#because in english i use it for love. in german (because the noun is feminine) i use sie as in she for love

[schadenfreudich]

language specific pronouns, but both language have both of those pronouns

[salvadorbonaparte]

heyo! since you’re “against gender asterisks” in german, how do you personally go about addressing gender neutrality in the language?

I know this isn't a perfect solution but I've been defaulting to the masculine noun like in English. I also wouldn't mind defaulting to the feminine version tbh as long as we all pick one.

I'm also in favour of gender neutral neopronouns (specifically "hen" I love that one let's normalise it please).

I'm personally just pissed off that people tell me that the asterisk is suuuper feminist because (and this is something people actually said to me) "men and women are included and the asterisk is for those transexual people". People can disagree with me but I personally as a non-binary person don't want to represented by a punctuation mark.

So many people are acting like they solved sexism and transphobia because they use "gender-neutral" language. Some time ago I had to be in a zoom meeting and everyone pat themselves on their back for being so feminist and queer friendly and then required everyone to share pronouns and threw masc presenting people out of the meeting because it was for FLINTA ("women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, transgender, and agender") and "they didn't look like they belonged".

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Terf: Define a woman.

Yeah, writer, NB here, and generally, I LOVE etymology and being both Korean and Jewish, both cultures have a thing for debating in different tactics. Jews, in particular, have a thing for arguing about words. (well, some of us–it mostly has to do with Torah reading, and meaning, but getting into that is a whole chore.).

How to answer this with queer joy:

Terf: I think words have meaning. Define a woman.

Sure. Woman is a wife man. See, the Etymology is from old English.

So, if you think about it, it's defining this person by their role, in what? Society. WIFE is not a natural construct. It's a social construction and does not refer to genitalia at all. Which means the root of the word is also a social construction.

Terf: I meant female.

Me: Oh... well then, the etymology of female is...

One who can suckle.

Male and female do not have the same etymological root, BTW. And despite what linguists argued on this one long twitter rant, yes, it is quite sexist to define someone by their breasts?

But even so, men do have the organs to *also* suckle babies.

There are historical cases of this in this article.

So technically, men can be female by the original meaning. Because the root of the word feminine and female are the same: dhe(i), to suck.

The attributes of a man in which it's described by his presentation, is attested only to the 1500's, which is long after the fall of the roman empire. The original usage was to gender nouns, which has fallen in English steadily since long before Chaucer.

Emasculate is attributed to the 1600's.

Thus, women can be men. And men can be women. It's very liquid by the original definition and actual biology. And as long as a person can suckle, they can be female.

BTW, Chinese, 女 is a person 人 who sits. Meaning she's in the house all day.

This also is a SOCIAL construct of the word. Do you find houses in NATURE?

(If they haven't fallen asleep by this time. Haha. As an Asian accused of not knowing English well, or whatever racists like to get up to, I LOVE doing this type of thing to them.)

And in fact the start of defining male v. female and woman and man as gender roles coincides with the rise of the patriarchy, and if you notice the dates, English colonialism, as they started to encounter cultures that did presentations of gender different from them. This might not have been the sole two motivating factors, but shouldn't you, "defending women's rights" think seriously on that fact? In order to suppress women, they needed to shift the meaning of those words.

Terf: But I mean people shouldn't use they.

Me:

Etymology:

See, because the original word was hie, which only referred to plural of he, not she. So they switched to a gender neutral word, thai. (Which BTW, is hilarious to me, since Thailand it's the only place to not have their plural gender system ravaged by colonialism. Yes, the sound of the words is different, but if the person is going that far into semantics, they can eat the shift of the masculine and feminine gender root to neuter too.) Anyway, the original is from Indo-European, likely meaning "this" "That" making it not gendered, but was gendered to only mean men along the way, but then was degendered

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/s%C3%B3

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sa

Singular usage is attested back to William Shakespeare according to Webster's dictionary, singular they was in usage in early Modern English.

William Shakespeare, who, BTW, had men dress up as women which is still a strong part of pantomime today.

Also, for those who look at the Bible: James, the King that enforced this rule for the stage: No women on stage, is said to have been interested romantically and sexually in men and women. Yes, the one that translated the Bible to English, the King James Bible, was attracted to men and women and had sex with both.

This is LONG before Shakespeare.

This means early court cases could recognize gender nonconforming people, thus Shakespeare, who was in the company of queers, and crossdressers was likely to have.

There is even debate about Shakespeare's sexuality as an icon who was attracted to men and women. Plus he wrote about cross dressing in his plays. As You Like it.

So yes, Queer people always existed and it was actually legally recognize way back when in the English language.

If they haven't blocked you by this time... they are likely going to go into how people shouldn't enhance biological sex and change it, and then oh, you have science on your side.

You can go into the history of how testosterone was made and how men used it to enhance their feelings of gender.

You can go into how estrogen was used and applied. And ask them if they think that estrogen is evil when it is in biological males. And if they hate the idea of birth control, "the pill" for women.

You can go over brain science in humans and how a super male is actually gay. Haha. Make their heads explode.

And by this time while you're having queer joy, they are angry and blocking you, but you've won because you have redefine a bit of semantics and science with evidence.

tldr;

Female, one who can suckle, but males can suckle too. Woman, Wife man. Singular They: first attested to Shakespeare, and the birth of Modern English. Shakespeare and King James VI who were also bi. Male and masculine in terms of presentation, rise of the patriarchy and colonization. Gay person? A super masculine man, according to nature. GNC was legally recognized by English law in 1395.

And the terf is going to have to cry and take it.

[xovvo]

English Wordsmithing Pt. 1: From PIE to Proto-Germanic

Ok, so intro post with the basics of PIE is done. Now we can actually get to making these words! Today, I'm feelin' like I want some good words for clergy/pagan priestly roles since pretty much all native English words for them have been Christianized.

There are a few PIE roots we could select (including *weh₂t-, which yielded Latin "vātēs" for an Oracle, prophetess, or seer, Odinn, and several words in English and other Germanic languages meaning "madness", "excitement", "singing", "rage", etc. It's a fun root, but not what I'm looking for right now. Maybe later.), but for this purpose, I want to explore *seh₂k-, which gave us Latin "sacer", "sanctus" and English "sacred" and English/French "saint". It has meanings of making or being holy, as well as making a pact---which is great! Perfect!

A note on Orthography: since my system can't render ḗ correctly, nor é̄, a long vowel bearing accent will be written as e̋.

Now we need to choose endings. I'm going to focus on endings that derive agent nouns from roots or verbs. The first that springs to mind is *-te̋r, which throws the stem into the ø grade. Because it derives nouns from adjectives, I could actually append this not just to the bare *seh₂k- root, but also the various infix-presents, and the factative and causative forms. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough yet with PIE word-formation, so I don't have a good idea of what happens when I need to adjust stress/ablaut on more than one syllable.

Wiktionary also claims that *-lós is also a suffix that derives agent nouns from roots/verbal nouns. Great, add it to the pile.

Lastly, I want to explore is actually three endings connected by ablaut. We have *-mén(s) > *-mën, *-mon(s) > *-mō, and *-mn̥. I'm tempted to think *-mn̥ is the original ending since *-mō is its collective/plural, and that was a common path for new words to get coined in PIE (and it's how we got the feminine gender in Post-Anatolian PIE!) and *-me̋n created in analogy, but I don't have data for that. It should be noted that *-mn̥ is neuter and both *-mō and *-me̋n are masculine. Also technically only *-me̋n and *-mō create agent nouns---but in Proto-Germanic two of the endings collapse together, and by the time we get to Old English, they're all the same ending.

as a bonus, I'm also including *seh₂klōys, which only has descendents in Anatolian languages and meant something like ‘custom, customary behavior, rule, law, requirement; rite, ceremony; privilege, right’, according to Dr. Kloekhorst, in his Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon which is great and I love it.

So, our candidate words are:

*sh₂kme̋n ~*séh₂kmō ~ *séh₂kmn̥

*sh₂klōs

*sh₂kte̋r

*seh₂klōys, for funsies

Now, the forms for the genitive and the plurals were distinct, so I'll be listing these words in tables with these four forms of the word (Nominative Singular, Nominative Plural, Genitive Singular, Genitive Plural). Because the oblique cases merge so fast (to the point where we go from PIE's fulll Nominative-Accusative-Genitive-Vocative-Ablative-Allative-Dative-Locative-Instrumental system to Old English's Nominative-Accusative-Genitive-Dative system that was already just a Nominative-Genitive system except for a few rare forms.) and I'm currently not looking to make new words out of oblique forms, we're good leaving them off.

