View Poll Results: Which is your most dominant language other than English?

Voters
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  • Chinese

    21 27.27%
  • Greek

    3 3.90%
  • Hungarian

    0 0%
  • Italian

    5 6.49%
  • Japanese

    5 6.49%
  • Maltese

    1 1.30%
  • Spanish

    4 5.19%
  • Tagalog

    7 9.09%
  • Other

    19 24.68%
  • I like machine language (none)

    12 15.58%
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Thread: What language (other than English) do you speak?

  1. #211
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    Watch this weatherman deliver the weather forecast in nine languages!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmP8UbuNalE

  2. #212
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    Inspired by this thread, here is a list of what I find are common confusions between Australian and American English. Typically from kids (I guess because they get confused with a lot of American media that they consume) but occasionally from adults.

    • AU = biscuit / US = cookie

    • AU = scone / US = biscuit

    • AU = jam / US = jelly

    • AU = centre, fibre, sabre, theatre, metre (unit of measurement) etc. / US = center, fiber, saber, theater, meter etc.
      Note that we spell "meter" if we're referring to a device used for measuring, e.g. electric meter, water meter etc.

    • AU = colour, favour(ite), flavour, mould, rumour etc. / US = color, favor(ite), mold, rumor etc.

    • AU = footpath / UK = pavement / US = sidewalk

    • AU = nappies / US = diapers

    • AU = pram / US = stroller

    • AU = rubbish & rubbish bin / US = trash & trash can

    • AU = boot (vehicle) / US = trunk

    • AU = bonnet / US = hood

    • AU = petrol(eum) / US = gas(oline)

    • AU = aluminium / US = aluminum (metal) & aluminium (element)


    Then there are some differences in pronunciation (aside from obvious accent differences. Australian English is more clipped than American English. Examples include...
    • INTEREST: AU = "in-chresst" / US = "inner-rest"

    • FEBRUARY: AU = "feb-bree" / US = "feb-brew-wary"

    • LIBRARY: AU = "lye-bree" / US = "lye-breh-ree"


    Although Americans sometimes clip consonants that we pronounce, such as "inter" which the Yanks pronounce as "inner."
    e.g. (US)
    • international = "inner-national"

    • internet = "inner-net"

    Although this can sometimes happen to speakers of Broad Australian English, especially if they're speaking quickly, and we can hear words like "winter" sounding like "winner." etc.

    We Aussies also have a peculiar way of pronouncing double Ts in the middle of words as a soft "d" sound, whereas most other Anglophones (e.g. UK, US) pronounce it as a definite "t." The soft "d" is really a sound that occurs midway between a true "t" and "d" sound, or what is technically known as an intervocalic consonant.
    e.g.
    • butter: Non-AU = "but-ter" / AU = "budder"

    • water: Non-AU = "war-ter" / AU = "war-der"

    And to make things confusing for people who are learning English here as a second language, we're not even consistent with this rule. We pronounce words like "button" with t's but "bottle" withdd. Try saying this sentence aloud and listen to the way you pronounce your T's:
    "Someone stuck a button on the bottle."

    There are times where we have clearly distinct pronunciations for words which sound the same to Americans. For example, "caught" and "cot" sound completely different in Australian English but are pronounced the same by Americans. Although I personally found this confusing when I was exposed to American cartoons as a kid and wasn't familiar with hearing the American accent. When I first saw the Transformers cartoon I heard Shockwave's name pronounced as "Sharkwave," since the American pronunciation of "shock" sounds like the Australian pronunciation of "shark." Although I knew that the character was called Shockwave in the comics and in toy catalogues (or as Americans would say, "catalogs"), it really confused me.

    Another one that bemuses me is how Americans use the word "ass" (rhymes with "mass") to mean both "ass" and another word-that-rhymes-with-sparse. I find it perplexing when I sometimes come across Aussies who mispronounce "ass" as rhyming with sparse and misusing "ass" as a synonym for the word-that-rhymes-with-sparse as Americans do. Americans of course don't seem to understand that "ass" and the word-that-rhymes-with-sparse are two entirely different words with different meanings and different origins. The word-that-rhymes-with-sparse comes from English (aers) and means "buttocks." "Ass" on the other hand comes from Latin (asinus) and means "donkey," but the Romans also used it to mean a stupid person. Hence why Kickback's motto ("Friend is another word for fool") translates as, "Amicus mihi asinus" in Latin.

