My clients are about 50/50 native and non-native English speakers, and non-native English speakers are pretty much the only ones who say “yes” when I ask them a question.
Native English speakers almost always say “yeah” or “sure”, unless it’s for emphasis. (“Is now a good time?” “Sure” vs “Is this your first baby?” “Yes he is!!”)
I’ve noticed that with yes and no. Both of those sound abrupt by themselves (“no” to a lesser extent than “yes”). “Did you do it?” “Yes”. To me, that would sound like someone who’s annoyed by the question, perhaps because it’s been asked repeatedly. For yes/no to work, they have to be followed by something else, like your example, or by a word like sir or ma’am.
I’ve reblogged a post like this before but I suspect this is an indication that the meanings of yes (and yeah) and no are actually changing – that English is undergoing a shift from a two-form affirmative-negative system to something else, such as an echo system (like Irish or Chinese uses) (except that in English we don’t have to repeat the whole verb, we can just use the auxiliary do).
I.e. this is why, I think, it’s so common for people to use “yeah, no” to deny something and “no, yeah, totally” to affirm something – “yeah” and “no” by themselves are too ambiguous, so we have to reinforce them by, for example, when we deny something, affirming the negative (“Yeah…”) and then denying the positive (“…no”), or when we affirm something, by denying the negative (“No…”) and then affirming the positive (“…yeah, totally!”). Maybe this kind of thing will stick around, or maybe it’ll shift to more of an echo system – I find myself saying “Yeah, I do” and “No, I don’t” a lot more than just the words “Yeah” and “No” by themselves.
This situation reminds me of how, when the Latin demonstratives were turning into articles, writers had to add additional decitic words to ille, illa, and illud in order to make their reference sufficiently specific – e.g. just “that man” by itself was starting to mean “the man”, so to mean “that man” they had to say things like “that aforementioned man” or “that particular man”.
Good tips for if your dialogue isn’t sounding realistic to your ear!
Oh, also: In Ashkenazi culture, it’s considered bad luck to name a child after a living relative, because there’s a fear that the Malakh Hamavet (Angel of Death) would get confused when coming for an older relative and take the child sharing their name instead. So, as a result, Ashkenazim are generally only named after deceased relatives.
HOWEVER, this leads to an amazing Yiddish phrase for telling somebody to fuck off, which is: “May a baby be named after you.”
AND CAN I JUST ADD TO MY RANT FROM EARLIER THAT LATIN IS LITERALLY THE BASIS OF OUR ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM.
MODERN MEDICINE WOULD NOT TRANSLATE ACROSS BORDERS IF IT DIDN’T USE LATIN AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE BASIS FOR ALL OF ITS TERMINOLOGY. ALL OF BIOLOGY TAKES ITS NOMENCLATURE FROM LATIN.
BECAUSE IT’S NOT A DEAD LANGUAGE. IT’S A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE. THE MODERN WORLD COULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT LATIN.
LATIN HAS BECOME SO DEEPLY ROOTED TO ALL ACADEMIA AND SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE THAT WE HAVE MADE IT *IMPOSSIBLE* FOR LATIN TO DIE BARRING THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE ITSELF.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT. WE WILL LEAVE SIGNS OF OUR EXISTENCE ON THIS WORLD AFTER WE DIE. SOME ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST IS GOING TO FIND EVIDENCE OF OUR CIVILIZATION ONE DAY. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO FIND?
LATIN.
LATIN WILL OUTLIVE OUR SPECIES.
can i just say that i love you in latin is ego amo te
te amo would probably be more accurate
Me when someone says that me liking Latin is useless and lame
me when someone says
that me liking latin is
useless and lame
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
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English: I love you
Slovak : Milujem ťa
Finnish: Panisin
Slovenian: Ljubim te
Danish: Jeg elsker dig
Portuguese: Amo-te
Tagalog: Kantotan tayo
Punjabi: Panchod chup kar
Somali: Dhillo iska amus
Arabic: انتا حمار
Spanish: quiero que te ahogues con mi pene
Bangla: Tumi ekta kuthar bacha
Indonesian : Aku cinta kamu
Hindi: Mein ghadhe ka bacha hoon
Pashto: spey pashante khkarey
Urdu: Mujhay tum say mohabbat hai
Tamil: Po da mairu pudungi
Malayalam: Patti kazhuda de mone
Kannada: Nind tale nal gobra thumbide
Telugu: Nee muddilo manta petta
Azeri: Seviram Sani
Russian: иди на хуй (idi na houy)
Bosnian: Mrš u pičku materinu
Marathi: Mi tula prem karate/karato
Kurdish: Ez te hezdikhem
Chinese: 你是个混蛋
Greek: είσαι μαλάκας (ise malakas)
German: Opfere mir dein Erstgeborenes
Swedish: Ät min röv
Romanian: Te iubesc
Norwegian: Jeg elsker deg
Polish : Kocham cię
French : je veux m’étouffer sur ta bite
Lithuanian: Aš myliu tave
Korean: 사랑해 (sa rang hae)
Hungarian: szeretlek
Dutch: Blijf met je vieze tengels van mijn fiets af
Italian: sei un caga coglioni
Hebrew: אני אוהב אותך
Estonia: Ma armastan sind
Latvina: Es tevi mīlu
Croatian: volim te
Japanese: あなたのチンコと遊びたいです。
Latin: amo te
Turkish: Seni seviyorum
hi your local jew here reminding you that cherubim, seraphim, nephilim, and words of that nature ARE PLURAL and therefore should not be used to refer to a singular one of these creatures like i see every day of my g-dforsaken life
a single instance would be referred to as a cherub, a seraph, a nephil, et cetera
these words originated from hebrew, and in hebrew -im and -ot are our plural endings. so if you say, like, nephilim in order to refer to a single nephil, it’s like you’re saying “look, a dogs!” it just doesn’t match up and you look really silly
goyim you can reblog please do so to spare yourselves and your friends from this thing that i legitimately see everywhere i turn
things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.
WOAH WHAT?
That is profound. I noticed this by accident when asked about adjectives by a Japanese student. She translated something from Japanese like “Brown big cat” and I corrected her. When she asked me why, I bluescreened.
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.
Why the UK can, and should, make space for our indigenous minority languages.
The ten languages indigenous to the British Isles and still spoken today are English, Scots, British Sign Language, Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Angloromani and Shelta.
Signal boost for this! It’s the same in France. Most of french people don’t even know that their country is originally – and still is – a multilingual country.
Yes, Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Gallo, Flamand, Picard, Basque etc are still spoken. But France refuses to sign the European charter for minority languages. Good job destroying the cultural patrimony that we are so proud of.
“To say there is no worth in learning a language that isn’t economically
useful is like saying there’s no point in being friends with somebody
unless they’re going to help you get a better job. It’s a spectacular,
cynical miss of the point. It’s also inaccurate.”
Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.
It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.
This puzzle, with “M”s and “F”s that aren’t fixed, is a masterful blend of subject and structure. “It potentially really evokes what gender fluidity is, which is not moving back and forth between two poles, but actually not being committed to either pole, and potentially existing in many states at different times,” Tausig said.
This is … really cool.
i never really thought of crossword puzzles as an art form, but like… this is art.
a crossword puzzle based on schrodingers’ cat??? a phYSICS CONCEPT??? sign me tf up i love everything about this
wupacing 