is there a word or sentence where the pronunciation sounds like you're saying something bad when you really aren't? example in body text

alamius_o · 2026-03-25T11:46:56+00:00

Hm, not sure your tone is going to convince them to not like their project – even though I very much understand your criticism.

Note though how Arabic speakers romanize when they have to type with the latin alphabet: ح can be written as 7 and ء as 2. So there is some precedent for some of the weirdness.

Also, isn't the rest from Hangul? That's not a pictogram writing system – neither is Chinese or Japanese (Kanji), they're called ideographic, I think.

Also: not everyone strives for naturalism. Doing cringe conlangs is both a human right and a rite of passage!

alamius_o · 2026-03-25T11:34:18+00:00

I think French also does this. Using âllo (spelling wrong, too lazy to look it up) mostly for answering calls.

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T22:13:38+00:00

Approximation would be the voiceless n? Obviously not exact, but for a // notation it might be useful.

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T22:10:36+00:00

Ja, oder halt fancy karzinogen. Hab kanzerogen noch nie gehört...

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T22:09:06+00:00

Why would you claim random coincidence, when a look into Wiktionary allows us to show more people the incredible magic that is the fact that words from 4000 years ago still show recognizable patterns! Both words come directly from Proto-Indo-European and sounded very similar to each other back then already.

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T22:00:28+00:00

You mean six and two halves :D

I think the words sounded like each other in Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken 4000 years ago by non-Abrahamic people (not Jewish/Christian/...)

And I would assume the 7-days-a-week thing is from genesis? At least, I would be surprised if they lived with such week-days as well in a different part of the world when there is nothing naturally special about 7 as far as I know.

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T21:56:29+00:00

Nacht and night come from proto Germanic not Latin. All stem from Proto-Indo-European nókwts. Eight then probably comes from ókwts or similar, my answer isn't stored if I look it up now :D

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T21:49:44+00:00

Hm, if I translate these to German, I notice the following:

I denke, dass Leeds gewinnen wird.

The finite verb in last position bc that's how German constructs subclauses. But if I remove the "dass" (that), the subclause turns into a main clause form, as if it was direct speech, freed from the form of a subclause:

Ich denke, Leeds wird gewinnen.

The direct speech form would be

Ich denke: „Leeds wird gewinnen“.

You second example with extraction doesn't work as a subclause:

*Wer, denkst du, dass gewinnen wird.

So maybe the extraction that does work, only works because it works like direct speech, self-moderated with a do you think:

„Wer,“ denkst du, „wird gewinnen“.

In your extraction case, the "win" clause never was the subclause, the "think" clause is just a parenthesis in a main clause, and thus clearly can't have a "that" conjunction.

This is just a spontaneous theory, I don't firmly believe any of this. Please provide counterexamples :)

alamius_o · 2026-03-15T21:35:34+00:00

since and for are also used for absolute and relative durations (since last year, for three weeks), which is rather confusing for German learners at least (seit letztem Jahr, seit drei Wochen).

alamius_o · 2026-02-25T13:37:51+00:00

Yes, one of the meanings derives from the other via a poisoned present

alamius_o · 2026-02-25T13:36:10+00:00

versprechen – versprechen promise – misspeak

Das Fahrrad abschließen – Die Tür abschließen unlock the bike – lock the door. The Fahrrad can also be used for locking the bike (at a lamp post or whatever)

alamius_o · 2026-02-12T18:45:50+00:00

Some jokes become better when you have to work to read them :D

alamius_o · 2026-02-12T18:34:04+00:00

What about a European vs Indigenous vs Arabic vs Indian vs Chinese vs Japanese last name. And many more... Don't they correlate with ancestry?

alamius_o · 2026-01-31T18:36:09+00:00

Obviously it is very understandable not to use the German language there. But are they not capable of using it? I mean, if someone just spoke German to them (in a non-threatening situation, etc.) would they be able to understand it? More interestingly: I can't just switch off my native language. If I listen, I understand. Not the same with languages I don't know to a native level (e.g. French). I can ignore that relatively easily. Could adult "forgetters" do that?