So! our initial tables are:

Image captions coming once I figure out how to trick screanreaders into pronouncing IPA

So, for the purposes of this post, I'll be following a roughly chronological order for the sound changes, but if you're following along at home, the chronological summary of sound changes can be found on page 152 of A Linguistic History of English, Volume I: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic by Don Ringe, but it's recommended that you definitely follow along by reading from section 3.2.1.

Now, Immediately, several sound changes are relevant to our words:

Syllabic resonants prepend an epenthic "u"

Word-final bimoric ("long") -ō lengthens to trimoric ("overlong") -ô

Word-initial laryngeals are dropped before consonants, laryngeals that precede a vowel color /e/ and /ē/ and are dropped, laryngeals that follow vowels lengthen them and color /e/ and /ē/ and are dropped, AND because neither Cogwill's nor Osthoff's law apply here, laryngeals between consonants are replaced by epenthic "ǝ"

Giving us:

Once again, this image uncaptioned until I can make a reader read it comprehensibly, I'm so sorry

At this point, the biggest changes we need to handle are Grimm's and Verner's Laws.

Grimm's Law shifts the "voiceless" series of consonants to voiceless fricatives ([ p, t, k ] > [ f, þ, x(orthographic "h") ]), "voiced" obstruents to voiceless obstruents ([ b, d, g ] > [ p, t, k ]), and "voiced-aspirated" obstruents to voiced obstruents (which also had voiced fricative allophones in many positions; [ bʰ, dʰ, gʰ ] > [ b, d, g ]). Now, clusters of obstruents block the shift such that only the first obstruent shifts. Which means for our purposed, only one consonant---the final "k" in the root is affected and nothing else.

Verner's Law and is more complicated. To quote Dr. Ringe in Section 3.2.4: """ After the PIE voiceless stops had become voiceless fricatives by Grimm’s Law, they became voiced by Verner’s Law if they were not word-initial and not adjacent to a voiceless sound and the last preceding syllable nucleus was unaccented; *s was also affected, and became voiced *z under the same conditions """

Also, really only affecting the genitive singular of *-ós: *-ósyo, is apocope, wwhich actually ends up chopped back to *-ós.

So now, at this crossroads we have:

At this point, stress moves to the initial syllable (so I will no longer be marking stress) which strengthens ǝ > a, and then two sequences of changes happen at the same time:

m > n at the end of words, then Vn > V̨ word-final /n/ is lost while nasalizing the preceeding vowel, and then ę̄ > ą̄

unstressed /e/ > /o/ before wC, unstressed /e/ > /i/ everywhere else

after this, the next two big changes happen before the Late contraction of vowels in hiatus wraps everything up:

ji > i, kicking off the general loss of j between vowels except the environments *ijV > *ijV and ǝjV > *jV

After stress moved to the initial syllable the low rounded back vowels unrounded: [ o, ō, ô ] > [ a, ā, â ], then after ę̄ > ą̄ and VjV > VV, the long low vowels re-rounded, regardless of nasalization: [ ā, â ] > [ ō, ô ]

The contraction of vowels in hiatus wraps everything up. For the most part, the contraction meant /o/ and /a/ got lengthened, capping at trimoric length.

So, our words are now in their Final Proto-Germanic state:

It's almost comprehensible to screen readers!

Right?

Well, not quite. Because we have to take into account he morphological changes that were made as native speakers remodeled declensions and shit to suit how they interpreted their language to work.

Here, it's just Nom. sing. "saglas" > "saglaz"

And also the leveling of sag- and merger of -mǫ̂ + -mō endings (with light remodelling.) Now we're ready to head into the next post where we cover the Intermediate stages between Proto-Germanic and Old English, with this set:

Soon, I promise

[procrastinatingsoicanreadfanfics]

@kaesosposts left this comment, and i’m finally getting around to replying (it’s been a long week guys)

“Hihi! I’ve been reading a lot of König ‘x reader’ fics on here that use a lot of nicknames, like Maus and liebling and schatz/schatzi etc. Can you do an explanation of various pet/nicknames like those? Like what they mean and how to properly use them? And what words does the German language have that are equivalent to more dirty nicknames? :>”

Okay, so i’m going to preface this by saying that a lot of Germans have taken nicknames from other languages into their daily vocab and some call their s/o babe/baby/etc. second thing to remember - german humour is DRY. If a nickname is especially corny, we might use it to tease our s/o, but i’ll go into that a bit more later. Third thing - i don’t think i’ve ever met a german that comfortably dirty talks in their native language. It’s not really a thing. I’ll still put some stuff down below but me personally? I could never.

Small grammar guide:

There are three genders that a noun can have in german: masculine (m), feminine (f), and neutrum (s). Neutrum sadly cannot be used for gender-neutral/inclusive language. There are also no gender neutral pronouns that i know of, apart from the “respectful” pronouns (Sie, equivalent to “vous” in french or “usted/ustedes” in spanish)

the possessive pronouns in german (which fic writers would need) are mein (s, m), meiner (m) and meine (f) (mine, my). So, if you wanted to say “my heart” you’d say “mein Herz”. This is because heart in german has the article das (s) which is neutrum. So, like you would in french, the possessive pronoun is related to the noun, not the person

this makes some nicknames completely gender-inclusive: Mein Herz, mein Schatz, mein Liebling

some nicknames are gender-specific such as “meine Liebe” (f) or “mein Lieber” (m) and have to be “declinated” (like conjugated but for nouns)

anyway, german grammar can be super complicated, so just shoot me an ask in case you have any questions!! Onto nicknames.

Nicknames for s/os:

Schatz: (treasure) This is a very basic one, something that a lot of people use on a day-to-day basis with their s/o. It’s similar in its usage to babe/baby in english. “Schatzi” would be the cute version of it, but i don’t really hear it being used all that often. Schatz would be a great go-to for domestic/fluffy/longer fics, especially with pre-established relationships

Liebling: (my love, my beloved) i think this may come across as a bit formal. I don’t hear it used very often, but its not necessarily something i cringe at all too much when i do hear it. It’s more something older people use, i’d say.

mein Herz: (my heart) not a very common nickname, but me personally? Absolute sucker for it. It’s very romantic, but the usage is about as casual as in english. Rule of thumb: if the literal translation into english is kind of out of the ordinary, it probably is an out of the ordinary nickname in german as well. Great for angst to fluff fics, romantic fics, fics with lots of emotions!

Maus/Mausi/Mäuschen: (mouse, and its cuter versions). Okay… this is a nickname some people use for their siblings. Not something i’d say, but i can see it with könig (and his size…). Please, no smut. I beg.

Schnucki: (no translation) PLEASE STOP WRITING SMUT WITH THIS PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU PLEASE NO. This is not sexy dirty talk. This is one of the “i want to tease my partner’ nicknames. I have never met anyone that actually says schnucki. Don’t. Please. Just erase it from ur vocabulary/help sheets/…

Bär, Bärchen: (bear) this is a nickname mostly used for male s/os, and i honestly think it would fit König quite well. Maybe if someone wants to write a fic where the reader learns german, u could implement this (e.g. mein Bär -> my bear). Again, kind of plays into the size thing.

A few more “dirty” nicknames:

Again, i personally refuse to speak german in bed, im sorry. Neither do any of my friends/german online friends, but if you will write german dirty talk, here’s some things u can use:

Schlampe: (slut) is a word used in regards to women, works very well for derogatory dirty talk. Holds about the same weight/power of insult as its english translation. Works great imo!

Hure: (whore) this does not work as well as schlampe for some reason. Maybe that’s because it gives kind of archaic vibes?

Fotze: (cunt) if u find this translation online and think of using it -don’t. This is a heavy insult, one that could gain u a slap across the face. Do not, ever, insult a women with this word in a german speaking country if you want people to have respect for you. It’s okay if you did not realise earlier, but this won’t slide anywhere, not even in bed.

there are certainly more phrases u could use when writing german dirty talk, but i honestly can’t think of anything now. Feel free to shoot me an ask if u need anything else!

@/ all the könig writers. german mother tongue speaker here, please please please feel free to drop any german questions for könig into my inbox <3333

the german translators are… not good (which isn’t your fault!) and the nicknames you can find on google are usually pretty badly explained (again, not your fault)

feel free to drop into my inbox for just about anything (apart maybe a 300 word translation) from nicknames to smut phrases :))))

[hindisoup]

How do you feel about Hindi for it's difficulty in learning? many people say Hindi is very difficult to learn. so what is your opinion on this?

I may be a bit biased to answer this being a native Finnish speaker and having studied Russian for a number of years and dabbled in Arabic and Polish, none of which are known to be very easy languages to learn.

