Petroleum Minister Pradhan felicitates Kashmiri students
Felicitates……is this some interesting sexual practice special to Kashmir? Or Kashmiris? Possibly a threesome involving a Hindu, a Moslem and A Han? Sex while wearing cashmere? While listening to Led Zep (in which case it’s neither very new nor interesting, is it).
Yes, yes, I know, congratulates. But it does sound more interesting, felicitates, doesn’t it?
Kashmir separatist leader Asiya Andrabi arrested from her residence in Soura
English English would have “arrested at” as that’s the place where the arrest took place. Indian English “arrested from” presumably as that’s where she was carried away from, kicking and shouting all the while maybe. Which is right is obviously just a matter of local usage. But at a deeper level, which should be right?
The problem is compounded because many new computer devices are designed to recognize English but they do not understand Icelandic.
‘Not being able to speak Icelandic to voice-activated fridges, interactive robots and similar devices would be yet another lost field,’ Jonsson said.
Icelandic ranks among the weakest and least-supported language in terms of digital technology – along with Irish Gaelic, Latvian, Maltese and Lithuanian – according to a report by the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance assessing 30 European languages.
Iceland’s Ministry of Education estimates about 1 billion Icelandic krona, or $8.8 million, is needed for seed funding for an open-access database to help tech developers adapt Icelandic as a language option.
This is all done by machine learning. Feed great vast gobs of stuff to the machines until they start to recognise it.
Languages which don’t have vast great gobs of stuff aren’t going to get recognised…..
I’ve heard that we’re seeing the same in machine translation. There needs to be a critical; mass of stuff in the language pair to be able to teach the machines.
Racer Ashwin Sundar, wife charred to death in car crash in TN
Not a nice story of course but that use of the word “charred” there…..
Van Heusen to enter men’s inner wear, athletic leisure market
Inner wear? Are Indians in the grip of some terrible new fashion? Wear clothes on the inside of your skin?
Ah, no, all is revealed. Inner wear is Indian English for underwear.
It is hard not to connect British linguistic reluctance with our endemic national weakness: island arrogance and a half-conscious memory of the days when we were an imperial force. It creates a pleasing but dangerous conviction that our islands are the natural centre of the world, and that we speak a uniquely rich and wonderful tongue which absorbed the best of all others to make something special (there’s a scintilla of truth in that, but no call to be smug). The result is a vague feeling that English is the natural default language, the “normal” one. So if the world wants to speak with us, it will do so in English. We gloss over the fact that the practical truth of this is due to the global dominance of America.
I caricature: but that attitude hangs around like a Channel fog. It’s in tourists assuming that the locals will parlano inglese or habla inglés because they need to sell us stuff, in gap-year interrailers relying trustfully on smartphone translation apps, and in businesspeople who attempt a few halting words of German (possibly in Oslo or Amsterdam, but what the hell) and then relax when their client replies in smoothly excellent English.
Because largely, they do.
And forgive me for this but I am a reasonable case in point. My French is that traditional schoolboy French. I’ve deployed it twice in the past three years. Once to order a sandwich, once to buy a map. And I got it right both times – I think getting the French for “Have you a map?” right at 6 am in some rural French town deserves a medal in fact, given that I really don’t speak the language. My Portuguese takes me shopping as that’s what I need it for. My Czech similarly. My Italian is atrocious but I once found myself with the Czech Radio correspondent to Italy, who had no English, and we chatted amiably for 20 minutes in that Florentine.
In terms of lessons I have none except for that O Level French. And then there’s the biggie – when in Russia it was necvessary to learn Russian well enough to be able to conduct business in that language. So, I did.
But always this has been just by listening to people and repeating – the way we naturally learn languages. Yes, it’s entirely true that with one Romance language the next beomes easier – some words change, lavoro in Italian becomes trabalho in Portugee but a lot of it is just accent. Same with slavic ones, pajalista becomes prosim, some others change properly, krasne becomes chervenyi.
