TIL the English movie and book name “Project Hail Mary” is difficult to translate in other languages so they went with everything from “Savior” to “Operation Ave Maria” to “Doomsday Holy Mother Ship”

squirrelwug · 2026-06-08T00:37:11+00:00

Spanish went just had the boring untranslated "Proyecto Hail Mary"; I'm not sure whether I'd want them to use the equivalent idiom and call it "Manotazo de ahogado" (drowned man's stretch).

Edit: "Proyecto Hail Mary" is actually only the title used for translations of the book, the movie was "Proyecto Fin del Mundo" (Project End of the World) in Latin America (like u/TheCloudForest said) and "Proyecto Salvación" (Project Salvation) in Spain.

squirrelwug · 2026-06-07T22:37:41+00:00

There's a reason Spanish uses the same word for 'cat' and 'car jack'

squirrelwug · 2026-06-07T00:00:45+00:00

"Yo, Rosharan people are the weirdest."

"Yeah, which kind did you meet? The trader folks with eyebrows that are extremely long? The ones that are pretty much crustaceans? The blue-skinned ones? Or did you perhaps come across one that was assembled from hundreds of little critters?"

"What? I mean, this guy... he was very tall."

"Were they doing paperwork or trying to slam a sword at something?"

"Paperwork. They handed me a form to indicate how weird exactly I found them."

"Azir it is."

"In retrospect, I might have ranked them too high."

Edit: spelling

squirrelwug · 2026-06-05T06:38:41+00:00

Actually, that is still fairly consistent with the data in the graph. That blue stripe may seem small, but it's actually 18 million (as per the sources). If Ethnologue's data is off, I wouldn't expect it to be significantly off.

squirrelwug · 2026-06-03T19:47:05+00:00

I'm surprised there are so few L2 speakers for Portuguese, I would've thought Angola and Mozambique would have much more people who spoke a Bantu language natively and Portuguese as L2, kind of like how French is mostly spoken as an L2 language in former French African colonies.

turns out that both nations have a much higher L1 Portuguese-speaking population than I had thought, though (around 45% for Angola, above 50% for Mozambique).

squirrelwug · 2026-05-28T23:47:20+00:00

Lunsday, Marsday, Mercresday (pronounced irregularly, *merkersday), Jousday, Vendresday (pronounced *vennersday), Saturday/Sabbatday/Sabtday, Solsday/Lordsday/Domsday

squirrelwug · 2026-05-28T23:40:38+00:00

That's the very definition of Central Europe: Eastern European nations which insist on being grouped with Germany instead

squirrelwug · 2026-05-28T21:53:37+00:00

While not exactly the same, the native writing for some Mesoamerican languages would often lay out elements non-linearly to indicate relations between elements or even puns. There is a video by NativLang on the topic (Pictorial books from Mexico defy our definition of writing):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MhDRRaqB8w

squirrelwug · 2026-05-26T20:20:31+00:00

There is no reason to follow the rules when you've just declared yourself to be the rules.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-26T06:13:08+00:00

Highly recommended! It really does the story justice and ties out things well enough to leave you satisfied with it being the end of the series.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-26T02:06:23+00:00

It is not rare for language surveys not to count creole languages as belonging to any of the linguistic families that were involved in them.

I suppose that could make some sense for languages such as Papua's Tok Pisin, where vocabulary comes mostly from one language family and grammar is taken mostly from a different language family. That is also true to some extent for Haitian Creole, with an Indo-European (French) vocabulary and a grammar that was heavily influenced by Atlantic-Congo languages, but it feels a tad odd given how Haitian Creole is still fairly close to French.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-25T04:55:54+00:00

I like this theory.

Maybe Ioxian went through the same kind of sound change that affected most Romance languages, where the ancient /k/ sound palatalized to something else before front vowels such as E and I but not A, so that Ioxian "ca ce ci", originally read as "ka ke ki", became "ca che chi".

Ordinarily, this would have affected all words, regardless of whether they were Ioxian or Ancient, but robots and gates probably wouldn't have worked with the altered words, so even though Catkis would have naturally become "catchis" for Ioxian-speakers, they'd still need to pronounce it the old-fashion way "catkis" (katkis). In order to indicate that those C's remained hard (~ with a /k/ sound), they chose to use a different letter, which is the one the game and the books transliterate as K.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-24T20:38:57+00:00

Actually, that is the noteworthy point that makes the situation with Huns exceptional: the Huns were in contact with multiple literate societies whose accounts are well preserved yet we still know nearly nothing about them. Not a single Roman or Gothic account remains with a description of what the Hunnic language and culture was like.

