can’t wait for the final boss battle of duolingo when you fight the 50 foot owl armed with nothing but your wits, a sword, and your shaky grasp of verb conjugations
Ancient Greek: As a young lion, venturing for the first time out of the den, drawn to the brightness of Helios and the rustle of leaves, is caught unaware by hunters and runs for his life, bounding over stones with ragged breath, so the late student, suckling of wisdom, hurried to the gymnasium.
Hittite: For the ritual of the late apprentice. When a scribal apprentice is continually late to work, I prepare the following: 3 sour breads, 1 bowl of water, 1 cu[p of … ] a little bit of red string, blue string, a stylus, a snail (?), a piglet, clay models of hands, 2 jugs of beer, a palm frond, fingernail clippings from the apprentice’s master, watercress (?), a stool… (continue for 15 lines)
Akkadian: If a scribal apprentice is accused of being late to work and the accuser produces three witnesses, the scribal apprentice shall have his hands cut off. If the apprentice is accused again, he shall be put to death. But if the accuser cannot produce three witnesses, then he shall be put to death.
Sumerian: The apprentice roams the city during the day. The apprentice always roams the city [during the day. The appre]ntice, the ungrateful (`?) child, always roams the city during the day. When the master asks [ … ] late. The clay is not patted into a tablet. The holy (or shining, or lapis lazuli?) stylus is not taken up. The master [ … ] drinking beer.¹
¹See Attinger who interprets this text not as a schoolmaster’s complaint but as a metaphor for sacred marriage.
Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
1. I work for the Australian National Audit Office as a federal performance analyst and literally everyone in the office refers to each other by their first name. Even the Auditor-General gets called by his first name, and he’s an independent officer of the Parliament, appointed by the
Governor-General on the recommendation of the Joint Committee of Public
Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) and the Prime Minister.
2. This is like the fourth time I’ve reblogged this due to additional A+ commentary.
So one of our new vocabulary words is “malus”, meaning “bad”, and I asked my students if they could think of any English derivatives, telling them that just about any English word that begins with M-A-L is going to mean something “bad”.
I’m expecting stuff like: malice, malcontent, malnourished, or even malware or Maleficent.
Instead I get this one girl in the back of the room say “male” with the most dead-eyed expression.
This has the same energy as two years ago when another student said she remembered “vir” meant “man” because “it looks like virus, and men are a virus”.
One of my Latin students, whenever I’d ask if they wanted a couple extra minutes to review before a test, would always say, “No, we die like men.” And so finally I asked her why it was always ‘like men’. She said, “We die like men, unprepared and useless.”
Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf – it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” – meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.
Another good post to read for those writing small human characters.
My son was about three when he came to me in the middle of the day and said, “Mommy, there’s a knight behind the bush.” I thought he meant a toy knight or something. So I follow him outside and he goes, “Listen. Do you hear it? It’s night behind the bush.” It was a cricket. A cricket was standing in the little patch of shade under the bush, chirping. So, my son saw this dark area with accompanying nighttime sounds and decided, okay, well, that is a night right there. Their brains are incredible.
My little bean knows she’s two, constantly saying proudly ‘I’m two!’ And the other day she saw this very frail old lady who looked one foot in the grave, pulled a face and said ‘oh shiiiit. She’s three.’ I almost screamed.
I live in Korea and have a lot of international friends, and the same is true with language barriers in adults.
*Looking at a bowl of pears* “Can you please pass me the… apple’s friend?”
A white person learning another language in the United States is a person looking to build a résumé.
A person of color learning English in the United States is a person looking to be treated like a human being.
It is not the same thing.
Keep reblogging this white people are getting mad because they don’t know the difference between learning a language because it’s fun or to put it on applications and learning a language so you won’t get treated like garbage by everyone
@indigopersei is the french language just always on the verge of getting someone accused of assault or..?
my friend, if only you knew
It’s a very dangerous language to learn
Here’s an interesting thing about French! Everything needs to have an article in front of it. That’s why it’s “la chat” as opposed to just “chat”. So, for instance, you could say la fille for the girl, or jeune fille for young girl, but you can’t just say fille, because that means you are calling her a sex worker in a derogatory way.
The moral of the story is, if you want to make something rude in French, just take out the article in front of it. Yes, this works for nearly. every. word.
Every year. Every year there’s that kid who forgets that you can’t translate “I am excited” to “Je suis excitée”. And every year Monsieur Jordan has to slam the brakes before that kid can finish his sentence and then tactfully ask him not to announce to the class that he is horny.
“is the french language always on the verge” oh buddy, oh pal, i am so happy to break this news to you:
kore ga revue! 