Compared to those and German which I also studied in the past, I find Hindi unexplainably beautiful and logical, and a very learner-friendly language too. Here are some of the reasons why:

Very few irregularities in declension and verb conjugation

In Finnish, there are 15 cases and 51 types of nouns that inflect differently (source, since I'm not making this up).

So although Hindi nouns and adjectives mostly inflect according to number and gender and there are three cases, it's honestly quite easy to internalise the basic rules for inflecting any given noun or adjective as per its position or role in the sentence. As compared to Finnish or English, the trickiest part is to learn to separate feminine and masculine nouns for which I guess there seem to be more exceptions than rules in almost any language that applies this structure.

There are six types of verbs in Finnish. In Hindi, every single infinitive is identifiable by its ending -ना. There are only a good handful of irregular verbs in Hindi and a couple of transitive verbs that conjugate as intransitive or vice versa. So the trickiest part here for me was to comprehend what does intransitive and transitive actually mean. In the beginning, I had to always add "by itself" (like नाचना, to dance by itself) or "something" (खाना, to eat something) after the verb to be able to distinguish the two. It took me maybe a good year of active studying, thinking and using the language once I realised that I'm not doing that (consciously) anymore and I have started to develop an intuition for it.

The problem for me still is, that when speaking I usually start the sentence with a subject, but I realise which verb or tense I'm using only after the fact so I very rarely manage to add the ने where I know it should have been when I reach the end of the sentence.

Regular word order and sentence structure

The basic structure in Hindi, subject-object-verb (SOV) gets you very far as a language learner. Even if you don't know all the words when reading a text, pretty soon you can identify the different parts of the sentence, and you can get a grasp of what is being said, that something did something for someone, or that something fell, ran or got broken, etc. just because the word order is often very predictable.

This applies to the use of postpositions as well, which to a Finnish speaker feels most natural. In Finnish, we also always add stuff (suffixes) at the end of the word to describe its relation to its environment or origin. And the amount and working logic of the most used Hindi postpositions (में/पर/को/से) are also quite learner-friendly and I feel like it probably will not take years to internalise them and still keep making so many mistakes (squinting at you, English).

Less is more

What I mean here, is that even if I find the basics of the grammar perhaps more simple than in some other languages, Hindi is an amazingly versatile and dynamic language, which doesn't need 15 cases to describe the same reality as let's say (again), Finnish. Most आ-ending adjectives aside, if something is ख़राब it's still ख़राब no matter what is the role, gender or number of the noun it describes - and I guess it's the same in English (but not in Finnish where it is crucial to inflect the adjective according to the declension of the noun or our world would collapse or at least we couldn't possibly understand the relation between the adjective and the noun without it).

And how I love the way a simple change in word order can add a totally another layer to what you say - like when you say कुछ कुछ instead of just कुछ, or change the position of क्या. Or the way just learning to use होना, करना and वाला opens up so many possibilities. Especially as a learner with not so immense vocabulary, by using these three words with almost any noun or adjective you happen to remember on the spot you can describe so many things and become understood, even if your grammar is still a bit shaky.

..and sometimes more is more

Somehow the fact that Hindi vocabulary is so vast and there are easily at least 3-4 synonyms for almost any noun, verb or adjective that come from various backgrounds (Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, you name it) and STILL the basic rules of declination and conjugation apply (with the exception of some loan words being completely indeclinable) and there hasn't been any need to formulate new and complex rules for them, tells me a lot about the basic ingenuity of Hindi. The language just works. The challenge for a language learner is accepting the fact that even if you've learned one word by heart, it's a certainty there are at least three others with the same meaning you just haven't heard yet.

The bottom line and why I'm still so excited about learning Hindi five years on is that I can see my own (slowish) progress and the more I realise how much there is still to learn, instead of feeling overwhelmed or discouraged by my own thick-headedness, I feel inspired and very much confident that eventually, I will be able to find the inherent logic behind whatever grammar rule this language throws at me. Unfortunately, that never happened with Russian or German for me, and I had to accept my defeat. Instead of inspiration, four years into the studies I felt rather like banging my head against a brick wall. I'm perfectly sure there's beauty and logic in those languages too, but my mind wasn't able to find it and I didn't feel a connection with those languages like I do with Hindi.

Thanks for the ask, not sure if I was able to answer your question though. Difficulty and ease might really lie in the eye of the beholder!

[fireflowersims]

Let's talk about localisation

So, now that I'm busy modding and creating again, I think it's time to address a particular annoyance of mine that generally doesn't get addressed that often: non-localized foods and global mods

Now, what do I mean by this? Well, the thing is, some people make food defaults or custom foods. This is awesome and I love them for it. However, there's one tiny issue: these foods are sometimes English-only.

This is not a problem if your game is actually in English, but if your game is in another language (like say, Dutch), you get doubled fridge menus. Not just doubled, but bilingual. This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but I personally can't stand the sight of having both "Serve Breakfast" and "Ontbijt Opdienen" show up on the same pie menu. If I see something like this, I basically have yo crack open the file to at least fix that issue. I don't care whether the actual name of the food is in Dutch or English. I just care about the "base level" of the pie menu.

Now this is pretty minor and may mot bother everyone, but another thing isn't: non-localized overrides.

If you ever looked at, say, piqwi's parenting mod, you may have seen that it is "for English games only". This is because the new content includes a text list override. The way this mod has been written is problematic for non-English users for a variety of reasons:

First, it just doesn't work. The text lists are not English only, so the EA text is still in its original language. However, the new text piqwi added has not been copied to all langs, so the game can and will throw errors if you try to use it in a non-English configuration. It's trying to find text that doesn't exist.

Second, the way the mod has been set up does not account for gendered language. This is not an issue in all languages or mods, but in the languages in which, say, nouns and adjectives reflect the gender of the one being referred to (say, Spanish and other Romance languages, German to some degree), you run into the problem that you have to choose between masculine or feminine forms of address regardless of the actual gender of your sim. "But can't you use gender neutral language instead?" You may ask. The answer: no, not in all languages. Many do allow for gender-neutral constructions, but not all.

Now like I said, the lack of gender checks may not be an issue for every single mod. But, if you have a mod that includes things like "[sim name] is tired" you need to double that string and add the appropriate gender checks into the bhav if you want to keep the option of localisation open. For example, this sentence could be translated into Spanish as "[sim name] está cansado" or "[sim name] está cansada". One's masculine and one's feminine. And no, there's no truly gender neutral options here.

Honestly, I would not have brought this up had piqwi actually made the mod compatible with non-English games. You don't have to localise to make everything compatible. You just have to make sure there's actual text in the text lists! It's just a big problem if you make your mod incompatible with non-English games by not clicking the "copy to all languages" button when adding your string! (It just copies that particular string to all languages, not the full text list).

But, that's just my opinion as a multilingual person and modder whose native language isn't English.

[adventures-in-iberia]

Multilingual Vocab Practice

Pets

(Here’s a vocab list to help you talk about your furry/scaly/feathered friends. This was my favorite list to make so far!

Note: For the most part, I have given the masculine version of each animal. In general, feminization of each animal in Spanish and French is pretty simple (see the end of the post for further explanation). However, some animals have unique words for each gender (like “cow” and “bull”). In those cases, I have listed the alternative names underneath the more commonly used word.

I also have the baby version of different animals listed directly underneath the adult version in some cases.

As usual, most adjectives are given in the masculine singular form.)

English | español | français | Deutsch

Phrases

bad dog! | ¡perro malo! | mauvais chien ! | böser Hund!

can I pet (your dog)? | puedo acariciar a tu perro? | Je peux caresser votre chien ? | Darf ich Ihren Hund streicheln?

good boy! | *¡buen perro! | *bon chien ! | Guter Hund! good girl! |* ¡buena perra! | *bonne chienne ! | gute Hündin!

good doggy! | ¡buen perrito! | bon chiot ! | Gutes Hundchen!

Interjections

miaow! | miau | miaou ! | Miau!

woof-woof! | ¡guau-guau! | ouaf-ouaf | Wau-Wau!

