4 ms·

As a linguist, I really appreciate reading/hearing people write/speak in a non-Native language, as the constructions are really interesting, and while I don't i

by spraak 10y ago

As a linguist, I really appreciate reading/hearing people write/speak in a non-Native language, as the constructions are really interesting, and while I don't intend to laugh at anyone, sometimes amusing: > Perhaps I am the one who possesses the face image of the most boss in the world. I must have it more than his parents. :)

stephengillie 10y ago
What fascinates me is watching the communication of concepts shift in different languages - watching people map the concept from one language to another as they translate the concept. And then sometimes a concept might have a dedicated word or means of expression, meaning the translation is asymmetric in length. In a way, it's like porting a program, from one language which supports ternary operations, to a language that does not have ternary operations - and having to manually write out the ternary operation as an if-then-else statement.
- spraak 10y ago
  I've had some really laughable times in Thailand in regard to this. Google Translate is really horrible at Thai <-> English, where both English and Thai speakers are left in confusion and usually laughter. Some examples: someone was telling me about the fresh mountain air, Google Translate showed 'drug scene' (I asked them for clarification and no, they weren't talking about drugs); another idiom which I didn't find out what it means, but 'eye twitching' was what Google Translate was giving, though the person didn't really mean their eye was twitching..
nightcracker 10y ago
For those unaware, 'spraak' is 'speech' in Dutch.
- spraak 10y ago
  Hehe good catch! (and also 'language' in Norwegian)
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    Well, with the "å"[1] it is :). Also in Swedish, I think? Danish has "sprog" which sounds a lot funnier if you say it "in English". In Danish it sounds quite similar to språk -- just soften everything until it turns into a mush of vowels. [1] For people not versed in Scandiwegian, there's this tradition of "å" -> "aa", "æ" -> "ae", "ø/ö" -> "oe" from the olden days... which is surprisingly useful even in these days of (one would hope) "pervasive" Unicode. :)
    - kuschku 10y ago
      And in low German it’s Spraak, and in high German it’s Sprache. So close, yet so far.
      - lomnakkus 10y ago
        Pfff... you fools! :p
    - spraak 10y ago
      It's common to write aa as å when it's not available (though I only assumed it wouldn't work in HN, maybe it does). Also historically it was aa and became å Edit: work as in for a username.
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    > and also 'language' in Norwegian Only for those without a Norwegian keyboard. Should be språk.
    - spraak 10y ago
      True.. språk is how I meant it, but I couldn't register as that on HN. å evolved from aa..
Retr0spectrum 10y ago
Maybe it's just because I only just woke up, but somehow I managed to read that sentence without even realising it wass awkwardly worded.
- Frenchgeek 10y ago
  Careful : Your German is showing.
  - Retr0spectrum 10y ago
    Ok, that was really weird. I'm a native English speaker, although I learnt German a few years ago and haven't used it since. I must have woken up in a German mood or something.
  - UweSchmidt 10y ago
    And your French too (space before ":"). :) I find it exciting to figure out someone's native language, or to understand the phrase in the original language before translation. A Spaniard asked me once to give me the "carpet", which made no sense in the context. He meant to say "file folder" ("la carpeta" in Spanish), hoping the Normans had brought the equivalent French word to England and save him a lookup in the dictionary.
marcfawzi 10y ago
If you simply replace "most" with "biggest" or "baddest" it should sound just fine. No?
franciscop 10y ago
This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. Besides the small note with two Japanese characters (ヽ(‘ ∇‘ )ノﾜｰｲ”), you can see some strings it in the screenshot. I've been learning Japanese and studied in Japan for a while and it is fascinating to see this: > When you are working, you have browsed information that is not relevant to your work, haven’t you? I don't know enough Japanese to translate half of it, but that kind of negative question termination is really characteristic from the language: "masenka?" (ませんか？) or even "sou desuka?" (そうですか？) as a reply. The interesting thing is that you can see the progress depending on the English level of the person, as Japanese people who are more fluent in English will first translate it into "right?". Even more fluent people will leave the sentence open-ended like it's missing something as they realize it's not so natural in English but still haven't totally switched over. Note: I'm Spanish and it's also funny to catch myself saying some of these different things as well.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. More things pointing to this being a Japanese blog: "aho" in "Ahogrammar", the name of the blog, is Japanese for stupid/silly. The wordpress theme is setup to write dates in Japanese. The default "Hello World" post from the wordpress installation has been left intact and is in Japanese. He links to his Github, where he registered himself under a Japanese name and as living in Tokyo, as well as published code for a Japanese chatbot that can search for restaurants [1]. [1] https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue
usgroup 10y ago
I share you fascination ... I had a colleague with whom I had to work with closely who spoke much the same way. Novel sentence construction aside, it caused a lot of weird misunderstandings constantly. I found it difficult to fix meaning and predict how she might interpret something by her feedback.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
justifier 10y ago
i like to say poor english is profound english i was traveling in india and went to an outdoor festival with friends there was a merchant doing mehndi my friend got her palms decorated then i asked to get mine done he told me it was only for women but i insisted and he begrudgingly, with a smile of disbelief, painted my palms the next day when we checked out of our hotel there was a man standing next to the desk he started to laugh and grabbed my hand and said, 'this is only women, not men' i said, 'well, i like it' and he responded, 'in india only women try to see the beautiful, men do not try to see the beautiful' now, i knew what he meant.. only women try to 'look' beautiful stead 'see' but 'see' was so potent i loved it as if to say men refuse to 'see the beautiful' so women feel compelled to adorn themselves so men will think them beautiful whereas women 'see the beautiful' in all things and as such see beauty in men without adornment i wanted to respond, 'you're right, you are failing to see the beauty of anyone having painted palms' but i laughed with him and said, 'exactly, i wanted to look beautiful'

by spraak 10y ago

stephengillie 10y ago

What fascinates me is watching the communication of concepts shift in different languages - watching people map the concept from one language to another as they translate the concept. And then sometimes a concept might have a dedicated word or means of expression, meaning the translation is asymmetric in length. In a way, it's like porting a program, from one language which supports ternary operations, to a language that does not have ternary operations - and having to manually write out the ternary operation as an if-then-else statement.