But the real point here is that there’s no point to doing the intense mental work to learn another language unless you need to. Not if your native language is English that is. Even that’s not quite exactly true – most of us have two Englishes, the local and something akin to BBC, we can certainly all understand BBC and near all speakers move closer to it when addressing someone outside that local accent group. (One party trick is to introduce foreigners to a proper Bath accent, well weighted towards the Twerton end of it, at which point even the most fluent English speakers go rather quiet.)
At which point the actual advice that I would give a native English speaker about foreign languages. Learn the damn grammar of your own language first. I don’t – I struggle mightily with the difference between a noun and an adverb let alone anything more complex. I write just from experience, hmm, yes, that looks about right. I know the language, obviously, but I don’t know the structure of it. And it’s that structure which is going to aid you in learning other languages much more than anything else.
To begin with, passing through a place, you can just pick up 20 or 50 or 100 words, that’s just not tough. And if you decide that you’re going to stay in a place then yes, obviously, you’ll want to learn that one language better. But the first thing all and any books are going to do is start with the grammar. This bit of the sentence will change as this bit does and this ending means this tense and that that and so on. And if you don’t already have that mental stucture in place in your own language then you’ll just never, never, get it.
That is, the best preparation for learning any other language is to know English grammar. Because, believe me, the first thing all the books do is assume that you do know grammar as they then try to teach you Portugee, Czech or Russian grammar.
The Philippine President about the US Ambassador.
The Philippines’ president, Rodrigo Duterte, has sparked a fresh diplomatic row after making a homophobic slur against the US ambassador in comments that prompted Washington to summon Manila’s envoy to complain.
In the latest of a series of tirades, Duterte used a local Tagalog language homophobic slur to express his displeasure with the US ambassador, Philip Goldberg, in televised comments made on Friday.
“As you know, I’m fighting with (US Secretary of State John Kerry’s) ambassador. His gay ambassador, the son of a whore. He pissed me off,” Duterte said.
Now what we need is a proper translation of this. Because I’d bet dollars to donuts that he didn’t say “gay”.
My bet would be that a proper translation would be “faggot” or some such.
So, where is Dongguan John’s wife then?
It does amuse….no, not the insult, the translation. They’ve gone all maiden aunt about someone using strong language while addressing soldiers. That’s their original complaint. But then our own (err, their perhaps) constraints on “homophobic slurs” have meant that they’ve not actually told us what the insult was.
I’ve long been under the possible misapprehension that Philip and Phillip are different spellings of the same name. Along perhaps the lines of Frances and Francis being the female and male versions of a name, or Ian and John being the same name but coming from different linguistic roots (Gaelic (and also Iain, Euan and so on) and English).
Actually looking it up it appears that just about everyone is a Philip. So, is Phillip my just potentially misspelling a word for these 53 years?
Just realised that one of he Indian stock market indices is called “Nifty”
Well done that man, well done indeed.
The NIFTY 50 index is National Stock Exchange of India’s benchmark stock market index for Indian equity market
Obviously, National and Fifty. But screams of joy when whoever it was realised how to create the acronym don’t you think?
Queens stepmom convicted of broom handle beating 12-year-old kid
Eh? George VI remarried?
Ah, no, stepmom in Queens….
The more the rant media drives itself to orchestrated frenzy over Kashmir
“Rant media” describes just so much of that media landscape, doesn’t it?
Dubai-Kozhikode flight makes emergency landing in Mumbai due to ruckus by passenger
“Ruckus”, lovely word.
And here’s a lovely example of that rant media:
It clearly seems that the lobbies at the international level are working to make sure that the opinion in the US becomes so much gripped with the fear of “Radical Islam” that Trump’s arguments of hate and the need to exterminate this hate through “destruction” of the very “roots” of Islamic radicalism start echoing in the heart of every American.
ISIS kills people to get Trump elected.
Yeeeees…..so, how’s your lithium dosage?
United Spirits has more crorepatis than Wipro, 52 executives earned more than Rs 1 crore last year
South Asian numbering uses lakh and crore. Crore is 10 million, or, in rupees converted to $, call it $150,000.