Nouns

animal | el animal | l’animal | das Tier

belly | el vientre | le ventre | der Bauch

bird | el pájaro | l’oiseau | der Vogel

bug | el bicho | l’insecte | der Käfer

cage | la jaula | la cage | der Käfig

canary | el canario | le canari | der Kanarienvogel

cat | **el gato | **le chat | **die Katze kitten | el gatito | le chaton | das Kätzchen

cat food | la comida para gatos | la nourriture pour chat | das Katzenfutter

chinchilla | la chinchilla | le chinchilla | die Chinchilla

claw | la garra | la griffe | die Klaue

collar | el collar (de perro) | le collier (de chien) | das (Hunde)halsband

cow | la vaca | la vache | die Kuh bull | el toro | le taureau | der Stier

dog | **el perro | **le chien | der Hund puppy | el perrito | le chiot | der Welpe

dog food | la comida para perros | la nourriture pour chien | das Hundefutter

doggy door | la puerta para perros | la porte chien | die Hundetür

ear | la oreja | l’oreille | das Ohr

feather | la pluma | la plume | die Feder

ferret | el hurón | le furet | das Frettchen

fin | la aleta | l’aileron | die Flosse

fish | ***el pez | le poisson | der Fisch

fish food | la comida para peces | la nourriture pour poissons | das Fischfutter

fish tank | la pecera | l'aquarium | das Aquarium

foot | el pie | le pied | der Fuß

friend | el amigo/la amiga | l’ami/l’amie | der Freund/die Freundin

fur | el peláje | la fourrure | das Fell

gecko | el gecko | le gecko | der gecko

gerbil | el jerbo | la gerbille | die Rennmaus

goat | el cabro | la chèvre | die Ziege

guinea pig | el conejillo de indias | le cochon d’Inde | das Meerschweinchen

hamster | el hamster | le hamster | der Hamster

hermit crab | el cangrejo ermitaño | le crabe ermite | der Einsiedlerkrebs

hoof | el casco | le sabot | der Huf

horse | el caballo | le cheval | das Pferd foal | el potro | le poulain | das Fohlen

leash | la correa | la laisse | die Leine

litterbox | la caja de arena | le bac à litière | die Katzentoilette

lizard | el lagarto | le lézard | die Eidechse

mouse | el ratón | la souris | die Maus

nose | la nariz | le nez | die Nase

owner | el dueño/la dueña | le propriétaire/la propriétaire | das Herrchen/das Frauchen

parakeet | el periquito | la perruche | der Sittich

parrot | el loro | le perroquet | der Papagei

paw | la pata | la patte | die Pfote

pet | la mascota | l'animal de compagnie | das Haustier

pig | el cerdo | le cochon | das Schwein piglet | el cerdito | le porcelet | das Ferkel

pony | el pony | le poney | das Pony

rabbit | el conejo | le lapin | der Hase bunny | el conejito | le lapin | das Häschen

rat | la rata | le rat | die Ratte

scale | la escama | l’écaille | die Schuppe

service animal | el animal de servicio | l'animal d'assistance | das Diensttier

sheep | la oveja | le mouton | das Schaf lamb | el cordero | l’agneau | das Lamm

snake | la serpiente | le serpent | die Schlange

tail | la cola | la queue | der Schweif

tarantula | la tarántula | la tarentule | die Tarantel

turtle | la tortuga | la tortue | die Schildkröte

veterinarian | el veterinario | le vétérinaire | der Tierarzt

weasel | la comadreja | la belette | das Wiesel

whisker | el bigote | la moustache | das Schnurrhaar

wing | ****el ala | l’aile | der Flügel

Verbs

to bark | ladrar | aboyer | bellen

to bathe (the dog) | bañar (al perro) | se baigner (le chien) | (den Hund) baden

to bite | morder | mordre | beißen

to crawl | gatear | ramper | kriechen

to cuddle (the animal) | acurrucarse (al animal) | câliner (l'animal) | kuscheln (das Tier)

to escape | escapar | échapper | fliehen

to feed (the pet) | alimentar (a la mascota) | nourrir (l’animal) | (das Haustier) füttern

to fetch (the stick) | traer (el palo) | chercher (le baton) | (den Stock) holen

to fly | volar | voler | fliegen

to gallop | galopar | galoper | galoppieren

to growl | gruñir | grogner | knurren

to hiss | sisear | feuler | zischen

to hop | dar saltitos | sautiller | hüpfen

to howl | aullar | hurler | heulen

to jump | saltar | sauter | springen

to kick | patear | botter | treten

to leap | brincar | bondir | springen

to lick | lamer | lécher | lecken

to love (my cat) | amar (a mi gato) | aimer (mon chat) | lieben (meine Katze)

to meow | maullar | miauler | miauen

to moo | mugir | meugler | muhen

to neigh | relinchar | hennir | wiehern

to neuter | castrar | châtrer | kastrieren

to pet | acaricar | caresser | streicheln

to play (with dogs) | jugar (con perros) | jouer (avec des chiens) | (mit Hunden) spielen

to play fetch | jugar a la pelota | jouer chercher | fetch spielen

to purr | ronronear | ronronner | schnurren

to ride (the horse) | montar (al caballo) | monter (à cheval) | (das Pferd) reiten

to run | correr | courir | rennen

to scratch | arañar | griffer | kratzen

to sing | cantar | chanter | singen

to sniff | olfatear | renifler | schnüffeln

to spay | esterilizar | stériliser | sterilisieren

to squawk | graznar | glousser | quaken

to squeak/squeal | chillar | piailler | quieksen

to swim | nadar | nager | schwimmen

to take care of (my dog) | cuidar de (mi perro) | prendre soin de (mon chien) | auf (meinen Hund) aufpassen

to train | adiestrar | entraîner | trainieren

to trot | trotar | trotter | traben

to tweet | piar | pépier | piepen

to wag (her tail) | menear (la cola) | remuer (la queue) | (mit dem Schweif) wedeln

to walk | caminar | marcher | laufen

to walk (the dog) | pasear (al perro) | promener (le chien) | (mit dem Hund) spazieren gehen

to whine | gimotear | gémir | jaulen

Adjectives

bad | malo | mauvais | schlecht

beautiful | hermoso | beau/belle | schön

big | grande | gros | groß

cute | lindo | mignon | süß

feathered | plumado | à plumes | gefiedert

fluffy | mullido | duveteux | flauschige

friendly | amigable | amical | freundlich

furry | peludo | velu | pelzig

good | bueno | bon | gut

nice | bonito | gentil | nett

scaly | escamoso | à écailles | schuppig

scary | espantoso | effrayant | unheimlich

skittish | asustadizo | capricieux | scheußlich

small | pequeño | petit | klein

smart | inteligente | intelligent | schlau

Notes:

*Note that “good boy/girl!” is not really used in Spanish and French to address dogs the way it is in English. They usually just say “good dog”.

**In Spanish, most animals can be feminized by replacing “el” with “la” (or “un” with “una”) and adding an “-a” at the end of the word, or by replacing the last vowel with “-a”. So, if you have a female cat, you can call her “una gata” instead of “un gato”. A female dog would be “una perra”.

**In French, most animals can be feminized by replacing “le” with “la” (or “un” with “une”) and adding an “-e” at the end of the word. Usually, the last consonant will have to be doubled as well. So, if you have a female cat, you can call her “une chatte” instead of “un chat”. A female dog would be “une chienne”.

**In German, most people use the feminine version of cat, “die Katze”, to refer to cats in general. To talk about a male cat (usually a tomcat) specifically, you can say “der Kater”.

***Don’t refer to someone’s pet fish as “el pescado”. That’s the word for fish that you eat. It would be like calling someone’s pet pig “pork” or someone’s pet cow “beef”.

****Like “el agua”, “el ala” is actually a feminine word that uses the article “el” simply because it sounds better. For example, if you wanted to talk about a bird’s red wing, you would refer to it as “el ala roja”.

[clarenecessities]

#i would love and index of who every one of these are tho considering tags say one is a fucking swan (via @n7punk ) don’t mind if I do!!!

*Enchanta* - mount from the original toy line, a giant swan (variously white or pink) with a bright pink mane

Starina - Serbo-Croation for antiquity/ancient times but like, definitely just Star with a fem. diminutive

Throsha - I have no idea. Throw+sha? Thrash-sha, like Sasha? Idek how to pronounce it.

Darknalia - Darkness + -alia, probably in reference to names like Talia but also a Latin suffix indicating a religious festival, eg. Bacchanalia. Personally I think they missed a golden opportunity to go with Dark’Ness

Caprellia - Capra (she-goat) + ellia.

Wingella - Wing + ella. Noticing a theme yet

Faironia - A genus of gymnosperm from the Carboniferous period, named for Dr. Muriel Fairon-Demaret. Once again, definitely a coincidence. Probably from ‘fairy’.

Nymphessa - Nymph + essa, which is grammatically absurd because that’s from Greek -ισσα, which is used to feminize masculine nouns, but it’s from νύμφη (bride), which is already feminine. Also in the 2nd century it meant clit. Honestly shocked they put this one on here. Imagine your child comes up to you and says, “My name is Nymphessa, princess of Love”. I personally would say “UHHH” and demand further information.

