• Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 months ago

    The French, whenever you see an English word and none of the letters make sense, we stole it from the French.

  • Taniwha420@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    In Viking’s defense: of all the Romance languages French is the most like Latin being spoken and written by a drunk hick with no formal education.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      I recently saw a tiktok (therefore I’m an expert) that showed that Old French was pronounced pretty much exactly how it was spelled.

      Every language simplifies it’s pronunciation over time, but usually they alter the spelling when they do, but French just said “miss me with that shit, dog” and decided just to change the rules about pronunciation instead

      • The_Lopen@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        I mean, I Heard that French monks were paid by the letter scribed, rather than the word, so they just put extra letters into everything using made up rules about spelling.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Probably yes, but the rules are simple enough today that you don’t need a PhD to explain though thought, or tie vs tier, or… wait for it… live vs live, or record vs record, read vs read.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Yeah that was my first thought. French pronunciation is fucking ridiculous, this isn’t the epic burn you think it is.

  • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Kuno:

    who the fuck decided rendezvous would be pronounced like that

    You:

    Poor monolinguals. They can’t seem to understand that other languages besides English exist

    Kuno:

    what the fuck did you just call me

    Kunoesse:

    He called you Mongolian

  • Ascend910@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    They say being bilingual is only impressive if your first language is English. Since you are expected to know English anyways. Is it true?

    • andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Bilinguals aren’t impressive at all. I think most people are bilinguals. Apparently, according to Journal of Neurolinguistics, we have more bilinguals (43 percent of the world population) rather than monolinguals (40 percent).

    • uis@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      There are trilingual regions in my country. And one neighbouring country is mostly trilingual too(2 official languages + 1 foreign)

    • current@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Well nobody can objectively force something to impress you or not impress you. But most people speak more than one language natively or on a regular basis, hell just short of 2 billion people (1/4 the world’s population) alone are from the Indian subcontinent region, and there the high variation/diversity of languages throughout the region make speaking 3-4 languages well the norm.

      Similar story with Indonesia/Papua New Guinea. And most people in Central Asia and many European parts of the former USSR speak Russian as a 2nd language (nearly all Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and most Baltic people speak Russian to a high fluency, while also often speaking a 2nd and sometimes 3rd native language).

      Then you consider language in European countries like the Netherlands (Dutch/English), Belgium (French/Dutch/English), Sweden (Swedish/English), Finland (Finnish/Swedish), Denmark & Norway (Denmark or Norwegian / some obscure highly derived dialect that’s different enough from the standard and common languages to be counted), Spain (Castillian/some other Spanish language), Italy (Standard Italian/some other Italian language). I’d say at least a third of Europeans speak more than one language natively and two thirds can speak more than one language well at all.

      Despite being a massive continent, one thing that can be said about almost all of the socities there is that most of them are polylingual. Probably less so in Arabic-speaking majority countries.

      Really, monolingualism is only the norm for anglo countries – especially the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Not so much in like half of Canada. I think it could be said that monolingualism is the norm in most of China too, but I’m not so sure about that. AFAIK it’s pretty mixed in Latin America but overall a majority of the people there speak only Spanish or Portuguese, save for places like Peru & Uruguay.

    • MrsDoyle@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I met a couple in Vanuatu - one of the world’s most language dense nations - whose mother tongues were mutually unintelligible, so they communicated using the country’s official language, Bislama. A lot of bilingual people don’t speak English. Plenty of Eastern Europeans don’t speak English (unpopular during communist rule) but speak say German or Russian as well as Serbocroatian or whatever.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Monolinguals are as culturally diverse as Mongolians. Just staying in one place, no need to expand horizons or learn anything new.

    • spamfajitas@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The last time the Mongolians decided to expand their horizons, it didn’t work out so well for a decent chunk of the rest of the world. I think it’s perfectly fine they choose to keep things simple, tbh.

  • UmeU@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The thing about Mongolians is that their barbecue is not the traditional Korean barbecue.

  • phorq@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    First Mongolians make the NoSQL database of my nightmares and now this… When will they learn!?

    • Skye@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I think you’re mistaken. It was the civilization of Mango Trees that made that database.

  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I know some of those words, nice!


    edit: added quotes

    Ron-Day-Voo

    rendezvous /rän′dā-voo͞″, -də-/ noun

    1. A meeting at a prearranged time and place. synonym: engagement. Similar: engagement
    2. A prearranged meeting place, especially an assembly point for troops or ships.
    3. A popular gathering place. “The café is a favorite rendezvous for artists.”

    monolingual /mŏn″ə-lĭng′gwəl/ adjective

    1. Using or knowing only one language.
    2. Using or knowing only one language. Opposite of multilingual. “monolingual speakers; a monolingual dictionary”
    3. Knowing, or using a single language.

    Mongolian is the principal language of the Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are native to modern Mongolia and surrounding parts of East and North Asia. Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and a recognized language of Xinjiang and Qinghai. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 6.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the ethnic Mongol residents of the Inner Mongolia of China. In Mongolia, Khalkha Mongolian is predominant, and is currently written in both Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script. In Inner Mongolia, it is dialectally more diverse and written in the traditional Mongolian script. However, Mongols in both countries often use the Latin script for convenience on the Internet.

    Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. The western extremity of Mongolia is only 37 km from Kazakhstan, and this area can resemble a quadripoint when viewed on a map. It covers an area of 1,564,116 square kilometres, with a population of just 3.3 million, making it the world’s most sparsely populated sovereign state. Mongolia is the world’s largest landlocked country that does not border a closed sea, and much of its area is covered by grassy steppe, with mountains to the north and west and the Gobi Desert to the south. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and largest city, is home to roughly half of the country’s population. The territory of modern-day Mongolia has been ruled by various nomadic empires, including the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Rouran, the First Turkic Khaganate, the Second Turkic Khaganate, the Uyghur Khaganate and others.