Pati means “master” or “lord”.
Crorepati. Literally, manager who earns $150 k a year or more.
Our little game for the day – what’s a proper English translation of that?
Corporate fat cat? Don’t know if crorepati really has the derogative implications of that. Anyone?
The government is to ban all Latin abbreviations on all its websites to avoid confusing non-English speakers, it has been announced.
Phrases such as etc, ie, and eg will be phased out from all GOV.UK sites because foreign speakers find them “difficult to read”.
They’re not really Latin abbreviations any more. They’re now “words” in English. Even I don’t know what eg stands for although I know how it is used and what it means.
Further, you don’t need to know “id est” nor what it means to learn what ie means. Just as you don’t need to know Nato, OECD or Ukip in full.
If they’re still useful keep using them, if they’re not, don’t. But edicts “because foreigners” is silly.
State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, one of the bill’s sponsors, disagrees, claiming that it targets “people or companies with multiple listings. There are so many units held by commercial operators, not individual tenants. They are bad actors who horde multiple units, driving up the cost of housing around them and across the city.”
Who knew Genghis was involved in New York real estate?
I suppose it makes some sort of sense actually but more would be made with “hoard”.
Apropos the BBC’s announcement that 8% of all jobs, on and off air, will be reserved for those with disabilities Gunker tells us the following:
If they had a newsreader with Tourette’s, I would gladly hand over my license fee.
I think you could actually run a YouTube channel on that premise. Pick up the feed of any number of TV news programs and replace the sound track with the same script just being read by someone with a specific Tourrette phonic tick. Would catch on I think.
However, something a little different. OK, so Tourette’s isn’t quite this but some manifestations of it are:
“Good FUCKPIG! morning, I’d like CUNT! a cup of coffee WANKER! please.”
And my question is, if such a Tourette’s sufferer learns another language, does that tic move with them?
“Bon ENCOULERCOCHON! jour, je veu MERDE! un cafe ANGLAIS!AMERICAIN! si vous voulez”?
And if it does, how do they know which words to use? What happens when they can’t yet swear in that new language?
It may have been spoken for 1,000 years, but the origins of Yiddish – the language of Ashkenazic Jews – has been a bone of contention between linguists for years.
Now researchers say the DNA of Yiddish speakers may have originated from four ancient villages in north-eastern Turkey.
And they believe the Yiddish language was invented by Iranian and Ashkenazic Jews as they traded on the Silk Road, challenging the popular idea it is an old German dialect.
It’s clearly and obviously a closely related to Germanic language. That the people who spoke it or invented it carried non-Germanic DNA changes nothing of that. Singlish is spoken by people almost entirely unrelated to Anglo Saxon DNA. It’s still very closely related to English and thus at least partly Germanic at root.
Reading around the web, as we do these days, we’re rather more exposed to those other variations of English out there. Where words don’t quite mean what we might think they mean. Possibly.
Take this from India:
Bengaluru: Police book Uber driver misbehaving with techie
That the techie was female is interesting but not necessary to the story. In our English English a possible meaning of “misbehaving” would be getting a freebie and consensual legover instead of being paid a fare. Unlikely perhaps, but certainly a possible meaning of the wording.
Hmm:
Bengaluru: Uber has done it again. The cab aggregator is this time in the dock over a lewd driver, who allegedly masturbated at a traffic signal while ferrying a woman passenger from HSR Layout to SG Palya late Tuesday evening at around 8 pm.
Ah, no, they mean the other possible meaning, don’t they?
A truly wonderful word: Paranoïdar.
Radar that tells me I should be being paranoid, suspicious.
Usage: “Thing is, if the kids got an unhealthy dose of the wrong iodine isotope, they must have *ingested* it. Through their food. Because that’s the way we get the stuff inside.
Which is why I’m interested in the breakup by age group for the Fukushima area, which is conveniently *not* represented in the article. It should show a spike corresponding to the disaster.
There’s something there we’re not being told, and it tickles my paranoïdar.”
Most useful word and of course it had to be a Dutchman, Grikath, who introduced us to it.