Crystasia - Crystal + -stasia, as in Anastasia. Not sure how crystals relate to resurrection.

*Spritina* - Spritina/Sprittina is a Twigget from the Filmation cartoon. All Twiggets had names beginning with Spr- until MOTUC made Madam Razz one & claimed her ‘real name’ is Regina Razz. I’m holding Scott Neitlich personally responsible for that one.

Eldaria - I know it looks like someone feminized ‘elder’ but I think it’s actually a feminized Eldar, Quenya for ‘elves’. At least I hope it is.

Flamera - Flame+ra. Also French for ‘flaming’, as in flaming homosexual and internet flaming. Fun!

**Felina** - She-cat and feline in several Romance languages, but significantly also the off-brand Catra from Olmec Toy’s Butterfly Woman line. Felina, the half-cat, half-woman vixen! (face turns to reveal cat face). Mattel actually bought out Olmec’s Rulers of the Sun line (the He-Man to Butterfly Woman’s POP) and incorporated it into their Origins line, so she could, very obliquely, be considered canon.

Fantalia - Probably fantasy + Talia/alia, which would make it the festival of presentation/perception

Sparkenia - Spark+enia, which is probably intended as a feminizing suffix but that only works if we read it as Sparky+-nia

Entanglia - Absolutely someone riffing on Entrapta. Just Entangle+-ia.

Xylena - a genus of moths! The swordgrass genus. From the Greek ‘wood’, as in the English ‘xylum’

*Granita* - while it is a delicious Italian dessert, Granita is also the female Rock Person/Comet Warrior. It’s just ‘granite’ with a fem. diminutive

Temptasia - Tempt+ -stasia. Seriously, who named these

Varinia - Spartacus’s wife in Howard Fast’s novel (later made into the Kubrick film). “I’m Spartacus.” You know him. I’ve seen some people claim it’s like, variegated, but I think it’s more likely a derivative of Varini, a Germanic tribe. Their name is proposed to mean ‘defenders’ or ‘living by the river’.

*canon

**maybe canon?

girl what the fuck

[arcticdementor]

Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That's very much the case with Farhad Manjoo's op-ed column in Thursday's New York Times, "The Perfect Pronoun: Singular 'They'."

…

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to "him" as "he." That's because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as "he" was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn't have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that "gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind" — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class? (In addition to calling himself a "cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad" at the opening of his column, Manjoo confesses that he "covet[s] my neighbor's Porsche," so it seems exactly right to describe him in this way.) I suspect Manjoo would say that his consciousness has been raised. Once he was blind, but now he sees. Once he slumbered, but now he's awake — or "woke."

Others have noted the religious connotations of the term. This has even been reflected in the prevalence of the formulation "Great Awokening" among sympathetic journalists seeking to explain the trend. It gets at something important. A kind of spiritual-moral madness periodically wells up and sweeps across vast swaths of the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these Great Awakenings were decidedly "low church" affairs and invariably emerged from America's plethora of Protestant sects. Today, for perhaps the first time in American history, it is a nominally secular, progressive elite that finds itself swept up into a moral fervor and eager to overturn (linguistic and other) conventions in a surge of self-certainty and self-righteousness.

…

What is it, exactly, that Manjoo finds oppressive about the use of gendered pronouns? In addition to raising a fusty objection to the ungrammatical use of a gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to single, gendered individuals, grammarians might also point out that English is far less gender-infused than many other languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages divide the world into masculine, feminine, and sometimes (but not always) neuter nouns. Masculine chairs, feminine houses, and so on, reflected in definite and indefinite articles and pronouns in every sentence ever read, written, spoken, or heard in languages across the world. Talk about a prison with little prospect for escape!

…

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That's more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn't even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which ("the gender binary") go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the writings of a number of thinkers who have analyzed, often critically but from a range of religious and political perspectives, the potential excesses of liberalism and democracy — and especially the antinomian logic of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, Michel Houellebecq, and others have reflected deeply on what might be called the phenomenology of individualism — how a society devoted at the level of principle to the liberation of the individual from constraints can easily produce citizens who continually feel themselves to be newly enslaved and in need of ever new and more radical forms of liberation.

…

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man's love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian's love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can't just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we're treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that's changed is the object of rebellion.

Will Manjoo's call for liberation from the tyranny of the gender binary catch on in the way that the push for same-sex marriage did before it? I have no idea. What I do know is that, whatever happens, it's likely to be followed by another undoubtedly very different crusade in the name of individual freedom, and then another, and another, as our society (and others like it) continues to work through the logic of its devotion to the principle of individualism.

The only thing that could halt the process is the rejection of that principle altogether.

[aeide-thea]

the thing that's frustrating about trying to read german is that i'm so used to being able to precisely identify what's going on with each word in a sentence, and how all the parts stand in relation to each other, and i'm just not familiar enough with this language to do it yet! grr, argh, &c.

Erster Teil

Eine Art Einleitung

have we talked yet about how irritating it is that feminine forms in this language are so often so fucking vestigial? i didn't get tripped up by it here, but this whole ‘how would you like some words without any clarifying endings?’ thing is just. deeply offensive to my sense of order. anyway. ‘First Part. A sort of introduction.’

I

Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise nichts hervorgeht

so... ‘From which notable manner nothing results’? or ‘develops,’ or ‘emerges,’ or whatever you like for hervorgehen; i'm increasingly resenting having to try and select the correct nuance in a vacuum! also i didn't know you could use woraus as a determiner [q.v. usage #11, here], but that seems to be what's happening here? you learn something new every day.

the ~Wortstellung~ also isn't quite clear to me... or rather, it's clear from it that ‘Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise’ constitutes a single noun-phrase, and that the verb is behaving as if this were a dependent clause... which didn't quite make sense to me until i typed those last two words, because of course, it isn't an independent clause, is it? in the sense that while it may not have an explicit antecedent, it's also very much a phrasal clause, not a full sentence that stands on its own. so i guess that does make sense after all.

moving on to the first Actual Sentence, and discarding a number of ~humorously self-deprecating~ remarks about how long it has taken us to arrive there—

Über dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum; es wanderte ostwärts, einem über Rußland lagernden Maximum zu, und verriet noch nicht die Neigung, diesem nördlich auszuweichen.

‘Over the Atlantic stood a barometric minimum; it moved eastwards, to a maximum settling over Russia’—i think the dangling zu here is actually a separable prefix belonging to wanderte, but i don't quite understand the comma after ostwärts or why einem... Maximum is in the dative, so i might be construing this all entirely wrongly! but: ‘it drifted eastwards, reaching a maximum where it settled over Russia, and did not yet betray the tendency to divert away from this’—what is ‘this,’ though? the Maximum?—‘to the north.' the definite article before Neigung is a little strange in english—i'd expect ‘a,’ or ‘its,’ or even ‘any,’ but maybe this is just an idiosyncrasy of the language? other than that—while i feel more than a little like a foal taking its wobbling, stilted first steps—the rest all seems more or less okay, as far as it goes...

okay. second sentence!

Die Isothermen und Isotheren taten ihre Schuldigkeit. Die Lufttemperatur stand in einem ordnungsgemäßen Verhältnis zur mittleren Jahrestemperatur, zur Temperatur des kältesten wie des wärmsten Monats und zur aperiodischen monatlichen Temperaturschwankung.

...i love (““love””) when german uses very precise, very esoteric technical terms very casually, as if they weren't deeply jarring to encounter in a scene-setting paragraph of a novel! i mean, don't let me pretend i'm knowledgeable enough to understand style or tone yet, but. ‘The isotherms and isotheres did their duty. The air temperature stood in a proper relation’—god, ordnungsgemäß is my new favorite word maybe, there's just something about compressing ‘in accordance with the regulations’ into a single adjective that... i don't know, it just feels like there's a lot of iceberg below the surface there. anyway—‘to the average yearly temperature; to the temperature of the coldest, as of the warmest, month; and to the acyclic monthly temperature variation.’ wow, this is riveting. sure am feeling glad i picked this novel to work laboriously through!

Der Auf- und Untergang der Sonne, des Mondes, der Lichtwechsel des Mondes, der Venus, des Saturnringes und viele andere bedeutsame Erscheinungen entsprachen ihrer Voraussage in den astronomischen Jahrbüchern.

