Geek and Nerd Humor

I was a little worried that it might be a re-post, but not so worried that I was going to search the thread...

reposts are fine - i'm concerned about the decreasing anality in this thread

"Reposts are fine - I'm concerned about the decreasing anality in this thread."

You're welcome.

Great post.
Native English speakers think their language is logical.
They're sooo wrong.

This native English speaker don't. I have to teach it. I knows betterer.

I'm a native speaker and I don't think English is logical at all. All those long dead glottal stops hanging around in spelling, irregular plurals, homonyms, blah.

I was amazed when in a beginner Spanish lesson the teacher said there are only five vowel sounds. That said the gendering of articles and words in other languages drives me spare. Obrigado for me, obrigada for Mrs Hinge. Seriously!

That's quite common in any number of languages, hinge, not just Spanish. In Polish, for example, as well as my native Latvian, it is a commonplace for the wife's family name to vary from her husbands. My surname is Mikelsons; if traditional rules were to be followed, my wife's surname would be Mikelsone. This rule is generally no longer followed in order to conform to international passport standards, but that's a very recent 20th century change.

Nobody I listen to more than Baez.


Oh, wait..

I've often thought that German was much more compatible to an English speaker than Spanish. Spanish might well have more cognates, but the German sentence structure just seems less foreign.

Not that I've ever been fluent in either.

When I started learning Korean, the books and native speakers would tell me how logical Korean is compared to other languages. Horse hockey. I don't think there is an objectively logical language. Not counting constructed languages, I mean. Native speakers use their language by intuition, not by logic. Whatever conscious knowledge of grammar rules they later learn is a post hoc representation of what they do intuitively.

I love the Icelandic system

Ragnar has a daughter - her surname is Ragnarsdottir - but his son's surname is Ragnarsson.

Family tree research most be a hoot over there!

Obrigado, dear Hinge?
That's portuguese!

The language I know of that is written exactly as it is pronounced is Serbo-Croatian (too bad MyOwnUsername doesn't hang out on A2K anymore to tell us more about it).
It is so strict about it, that the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is Gabrijel Garsija Markes and the well-known XIX Century German philosopher is Fridrih Vilhelm Niče.

And yes, gender in words. That's an English advantage... with the disadvantage of always having to put the pronoun to mean if it's a he, a she or an it (a difficulty that seems unsurmountable to González Iñárritu, according to his Oscar acceptance speeches).

If you think Spanish is crazy about gender, think about German.
First of all they got it wrong. The Sun is male and the moon is female, not the other way around!
And then they got this neutral gender thing only to make things more complicated.

Then comes Russian, where a man says "I slept", and a woman says "I slepta".

Miss him too.

German gender is easy. Just make them plural and everything becomes feminine.

Okay, frauline is gender neutral, but you get used to it - sort of.

Perverts, that's what they are!

I wasn't going to mention that. Out of respect, you know.

I know FB - it's an extreme example of what I said a lot on non-English languages do. In Spanish gracias is gracias but in Portuguese the word you use for thank you depends on your gender!

grazie sil vous plait efkharisto

(I can also order two beers in every country I've travelled to)

One's never enough eh?

Of course it's never enough:
http://able2know.org/topic/23210-1

A great thread from back in the day che.