    It literally means, "Friends are asses to me."
    Compare this with the Latin saying, "Proximus egomet mihi," which literally means, "The closest one to me is me myself," but more commonly translates as "Charity begins at home," or "Every man for himself." I use both "ass" and the word-that-rhymes-with-sparse, but non synonymously with each other.
    e.g. "That dumb-ass got his (word-that-rhymes-with-sparse) kicked."
    And again, ensuring that the Latin-based word always rhymes with mass, gas, wrasse and lass, and never with class, grass, glass or pass. Although the "a" in the word-that-rhymes-with-sparse originally was the same as the "a" in words like apple, ash and angry, but it was a long drawn-out vowel and I believe the "r" was unreceived, so it was never pronounced like "ass."

  3. #213
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    Aaah, much better #MSPaintCorrections

  4. #214
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    Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
    Did I need to put a page break between my points
    That would not have altered the meaning of your previous statement:
    Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
    Oooh, and a Tracks as well.

    Looks good.

    Fingers crossed for some MP representation.
    ↑Here there are three sentences and the latter two lack a subject, thus they carry on from the subject of the first sentence which is Tracks. The way that English works is that unless a new subject is introduced, either directly by explicitly stating the subject or indirectly through the use of something like a pronoun, then the follow up sentences can only refer to the initial subject introduced.

    Thus what you have said was:
    Oooh, and a Tracks as well.
    (Tracks) looks good.
    Fingers crossed for some MP representation (for Tracks).


    English continues the same subject unless a new one is introduced.
    e.g. "Jane is beautiful and intelligent. She's well liked."
    Note that the second sentence doesn't contain a subject, however the use of the pronoun "she" carries on the subject from the previous sentence; Jane.

    With your initial statement, each successive verb continues to agree with the initial subject that you presented as it is the only subject that was presented.
    * Oooh, and a Tracks as well. <---this first sentence introduces the audience to a subject. Tracks.
    * Looks good. <---there is no other subject or even pronoun used here, thus this sentence continues to agree with the subject from the previous sentence. Tracks.
    * Fingers crossed for some MP representation. <---and again, the subject-verb agreement is continued here. More love for Tracks.

    I realise that not every language works that way; I don't know how it works in your native tongue, but this is the way that it works in English. As a West Germanic language, English is still relatively more reliant/insistent on the use of subjects (either directly or indirectly) - they are not as omissible as in some other languages. Languages like Japanese can easily omit subjects altogether and the subject of the sentence, but English just doesn't work that way.
    e.g.
    帰ってきたらテレビがなくなってたから警察に電話した。
    ↑This literally translates as "Came home and my TV was gone so called the police."
    This sounds weird in English because of the lack of a subject. Who came home and called the police? Was it the speaker or someone else? The sentence translated like that in English doesn't specify which doesn't really work in English as it cannot establish a subject-verb agreement (known in linguistics as concordance). In English the verb must agree with the subject. And you cannot establish this agreement if the subject is absent.

    Now of course the reason why some other languages like Japanese, Latin etc. aren't as dependent on the use of subjects is because they have other grammatical features that English lacks to help clarify meaning. Japanese and Korean use a grammatical feature known as particles, and Latin uses case declensions. Let's look at two translations for Megatron's infamous line that helped to found the Decepticon movement: "You are being deceived." Let's look at this line in English, Japanese and Latin and break down each component.

    English: You are being deceived.
    It begins with the second person pronoun "you" which is the subject of the sentence followed by a successive string of verbs. We have the present participle "being" acting as an auxiliary verb in conjunction with "are" in order to form the present continuous tense, but then this leads to the primary action verb of "deceived." This all works to build the subject-verb agreement or concordance in the sentence. It has to because Modern English lacks things like case declensions or particles to tell us otherwise (Old English had case declensions and inflections, but not in Modern English).