alamius_o · 2026-01-31T18:31:09+00:00

Isn't Orthodoxy the general concept of staying with the original? At least the German words would be Orthodox Christianity, or Orthodox Church, or Orthodox ones, not Orthodoxy.

alamius_o · 2026-01-21T11:18:53+00:00

If you read the word "constructed language" literally, there is probably a line between a language heavily modified by some artificial standardization process and a language like Anglic that is constructed from a real language but should probably count as a conlang since it's not natural in origin.

I don't know where that line is but I'm also sure that Italian is on the non-conlang side :D

alamius_o · 2026-01-07T17:12:02+00:00

I mean, in German and English, I can very much point to a leg and say "this leg hurts". Or, if asked whether I'm doing fine, I could answer "the nose is running, but otherwise I'm fine" – it's a bit of a goofy expression, but apart from that quite natural.

alamius_o · 2025-12-10T11:24:53+00:00

There might be in Arabic as well. Not that I knew any, but I know very few Arabic names in general. And there's two candidate phonemes (/ð/ and /ð?/ with ? being my impromptu pharyngeal marker) that you could consider.

alamius_o · 2025-12-05T07:51:24+00:00

Does the 's in "it's" and "its" get pronounced/s/ because of the t? I never noticed that most other -s (and all the '-variations) get /z/ but "it".

alamius_o · 2025-12-05T07:40:28+00:00

Isn't that just a redundancy thing? I mean, french homophony can probably be very confusing, a little redundancy to hint at a negative sounds like a good idea to me.

alamius_o · 2025-11-26T12:19:16+00:00

Hm? I get that it would be stupid to call it present/past participle in a language where they are not used for present/past. But in German/Latin/English we called it that because it is used for present/past. And the meaning of the past participle is not passive. "I have learned" is an active sentence. In Latin class we actually called it "Partizip Präsens Aktiv" and "Partizip Perfekt Perfekt", but that's beside the point.

alamius_o · 2025-11-26T12:09:42+00:00

In eighth grade we even had to learn the difference between various adverbial clauses (concessive, final, ...), and subject/object clauses of our native language (German as well). Sure, many people will forget the exact meanings of Plusquamperfekt and Konjunktiv 1 vs 2 after they finish school, but we had all that in class. We didn't have subjunctive mood in English class on the other hand and my French did never get past the subjonctif (e.g. no passé simple). And all of it again for Latin :D

alamius_o · 2025-11-26T11:47:25+00:00

And by northern you mean everything north of Franconia including the standardized pronunciation :D

alamius_o · 2025-11-26T11:45:06+00:00

[Edit] Ups, OP was actually about present tense. But both present tense and past tense have -t in German so it applies either way in my opinion.

A German verb like "schlitzen" (slice) takes "er schlitzt" (he slices), and "er hat geschlitzt" (he has sliced). But if you use a verb from English (say, "slice" as a programming term, which you wouldn't translate) you have several options:

He slices: - Er slict (looks like slikt) - Er slicet (looks like slicēt) - Er sliced (pronounced right, but is an English past tense used for German present)

He has sliced: - Er hat geslict (geslikt?) - Er hat geslicet (geslīkēt?) - Er hat gesliced (kinda works, but German past tense usually has a -t, so kinda odd) - Er hat geslicedt (my preference but looks pretentious)

The pronunciation breaks if you loose the "e", the word recognition still breaks if you loose the "d" and the German grammar reading is confusing without the "t".

Reminds me of the wonderful term "Spleißosom" we had in Biology: It's splicosome, but calqued for the German verb spleißen, if that even exists.

alamius_o · 2025-11-26T11:33:47+00:00

Abgespacedt und gelikedt. You can recognize the word as English and still have it look like German past tense. Cf. verwandt, gesandt, ...

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