‘The rise and fall of the sun, of the moon, the changing phases’—lit. ‘the light-shifting,’ but i get the impression this is all supposed to be boringly technical rather than poetic so it seems like smoothing it out auf englisch is the way to go?—‘of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other important phenomena corresponded to their forecast in the astronomical almanacs.’

at this juncture we find our hero increasingly missing the readings A— came up with, and thinking glumly, maybe i should've tried kant or something, instead of this enormous Midcentury Modernist Novel... but then, i haven't even read a paragraph yet; there's no english classic i'd be giving up on this quickly. courage, dear heart, & onwards—

Der Wasserdampf in der Luft hatte seine höchste Spannkraft, und die Feuchtigkeit der Luft war gering. Mit einem Wort, das das Tatsächliche recht gut bezeichnet, wenn es auch etwas altmodisch ist: Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres 1913.

‘The water vapor in the air had its highest’—i don't really understand Spannkraft here. ‘concentration,’ maybe? ‘saturation’? or actually, let's try: ‘pressure, and the humidity of the air was slight.’ ...okay, here's a dumb science question: if there's a lot of moisture in the air, wouldn't that translate to high humidity, not low? color me confused. anyway: ‘In a word (which describes the actuality quite well, although it is also a little out of fashion): it was a beautiful August day in the year 1913.’

i! hate! having to look up so many words! this is like greek all over again, & without any beaux yeux to gaze upon my efforts approvingly, even—not to disparage the yeux of those of you who have been kind enough to engage with my deutschposting, which i am sure are perfectly beaux! but you know. ughhhhhhh. okay. paragraph zwei:

Autos schossen aus schmalen, tiefen Straßen in die Seichtigkeit heller Plätze. Fußgängerdunkelheit bildete wolkige Schnüre. Wo kräftigere Striche der Geschwindigkeit quer durch ihre lockere Eile fuhren, verdickten sie sich, rieselten nachher rascher und hatten nach wenigen Schwingungen wieder ihren gleichmäßigen Puls.

‘Cars’—or no, that isn't right, is it; we're in 1913 still, it ought to be ‘Automobiles darted down narrow’—wow, tief is remarkably hard to translate here! streets aren't ‘deep,’ so i imagine the image is one of overhung dimness... maybe ‘plunging streets in the shallowness of bright’—places? squares? spaces? when in doubt, go generic: ‘places. Pedestrian gloom formed cloudy strings.’ okay, okay, i'm sorry i was catty about how unpoetic i found the previous paragraph—peccavi, domine, miserere mei! ‘Where bolder streaks of speed drove straight through their nonchalant haste, they clotted, subsequently trickled faster, and had, after some oscillations, their regular pulse once more.’

an odd place to stop, that—mid-paragraph, even!—but i think that's all the focus i can muster for the night. stay tuned and idk, maybe we'll meet some characters eventually? looking back on what little i have so far, i can at least see that in a language i read more fluently i might find it charming, which goes some way towards my finding it charming in this one...

[about-german]

Some interesting facts about German language

German can be found all over the world

According to Wikipedia, German is the 11th most widely spoken language in the world, with about 1.4% of the population being German-speaking. Mandarin takes first place and English comes in third.

English and German are sister languages

Like English and Dutch, German forms part of the West Germanic languages. When English speakers learn German, they will have the consolation of finding a lot of words that are similar in both languages. Be careful though, there are some sneaky words that look and sound the same but have totally different meanings. The German word ‘gift’ for example, means poison, nothing like the present or blessing it is used to describe in English.

German has some bizarre and hilarious proverbs

Some of our favourites German proverbs are Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei (everything has an end, only sausage has two), Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof (I only understand train station) whose English counterpart would be ‘It’s all Greek to me’ and the most delightful saying, Das ist nicht dein Bier! (that is not your beer!) which means ‘none of your business!’

All nouns are capitalised

If you ever pick up a German newspaper, you might be confused to see large bodies of texts permeated by long words written in capital letters. That’s because all nouns in German are written with capital letters and no, it’s not optional.

German is the ‘language of the writers and thinkers’

German has often been referred to as the language of the Dichter und Denkeror the writers and thinkers. For example, the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – author of the epic Faust – is considered one of Germany’s greatest national treasures. Other notable Teutonic thinkers are Kant, Marx, Humboldt and Nietzsche.

German boasts words that simply don’t exist in English

One of the best features of the German language is its knack for creating new, hyper-specific words that express life more perfectly than any English word ever could. For example, Schadenfreude describes the happiness derived from somebody else’s misfortune, injury or pain. Torschlusspanik perfectly sums up the fear which creeps in with age and a realisation that time is slipping away, evoking a sense of urgency to achieve or do something before it’s too late. Click here to discover more of these wonderful German words.

German loves compound nouns

If you see a long scary German word don’t panic because it can probably be broken down into smaller, common nouns. German has a habit of building new words from existing words for example the word hand, which is the same word in English, is joined to the German word Schuhe (shoes) to form the noun Handschuhe, meaning ‘hand shoes’ or gloves in English.

It’s official, not just in Germany

Besides Germany, German is the official language of both Austria and Liechtenstein and one of the official languages in Switzerland and Luxembourg, making it the most spoken native language in the European Union

Dialect changes drastically depending on where you are

Wherever you go in Germany, you’ll be faced with a specific dialect that your high school German class probably hasn’t prepared you for. The Bavarian accent and dialect for example, has even been joked about as the ‘German that even Germany doesn’t understand’.

Every noun has a gender

There are three genders for German nouns; masculine, feminine and neutral. Although at first glance, gender in German doesn’t seem to follow much logic because it doesn’t necessarily comply with the gender of the object it is naming, so it’s purely grammatical. Mark Twain famously said of the German language: ‘In German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip does’.

The longest word in the world

To continue with the previous point, the German language once had the 63-letter word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz in its arsenal. However, this word, meaning ‘the law concerning the delegation of duties for the supervision of cattle marking and the labelling of beef’ was considered too much of a mouthful even for German bureaucrats, and the word is now obsolete.

#language #german #interesting facts

[3oey]

Important addition to this post: i love that (at least as a german speaker) there is some ambiguity in assigning a gender to english nouns and you get into heated fights with your friends about the correct gendered article of words that aren't actually gendered in the first place.

In most cases you're good with using the gender of the translated word: it's die Stadt (feminine) so it's die City. Easy, makes sense. But it doesn't work all the time.

Like for the word "mood" i've heard people use both masculine (der) and feminine (die) articles. Der Mood. Die Mood. And neither of them sounds wrong! (I personally say der Mood but i can't explain why. It just sounds better)

The words "song" and "track" are both masculine even though the german translation das Lied is neuter.

For the word "squad" I've heard people use all three different articles and honestly? I can't even say which one sounds best?? They all make sense in some way and i even use them interchangeably because i can't decide either

What bugs me the most is the word "journey". People say die Journey because it's die Reise, yeah i get where they are coming from. But der Journey just sounds so much better and more right to me 😭

my favourite thing about not being a native english speaker is using english words while speaking in my native language but also conjugating/declining them with that language's grammar rules

[miraculous-french-learning]

Getting started: A masterpost of French basics

Bonjour, mes chers miraculeurs! Are you interested in learning French, but you’ve never spoken a lick of it? Well then you’re in luck because this post has been specially made for you!

In this masterpost, you will be introduced to 4 concepts that you will need to start forming basic sentences in French. Included in it will be my basic rundowns, the nitty-gritty of what you need to know, along with links to videos and other resources that will explain things more in-depth. I highly advise looking through all the links, as there is a lot of nuance that my quick charts will not explain. So, those 4 concepts are:

Personal pronouns

Regular “-er” verbs

The verbs “être” and “avoir”

Definite and indefinite articles

Note that this post is subject to be edited if I decide that I want to further elaborate on anything, add more links and resources, or add more concepts.

Alors, commençons! So, let’s begin!

1. Personal pronouns

Before we can even look at verbs, we need to know our personal pronouns. In English, these would be things like I, you, he, she, we, & they.

In French, we have:

je - I tu - you (informal, singular) il/elle/on - he/she/one nous - we vous - you (formal or plural) ils/elles - they

Here is a video that explains the use of each of these.

Pay particular attention to the differentiation between tu and vous, as this is something that flat-out does not exist in modern English. If you ever took a foreign language class in school for another Romance or perhaps a Germanic language, you may already be familiar with the concept. It’s quite common, in fact, and is called the T-V distinction. Old and Middle English even used it to have it an extent! That’s your fun fact for the day.

One thing that this video does not discuss fully is the difference in usage between ils and elles to mean they. It says that “There are two words for they, since the things you’re referring to could be masculine or feminine.” There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that.

Let’s imagine a room full of 20 women. To refer to all of them, you would use elles, because all of them are feminine. If, however, one man walks in, you would now use ils to refer to the entire group. Elles can only be used when all things in the group are feminine!