spraak 10y ago
I've had some really laughable times in Thailand in regard to this. Google Translate is really horrible at Thai <-> English, where both English and Thai speakers are left in confusion and usually laughter. Some examples: someone was telling me about the fresh mountain air, Google Translate showed 'drug scene' (I asked them for clarification and no, they weren't talking about drugs); another idiom which I didn't find out what it means, but 'eye twitching' was what Google Translate was giving, though the person didn't really mean their eye was twitching..

nightcracker 10y ago

For those unaware, 'spraak' is 'speech' in Dutch.

spraak 10y ago
Hehe good catch! (and also 'language' in Norwegian)
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  Well, with the "å"[1] it is :). Also in Swedish, I think? Danish has "sprog" which sounds a lot funnier if you say it "in English". In Danish it sounds quite similar to språk -- just soften everything until it turns into a mush of vowels. [1] For people not versed in Scandiwegian, there's this tradition of "å" -> "aa", "æ" -> "ae", "ø/ö" -> "oe" from the olden days... which is surprisingly useful even in these days of (one would hope) "pervasive" Unicode. :)
  - kuschku 10y ago
    And in low German it’s Spraak, and in high German it’s Sprache. So close, yet so far.
    - lomnakkus 10y ago
      Pfff... you fools! :p
  - spraak 10y ago
    It's common to write aa as å when it's not available (though I only assumed it wouldn't work in HN, maybe it does). Also historically it was aa and became å Edit: work as in for a username.
- kwhitefoot 10y ago
  > and also 'language' in Norwegian Only for those without a Norwegian keyboard. Should be språk.
  - spraak 10y ago
    True.. språk is how I meant it, but I couldn't register as that on HN. å evolved from aa..

Retr0spectrum 10y ago

Maybe it's just because I only just woke up, but somehow I managed to read that sentence without even realising it wass awkwardly worded.

Frenchgeek 10y ago
Careful : Your German is showing.
- Retr0spectrum 10y ago
  Ok, that was really weird. I'm a native English speaker, although I learnt German a few years ago and haven't used it since. I must have woken up in a German mood or something.
- UweSchmidt 10y ago
  And your French too (space before ":"). :) I find it exciting to figure out someone's native language, or to understand the phrase in the original language before translation. A Spaniard asked me once to give me the "carpet", which made no sense in the context. He meant to say "file folder" ("la carpeta" in Spanish), hoping the Normans had brought the equivalent French word to England and save him a lookup in the dictionary.

marcfawzi 10y ago

If you simply replace "most" with "biggest" or "baddest" it should sound just fine. No?

franciscop 10y ago

This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. Besides the small note with two Japanese characters (ヽ(‘ ∇‘ )ノﾜｰｲ”), you can see some strings it in the screenshot. I've been learning Japanese and studied in Japan for a while and it is fascinating to see this: > When you are working, you have browsed information that is not relevant to your work, haven’t you? I don't know enough Japanese to translate half of it, but that kind of negative question termination is really characteristic from the language: "masenka?" (ませんか？) or even "sou desuka?" (そうですか？) as a reply. The interesting thing is that you can see the progress depending on the English level of the person, as Japanese people who are more fluent in English will first translate it into "right?". Even more fluent people will leave the sentence open-ended like it's missing something as they realize it's not so natural in English but still haven't totally switched over. Note: I'm Spanish and it's also funny to catch myself saying some of these different things as well.

wodenokoto 10y ago
> This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. More things pointing to this being a Japanese blog: "aho" in "Ahogrammar", the name of the blog, is Japanese for stupid/silly. The wordpress theme is setup to write dates in Japanese. The default "Hello World" post from the wordpress installation has been left intact and is in Japanese. He links to his Github, where he registered himself under a Japanese name and as living in Tokyo, as well as published code for a Japanese chatbot that can search for restaurants [1]. [1] https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue

usgroup 10y ago

I share you fascination ... I had a colleague with whom I had to work with closely who spoke much the same way. Novel sentence construction aside, it caused a lot of weird misunderstandings constantly. I found it difficult to fix meaning and predict how she might interpret something by her feedback.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

justifier 10y ago

i like to say poor english is profound english i was traveling in india and went to an outdoor festival with friends there was a merchant doing mehndi my friend got her palms decorated then i asked to get mine done he told me it was only for women but i insisted and he begrudgingly, with a smile of disbelief, painted my palms the next day when we checked out of our hotel there was a man standing next to the desk he started to laugh and grabbed my hand and said, 'this is only women, not men' i said, 'well, i like it' and he responded, 'in india only women try to see the beautiful, men do not try to see the beautiful' now, i knew what he meant.. only women try to 'look' beautiful stead 'see' but 'see' was so potent i loved it as if to say men refuse to 'see the beautiful' so women feel compelled to adorn themselves so men will think them beautiful whereas women 'see the beautiful' in all things and as such see beauty in men without adornment i wanted to respond, 'you're right, you are failing to see the beauty of anyone having painted palms' but i laughed with him and said, 'exactly, i wanted to look beautiful'