    Japanese: 「君達は騙されている」
    * 君 = you, and this also delves into forms of honorifics which is a whole different kettle of fish
    * 達 = pluralises the second person pronoun
    * は = topic marking particle, establishing the pluralised second person pronoun as the subject
    * 騙されている = verb conjoined in the passive form in the present continuous tense. Thus without needing to use any auxiliary verbs, this single verb alone tells us "are being deceived."
    And the thing is that you can omit the first two parts and just have 騙されている and it would still work. It would still mean "You are being deceived," even though I've completely omitted the subject. Subjects really aren't nearly as important in Japanese sentences as they are in English and in many cases can just be left out. And if you think that's funky, check out...

    Latin: DECEPIMINI
    That's it. That's literally all you need. One verb that tells the audience quite precisely everything that you want to say. You are being deceived. DECEPIMINI in its nominative singular masculine case is DECEPTVS which is where we get words like "deception" from, but when you conjugate DECEPTVS as DECEPIMINI then the meaning immediately shifts from simply being "deceived" to "you are being deceived."

    Both Japanese and Latin don't actually need anything else beyond the primary verb; the conjugation tells us what we need to know. 騙されている/DECEPIMINI -- you are being deceived. In English the word "deceived" doesn't conjugate in any other way aside from tense. All we can do with it is take it to its present/future tense (deceive), continuous tense (deceiving) or past tense (deceived). But this is the additionally complicated thing with English, Megatron isn't using "deceived" as a past tense verb. He's using it as a past participle because he's constructing a passive sentence, not an active one. And the difference between the passive and active voice.

    Correct and incorrect examples...

    * I beat the game ← Correct
    * I was beat by the game ← Incorrect
    * I was beaten by the game ← Correct
    * I beaten the game ← Incorrect
    * I have beaten the game ← Correct
    * The game was beaten ← Correct

    Notice that the last sentence is an example of an English sentence that doesn't require the use of a subject. Japanese works much like this. Such sentences don't tell us who has beaten the game though, only that it's been beaten. If I were to say, "John was playing Fall of Cybertron. Finally, the game was beaten." Since the second sentence introduces no new subject, the final verb continues to agree with the subject from the first sentence.

  5. #215
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    Is SIEGE really that difficult a word to spell?

    "ie" makes the sound "ee" as in:
    liege (not leige)
    field (not feild)
    niece (not neice)
    chief (not cheif)
    brief (not breif)
    grief (not greif)
    relieve (not releive)
    priest (not preist)
    fierce (not feirce)
    achieve (not acheive)
    hygiene (not hygeine)
    fiend (not feind)
    Masterpiece (not Masterpeice)
    etc.

    Whereas "ei" makes the sound "ay" as in:
    beige
    eight
    freight
    vein
    weigh
    neighbour
    rein
    reign
    sleigh
    sheikh
    heir
    etc.

    It's weird... I'm seeing a number of people writing "Transformers Seige," but IRL everyone still says "siege." I've yet to encounter someone who actually refers to Siege as "Seige" ('sage') IRL. I guess if people really want to refer to Siege as Seige they can, but at least be consistent between one's written and spoken standards (i.e. say it as you would write it).

    And yes, I realise that "weird" demonstrates one of many exceptions where "ei" is pronounced as "ee" instead of "ay" and it also occurs in words like protein and weir - but these are exceptions. The majority of English words containing "ei" pronounce the "ei" as "ay." Yeah, English is special that way. But still, unless English is your second language...

  6. #216
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    Funny you mention that, I actually read a similar post by somebody else highlighting the misspelling of Siege today on FB.

    Then of course there's


  7. #217
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  8. #218
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    Siege / Seige.
    Laserbeak Lazerbeak.

    Pffff. It’s a forum for fans, not school.

  9. #219
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    Sinnertwin: Yup!

    I love how even Honest Trailers made fun of this.
    "Guys, you seriously need to learn how to spell 'Rogue.'"
    Quote Originally Posted by Tetsuwan Convoy View Post
    Probably more of a point of lazy typing/fingers more than anything else I'd say.
    That might make sense if "Seige" had fewer letters than "Siege." And yeah, as Sinnertwin pointed out, it's as ridiculous as people saying "rouge" instead of "rogue."


    I hope that these people are at least consistent in their chosen deviant spelling convention.

  10. #220
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    Topic closed for review.

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