This goes for non-humans as well. All nouns have grammatical gender, and it works the same way if you’re referring to a bunch of feminine nouns with one masculine noun mixed in. Some examples:

La coccinelle (the ladybug, feminine) et le chat (the cat, masculine), ils sont génials! (they are amazing!)

La table��(the table, feminine) et la chaise (the chair, feminine), elles sont en bois. (they are wooden.)

Keep this in mind, as the same rules apply in many other aspects of grammar. But now that you know your personal pronouns, we can move on to the next concept!

2. Regular “-er” verbs

Regular “-er” verbs are the most common type of verbs in French. They are called regular because the conjugation follows a regular pattern no matter the verb. They’re called regular “-er” verbs because, in their infinitive form, they end in the letters “-er”.

Some examples of regular “-er” verbs are:

parler - to talk manger - to eat transformer - to transform aimer - to like or to love donner - to give jouer - to play

I’ll leave this video to do most of the explaining here, as it covers basically everything you need to know about conjugating regular “-er” verbs in the present tense. I really don’t have anything to add here, other than a little chart I made for you because I couldn’t find any online that had this two column layout, which is personally what I prefer because it’s what I was taught with and the setup makes sense, with the rows being 1st person, 2nd person, then 3rd person, and the columns being singular and plural.

There’s really no shortcut to learning conjugations, unfortunately. It’s really just a matter of drilling it over and over and over until it becomes second nature. This will take a while, especially as you’re trying to memorize a few irregular verbs as well… (this is a transition oooooh foreshadowing)

3. The verbs “être” and “avoir”

These verbs are your lifeline. Meet them, know them, befriend them, love them. They are the two main auxiliary verbs in French, and their present tense forms are used to form the perfect past tense, or passé composé. We’re not touching the passé composé here, but if you plan on continuing learning French, that lesson isn’t terribly far down the road.

Unfortunately, être and avoir are irregular verbs, meaning their conjugations don’t follow a nice pattern like our friends, the regular “-er” verbs up there. There is no rhyme or reason to their conjugation, and you have to memorize that whole chart for both of them. Except this time, each chart is only for one verb, not hundreds.

Here are your conjugation charts:

And a video demonstrating the pronunciation of the conjugations of être and avoir. 

And I hate to be the breaker of bad news, but many of the most common verbs are also irregular. English is like this as well, as are many languages, in fact, as common verbs tend to stay erratic due to their frequency of use. So I’ve included a blank conjugation chart for you as well for you to have fun drilling with.

Or just grab a notebook and make your own chart and fill it out again and again and again until you can recite your conjugations in your sleep. Trust me on this. Test yourself by trying to fill it out without any reference. Try not to look at a chart when forming sentences. You see somebody walking by with a dog? Think of how you would say “He has a dog” in French without looking at the avoir chart. Try to exercise your brain on a daily basis like this, try to think simple sentences in French once you get the hang of a few verbs and nouns. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d be doing in a classroom, and it might suck at first because memorization isn’t exactly fun, but if you keep at it for long enough I promise that it will pay off.

Anyhow, after that little rant about “practice makes perfect” and what have you, let’s move on to the last concept. It’ll be shorter, I promise.

4. Definite and Indefinite articles

“What the heck is an article?” you may ask. My answer is that you just used both a definite and indefinite article in your question. An article is a part of speech that introduces a noun. The definite article in English is “the”, and the indefinite articles are “a” and “an”. What’s the difference? It’s exactly as their names say, “the” denotes a specific example of the noun. “A” or “an” denotes just any example of the noun.

If your friend has a bushel of apples, you can ask them for “an apple,” meaning any apple from the bushel. You might see a green apple and begin talking about it with your friend because you are such conversationalists, and then ask for “the apple,” implying the specific apple you were just talking about.

The definite articles in French are:

le - singular masculine la - singular feminine l’ - singular before a vowel sound les - plural, masculine or feminine

I will send you with Pascal here to explain further, although he goes into a bit about voiced and unvoiced Hs a bit more than I think necessary.

The indefinite articles in French are:

un - singular masculine une - singular feminine des - plural, masculine or feminine

Again, here’s Pascal, and again, he goes into a bit more complex things at around the 5:30 mark. For our purposes today, I’d skip the rest of the video after that, it’s more advanced than just learning the bare essentials.

I don’t have much more to say on the topic other than 1) start memorizing nouns’ genders and 2) note that French requires articles in a lot of places that English does not. Pascal gives the example of des voitures, which is the equivalent of just saying “cars” in English. English doesn’t require and article in this case, though you could say “some cars” if you felt like it and it would be the same. This is just a little something to keep in the back of your mind as you continue your learning.

So you made it to the end of this post. Félicitations! Congratulations! You can now form basic sentences, even if they are admittedly very simple. But the foundations have been set and now you can begin building on that, hopefully until you have a lovely sculpture of the French language dancing in your head, or on pages, or in the air. You should be proud of that! It’s really quite an accomplishment, even if it doesn’t seem like much. You took the first step in learning a new language, and that can be a very daunting task. Give yourself a pat on the back for that.

Anyway, I hope I can help you build up your beautiful lingual sculptures by providing vocabulary lists and general discussion of the language. Feel free to ask any questions you may have. I’m here to help and love doing so. And I’m Cool and Down With The Kids and am just as much of a nerd for this show as you are. And don’t forget to drill your conjugation charts! :p

[chopping-onions]

Let me look up the definition... My problem with Greg’s understanding of language

This morning I stumbled upon Onision disrespecting LaineyBot video. Here, Greg is trying to explain how language and words work. I have a problem with the way he claims using literal definitions is showing respect for the language you are speaking.

I’m not sure how many of you in this community are from Europe, but here (at least in my country and this part of the continent), we have high schools with special curriculums. We have medical schools, technical schools and so on.

The school I went to is a gymnasium, where students choose from  4 different fields of curriculum focus: general, linguistics and social sciences, informatics, and mathematics. The curriculum which I picked and finished is linguistic and social sciences, which means that my main focus for 4 years has been language. I’ve studied my native language, English, Latin, and German.

A gymnasium education takes four years following a compulsory eight or nine-year elementary education and ending with a final aptitude test called Matura. In these countries, the final test is standardized at the state level and can serve as an entrance qualification for universities. With the final test, we also have to pick one subject, write and defend our own thesis to graduate.

Why am I explaining this? Because I’ve spent four years studying language and social sciences, my finishing paper was about language and literature and I’ve finished my education with high grades.

As a result, it really pisses me off when Cucky McFucky decides to play the all-knowing here because he has no fucking clue how language works.

The first thing we were taught is: LANGUAGE IS A LIVING, CHANGING MATTER. And I don’t think you need to study language excessively to know that. Words evolve and they change their meanings all the time. I’d really love to see Onion boy trying to talk to Shakespeare because for the love of God the only way to respect your language is to blindly follow dictionaries.

I won’t be addressing how clueless he is about biology and social dynamics here because that is a whole other story.

But here we go:

First, what is language?

Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance, and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.

(I am aware that Wikipedia is not always the most reliable source, but on this particular subject, it’ll have to do. I could list my sources here and even retype paragraphs and paragraphs of official literature that supports these statements but it would be pointless considering that the literature would be unavailable to most people reading this. And if anyone is interested in more in-depth reading on the subject I’m sure you can find all of it online in the languages of your choosing.)

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur.

But to notice how language changes you don’t have to study ancient languages, just pick an older person to talk to. Talk to your grandmother- chances are she is using words and phrases which you never use, or she uses those words differently than any person your age. If you don’t really feel like talking to old people go ahead and watch an 80′s movie or open an older book.

See the difference? Those changes don’t seem like a big deal, but they pile up and in about hundred years a language gets a complete makeover.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

But even if we disregard this phenomenon, language is not a simple set of rules. It consists of many layers. American English is a great example of that. A person born and raised in Texas uses language quite differently than a person born and raised in California. Things get even more diverse when we include class differences, levels of education, and age. These differences within a language are called dialects, sociolects, and idiolects.

In this particular video, Greg focuses on the definition of male and female.

He lists google definition of female:

femaleˈfiːmeɪl/

adjective

1.of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes." a herd of female deer"

noun

1.a female person, animal, or plant.

But let’s look at other definitions (I personally prefer Merriam-Webster dictionary).

Definition of female

1a (1): of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs

(2) : having or producing only pistils or pistillate flowers

b: made up of usually adult members of the female sex: consisting of

females

c: characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex: exhibiting

femaleness

d: designed for or typically used by girls or women

e: engaged in or exercised by girls or women

2: having some quality (such as small size or delicacy of sound) associated with the female sex

3: designed with a hollow or groove into which a corresponding male part fits

Oxford dictionary

female

1. Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

1.1 Relating to or characteristic of women or female animals.

1.2 (of a plant or flower) having a pistil but no stamens.

