Had a nightmare in Portuguese and woke up agitated at 3am thinking in full French. Turned on the bed and saw I had a message. I spent the next 5 minutes staring at my cellphone trying to make sense of what seemed like nonsensical keymashing -until I realised I was trying to understand Spanish with an English focused brain. I just, what
Really, we actually can't hate a particular language. Every language is unique and actually there is no difficulty in learning a particular language. The difficulty of a language is subjective and must also be based on certain linguistic criteria like phonology or writing system. For example, Japanese may be one of the languages with the easiest pronunciation but not the writing system.
so many thoughts and so many languages to choose from
inspired by @mcfanely and their depiction of the echidna language!!!
Languages in order: Japanese? Spanish? Portuguese? K'iche'? Chinese? Chinese(simplified)? Babylonian? Swahili? Yoruba? Patois? Nahuatl? Korean? Cantonese? Tagalog? Bisaya? Equiñoul(my name for knuckles' first language) english???
Nina asks Crowley about Aziraphale being his bit on the side.
Crowley protests:
- He's not my bit on the side.
At this point, when he continues, what I hear is:
- He's far too pure of heart to be anybody's bit on the side.
Except… Both the subtitles and the transcriptions I found online report this:
- I'm far too pure of heart to be anybody's bit on the side.
So, subtitles and transcriptions would have me think that Crowley is talking about himself as too pure of heart, but my ears disagree, making a strong case for Crowley talking of Aziraphale as too pure of heart. Which, you know. Makes perfect sense. Especially taking into account Crowley's tone of voice (righteous indignation instead of practiced sarcasm). Also the whole Aziraphale-being-an-angel thing. So.
Native English speakers of the Tumblr, please confirm?
the perpetual difficulty of the word i want existing only in the other language without a cognate or sister word!!!
the specific word i want is something that means "hang" with a sense of dangling, lightly swinging, etc but i want that sense of something smaller hanging by a thin thread, sword of damocles style, imagery like a pendulum.
we have the exact word i want: pendurar, from latin pendurus, whereby english gets pendulum! great! pendurar just means hang but it has the visual/sound connection to pendulum which i like for aforementioned word-association reasons!
pendurus has no child in english but for pendulum!
english has "pendulate" but that means actually swinging side to side like a pendulum, which, not what i want
Going to bed because I dropped my phone and my brain forgot immediately that it was my phone, just remembering it was an f noise word. In response it decided I must have dropped my fork, so I spent like 15ish seconds looking around the kitchen floor wonder why the heck I couldn't find my fork.
Answer: I couldn't find my fork because it was firmly in my hand. I looked at my phone on the ground several times, and it took far too long for my brain to figure out which wires got crossed.
my first language is portuguese. today, in spanish class, we were asked to describe one of our classmates in spanish. i had the perfect word in mind, but i could only remember it in english, not its translation to portuguese or spanish. i turned to my friend and asked “how can i say [word] in spanish?” and they were like “why the fuck are you thinking in english”
My name is Heulfryn which is a Welsh name because of my Welsh mother, but I usually go by Heul, again a totally fine and respectable name, but since I learned German I do find the spelling just a bit funny. Like:
I just saw a sign that said ‘BEECHGROVE’ (the name of the road ig) and it was cut off so all I could see was ‘BEECH’, and y’all, my ass really went ‘vjejesn?’. I thought that sign was in Cyrillic, a road sign, in the rural UK, and I thought. it was. CYRILLIC! actual dumbass here.
A minim is "a short, vertical stroke used in handwriting" and the 'minim problem' refers to the difficulty of differentiating between the letters i, u, o, v, m, n (especially in Gothic script). Here's an example:
This problem led to some spelling developments to be able to differentiate between the letters:
Minims often have a connecting stroke which makes it clear that they form an m, n, etc.; however, in Gothic scripts, also known as textualis especially in late examples, minims may connect to each other with only a hair line stroke making it difficult for modern readers to tell what letter is meant. A 13th-century example of this is: mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt ("the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished"). In Gothic script this would look almost like a series of single strokes (this problem eventually led to a dotted ⟨i⟩ and separate letters ⟨j⟩ and ⟨v⟩).
Middle English scribes adopted a practice of replacing ⟨u⟩ before ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, or ⟨v⟩ with ⟨o⟩ in order to break up the sequence of minims. The resulting spellings have persisted into modern times in words such as come, honey, and love, where an o stands for a short ŭ.
Can we just talk about Crowley's name in French? Rampa.
Honestly, it's a stroke of genius.
To crawl = ramper
Crawley (his original name) becomes Rampant (= he who crawls)
Crowley (his new name) becomes Rampa (= he crawled)
Bonus points for maintaining: 1) the original meaning of the word and 2) the subtle sound change in pronunciation, from a nasal A to a simple A, like the difference between Crawley and Crowley in English.
Brilliant.
More ramblings under the cut / Plus de divagations sous la coupe
La version française de GO2 est la plus drôle jusqu’ici.
Un mot en particulier : Rampa !
Certes, je n’avais jamais lu la traduction du libre, donc trouver le nom de mon démon préféré remplacé par « Rampa » a été d'abord étonnant. Mais après, j’ai réfléchi, il n’y a pas d’adaptation française sans traduire chaque mot : ordinateur, souris, numérique… Rampa !
Choix brillant, à vrai dire. To crawl = ramper. Et rampa est la troisième personne du singulier du passé simple, mais il ressemble aussi à un prénom qui évoque l’idée d’un serpent … rampant. En fait, le public français peut mieux apprécier l’association entre le nom du démon et sa signification originale. Ce n’est pas une coïncidence que « Rampant » est le premier nom avec lequel le démon se présente à Aziraphale, et après il le change en « Rampa ». La différence entre le A nasal et le A simple est aussi subtile que le contraste entre Crawley et Crowley en anglais. Bravo, les traducteurs !
Autre traduction hardie : créatures au lieu de personnes/gens.
Dans le premier épisode, Aziraphale explique à Rampa le plan du Tout-Puissant pour la Terre, c’est-à-dire la peupler de « people » dans la version originale anglaise. Alors, on peut traduire « people » par « personnes » ou par « gens », mais les dialoguistes ont choisi… créatures ?
Or, j’arrive à comprendre pourquoi ils ont écarté « personnes » : trop de possibilités de se tromper avec le singulier, « personne », qui veut dire exactement le contraire de tout le monde et, dans ce sens-là, pouvait prêter à confusion.
Mais alors, je me suis dit, pourquoi pas « gens » ? Un mot sans aucune ambiguïté, avec l’avantage d’être suffisamment spécifique pour se référer au genre humain, tandis que « créatures » est si générique qu’il peut désigner n’importe quel être vivant, animal ou végétal.
Au moins, la version québécoise est plus cohérente: elle utilise « les humains », pas de malentendus !
Les Francophones de Tumblr, qu'en pensez-vous ?
P.S. To the Québécois, why does the French-Canadian dubbing sound so … French? Or is it just me? Did they get the accent right?