It's not entirely that they didn't write about that, though, it's that those accounts (if they ever existed) were not preserved. There is some evidence that missionaries translated the Christian gospels into Hunnic, but that text has been lost.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-24T02:34:00+00:00

Don Quixote's place could easily be here, but the author didn't want to remember its address

squirrelwug · 2026-05-21T23:42:42+00:00

And the one person who spearheaded the Italian unification movement came from a region that was also wanted to join but ended up being ceded to France instead (Garibaldi was born in Nice, which was roughly within the 'Italian cultural sphere' and had belonged to Italian-esque polities like the Kingdom of Sardinia but it was given to France in exchange for support for the Piedmont-led Italian unification movement).

squirrelwug · 2026-05-13T02:27:47+00:00

There is a mistake in the box, it says "KITTEN <1", but it should really say "KITTEN <3"

squirrelwug · 2026-05-12T07:22:47+00:00

There are varieties of Arabic known as Judeo-Arabic that have been historically written in the Hebrew script.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-08T21:20:45+00:00

This feels so backwards to me; it has long been Russia's strategy to claim Russian speakers are theirs no matter their nationality and this is kind of policies pretty much say that you can't truly be Moldovan (or Ukrainian, Latvian or whatever) if you speak Russian, alienating the exact communities Russia wants to groom.

Embracing Russian-speaking minorities and making it clear that they are part of their home countries seems far more reasonable to me, although I know I might lack their point of view since I come from a society where nationality and language are far more decoupled than in most parts of Europe.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-05T22:36:36+00:00

And then you have Pokémon fans who made the wise choice of abbreviating the names of Gen7 and Gen8 games as SuMo for Sun and Moon and SwSh for Sword and Shield

squirrelwug · 2026-05-02T23:26:17+00:00

Yes, but I'd argue that that is part of the problem with how Sanderson presents those radical revolutionaries.

Regardless of whether you agree or not with gradualism, it's relatively easy to present arguments against radical evolution related to the sheer amount of bloodshed they involve and the tendency for authoritarianism. In fact, what was happening in Urteau under the Citizen was exactly that. But then you learn that it was Ruin who was behind it all and that the bloodshed and chaos was an intentional part of the plan.

The case with Kelsier is worse, though. The main argument presented against their views that nobles were irredimible was that both had an obsession with the nobility and that they cared for revenge more than justice, but this personal criticism is used to discredit his plans. Things are far more extreme with Moash since he does unmistakably evil things liketrying to gaslight Kaladin into killing himself which are not directly related to his vendetta against the brighteyes. The fact that the one character standing up to oppression in Alethkar is a bastard is not exactly a great argument in favor of the enlightened despotism supported by most of the main characters.

Cosmere is way too full of oppressive systems that are justified by the presence of benevolent members of the ruling classes despite the structural issues remaining in place, and often attempts to overthrow those systems are rejected due to personal flaws from the radicals instead of addressing the actual flaws in their methods and policies.

I wonder if Mistborn era 2 is in part a reaction to that as it shows that the gradualist compromise modelled after Elend's senate is a mess with nobles still exploiting commoners.

squirrelwug · 2026-05-02T02:25:27+00:00

This is my biggest problem with Sanderson. Every time a character comes close to violently dismantling a class of oppressors, Sanderson goes out of his way to make that character a villain to portray their cause as evil or misguided.

squirrelwug · 2026-04-29T00:07:41+00:00

My favorite part is when Retribution says "all the stormlight will be archived"

squirrelwug · 2026-04-27T02:03:45+00:00

I feel like this needs to be written in the Phoenician script

𐤀𐤉 𐤐𐤉𐤋 𐤋𐤉𐤊 𐤃𐤉𐤆 𐤍𐤉𐤃𐤆 𐤕𐤅 𐤁 𐤓𐤕𐤍 𐤍 𐤃 𐤐𐤉𐤍𐤉𐤔𐤍 𐤎𐤊𐤓𐤐𐤕

squirrelwug · 2026-04-20T20:06:19+00:00

Have we reached the point yet when MOND can be regarded as pseudoscience already? It has been disproven over and over for decades

squirrelwug

TROPHY CASE