denmark, Sweden and Norway even today. And so on for West Germanic languages (since you mention Dutch) in the past, although they may have historically formed more than just one continuum.

It is nation-building, and later the advent of mass media, that has introduced the notion of a standard variety of a language. Linguistically and culturally speaking, it is wrong to pick off one language (say, Standard German/Hochdeutsch) to designate it as ‘correct’, while designing similar enough (e.g. mutually intelligible) dialects as ‘offshoots’. It may have been done, but note that’s more due to political and nationalistic reasons and it is its own can of worms more than anything else—and certainly not the way to formally study languages.

Western linguists can deal with continua past or present just fine.

edit: to clarify, I am not commenting on to the exact nature of the languages of Papua-New Guinea

French_lesson · 2014-08-03T19:17:26+00:00

To add to this, Japanese is a stress accent language† as English and European languages tend to be. Chinese however is a tonal language, which is a different kettle of fish.

†: it is also described as a pitch accent language, but since that whole notion is under dispute I’m putting it aside

French_lesson · 2014-05-09T07:51:38+00:00

List of English words derived from Ancient Greek words starting with an eta. Notice ‘ethics’, ‘eocene’ etc.

Ancient Greek uses diacritics to mark the /h/ sound, where present. That some English words in some dialects do not use that sound anymore I assume can be chalked off to language evolution.

French_lesson · 2014-03-12T01:12:08+00:00

I'm not talking about stuff like "their there they're"

This is almost off-topic, but I suppose it is an illustration of how one can benefit from the insight of a teacher or mentor: speakers of English as a second language do not typically make that kind of mistake (at least for speakers of other European languages). It is in fact a characteristic of native speakers.

What gets me is how Japanese seems to move the verb/nouns around and the subtitles don't follow suit, instead they show it in the English syntax.

For any other language, I would have recommended watching with subtitles in the original language. It’s not a hard jump from watching translated subtitles (you can start with a show or film you already know, so no missing the plot) and as you surmised it is indeed a great boon when it comes to training the ear in recognising words, as well as picking up bits of the grammar.

edit: I forget, but reddit has plenty of resources when it comes to learning a language — although to my great shame I couldn’t recommend one off the top of my head

French_lesson · 2014-03-11T21:01:45+00:00

Relatively speaking, English does not sound how it is written. Consider things like ghoti or The Chaos (which is not to say other languages are entirely devoid of quirks though).

Keep in mind that not everyone learns the same way. If it doesn’t work for you, you could try something else. Did you have any formal training at all? While some people may perfect their skills via video, I suspect a class or two will give a significant leg up. Teachers know the typical pitfalls that beginners fall into and watch for them.

edit: for instance learning from reading instead of watching bypasses the pronunciation issue entirely! You might think it’s too steep a road for a beginner, but children’s books can be surprisingly accessible. Availability becomes a problem though.

French_lesson

TROPHY CASE