1.3 (of parts of machinery, fittings, etc.) manufactured hollow so that a corresponding male part can be inserted.

Wiktionary

female (not comparable)

Belonging to the sex which typically produces eggs and/or, in mammals, has XX chromosomes.

Belonging to the feminine gender (social category).

(grammar, less common than 'feminine') Feminine; of the feminine grammatical gender.

(figuratively) Having an internal socket, as in a connector or pipe fitting.

This is how these four dictionaries define a female. Google, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, and Wiktionary all give slightly different definitions of a female. How can that be? Ever noticed how when you open an actual dictionary there is more than one definition listed?

The thing is a female (and it’s not the only example of how sometimes a simple little definition is not enough) is quite a broad concept. There are both biological and social connotations tied to it. And guess which is easier to define?

How does Greg identify males and females? Does he ask each and every person he meets about their ability to produce offsprings? What about people who are infertile?  What about people who have certain chromosome variations? Women who can grow beards and men who have more pronounced breasts? How do they fit into this neat little definition?

Even if we stick to the binary division of only two sexes and genders, it is impossible to go strictly by biological definition in everyday life. I’m not saying we should completely ignore biological definition, but there is a reason biological definition is not the only one.

And what really annoys me is how he screams SCIENCE, even tho three seconds earlier he didn’t even know what’s spermatozoa.

Just because you google the fucking definition doesn’t mean you understand science, Greg. Science is one of those pesky little things where you really need to go in-depth to understand shit, Greg. People study biology for years, get specializations in specific fields, Greg. Believe it or not, actual people of science dedicate their entire lives to specific fields just to gain an actual, deeper understanding of how shit works. Science is not two seconds of googling it takes you to find whatever definition you like the best, Greg. If any of my professors heard this man talk on any subject whatsoever they’d probably return him to preschool.I swear to god, I’ve met thirteen-year-olds who are better educated and have more understanding of how stuff works than him.

And I’m a bit lost here, now. He takes the biological definition to define males and females. Then he jumps to defining sexuality. He gives definitions which are directly tied to sex. If infertile people aren’t male nor female, does that mean they have no sexuality?

This is where I’m finishing this video, I can’t bear to listen to this obnoxious man any longer. 

So, to all you trans ladies and gentlemen out there, don’t listen to this giant manchild. Your gender and sexuality are valid, you are respected, you don’t deserve to listen to this sort of bullshit.

Sorry for this unnecessary rant, but it annoys me when a person with no actual understanding of a matter tries to lecture others about it. 

[fandomsandfeminism]

Ever since President Annoying Orange von GrabbyHands came into office, there’s been a lot of chatter about Orwell, and 1984, and whether this or that is Orwellian. Amazon was actually sold out of copies of 1984 for a few days after Kellyanne Conway said that falsehoods being spread by the administration were “Alternative Facts.”

So today I want to talk about 1984, what “Orwellian” actually means, and how Orwell explores the impact of language on thought and dissent with NewSpeak in his novel. And, at the end, we will look at how these concepts do and don’t apply to today’s political climate

Transcript below:

Quick warning: This video is going to be...political. This is to be expected when discussing Orwell, but I think it bears saying. This will be a political video, and if you aren’t sure which way my politics lean right now, you are about to find out. I will try to keep my rage to a reasonable level, but this could get...kinda ranty. So...you’ve been warned.  Ok.So.Ever since President Annoying Orange von GrabbyHands came into office, there’s been a lot of chatter about Orwell, and 1984, and whether this or that is Orwellian. Amazon was actually sold out of copies of 1984 for a few days after Kellyanne Conway said that falsehoods being spread by the administration were “Alternative Facts.”So today I want to talk about 1984, what “Orwellian” actually means, and how Orwell explores the impact of language on thought and dissent with NewSpeak in his novel. And, at the end, we will look at how these concepts do and don’t apply to today’s political climate -

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell was born June 25th 1903. He was an English novelist who was particularly concerned with social injustice, totalitarianism, and was an outspoken advocate in favor of democratic socialism. My kinda guy. His most famous works are his allegorical novella, Animal Farm, which follows the rise and corruption of Stalinist Russia as told through farm animals, and 1984, our focus for today.  

I want to give a quick shout out to another dystopian novel that I love, and that is often taught as a pair with 1984. Huxley’s novel “Brave  New World” is an amazing book that focuses on how a dystopian government will seek to control the populace through the cultivation of apathy. Through escapism and drugs, sex and a carefully cultivated caste system, a totalitarian regime can carry on with little to no violence on its part simply because the citizens are too unaware to do anything about it. Huxley feared that the things we love will destroy us because we won’t care enough to stop them.

Orwell though? Orwell’s warning of the future is far more brutal- the things we fear will destroy us because when sufficiently powerful, they can not be stopped.

1984 is a dystopian novel published in 1949 that explores the extreme totalitarian regime of Oceania, specifically the province of Airstrip One (Formerly Great Britain) and the protagonist, Winston Smith’s failed attempt at breaking free of the grip of the government. The government is characterized by its hyper-surveillance, the dictator figure of Big Brother, the idea of thoughtcrime, the two minutes of hate where party members must express their hatred of the party enemies loudly and publically every day, the repeated revision of history in the government’s favor, and the repression, aggression, and anxiety that pervades such a political atmosphere.

Many aspects of the novel are based on the totalitarian governments that Orwell was familiar with. The revision of history for example, is a reference to Soviet Russia. There are many examples of people being seen clearly in official photographs of Soviet Russia, and later being removed when they fell out of favor with Stalin. - So what does Orwellian mean? It’s not just a synonym for dictatorial or authoritarian, though you’ll see people use it that way. Orwellian is meant to be more specific. Some characteristics of a situation  or government that are Orwellian include: Extreme and persistent government surveillance The emphasis on loyalty to the state above all else, even family. The advocation for “doublethink” where citizens must accept obvious contradictions-  like giving up liberties to achieve true freedom State revision of history The use of a contradictory euphemism to describe the function of an agency- the Ministry of Peace is responsible for the military and war for example The manipulation of language for the purpose of controlling the people

And this brings me to NewSpeak and Language. Within 1984, the government is working to create a new official state language- NewSpeak. The idea behind NewSpeak, on the surface, is fairly reasonable. English, as a language, is highly inefficient. We have many synonyms with many shades of connotation after all. So on the surface, NewSpeak aims at eliminating all redundancy. You don’t need the words phenomenal, wonderful, amazing, fantastic, and exceptional when just Good will do. And on that same note, you don’t need the words dreadful, terrible, horrible, awful, and horrendous when UnGood will do. Want to show emphasis? DoubleUnGood. Need even more emphasis? DoublePlus Ungood. Simple.

But the true purpose behind NewSpeak is far more sinister. The book says “ "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

By controlling the way people talk, the government can control the way people think. It’s impossible to dissent or rebel if the words you need to dissent or rebel don’t exist. -

And while that sounds pretty far fetched, there really is some evidence that language can shape the way we think. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers, for example. Traditionally, Japan didn’t have separate words for blue and green, and didn’t develop a distinction between the two colors until after world war 2. Some aboriginal languages in Australia don’t have words for right and left- all directions are described in terms of North, south, East, and West. Many languages gender nouns and this affects the way native speakers will describe those objects. If you were asked to describe a "key" —a masculine word in German and a feminine word in Spanish — the German speakers are more likely to use words like "hard," "jagged," or "metal,"; while Spanish speakers are more likely to say "golden," "little," "lovely," and "shiny," The languages we speak seem to affect the way we see the world.

Even on a more basic note, you can’t identify with a group of people if there is no word to describe that group. The creation and definition of labels is important to community building. Create the word, make it possible to talk about that group.

Even something as simple as pushing a certain phrase or alternative name can affect how people feel about something. The current rise in stories of people who LOVE the Affordable Care Act, but HATE ObamaCare, failing to realize they are the same thing, is evidence of that.

Orwell uses this idea- that language itself shapes the kind of thoughts we can have, to suggest that if a government can control language, they can control the thoughts of the citizens. Going beyond even the most aggressive propaganda, leaving citizens unable to rebel because no thought of rebellion is possible because no word for rebellion exists. - Now.

Not everything that a politician does that you dislike is “Orwellian.” Trump’s executive order about banning immigrants from predominantly islamic countries and the mexican border wall are awful, but not Orwellian. When Betsy god damn Devos can stand in front of congress and admit to not knowing a god damn thing about public education, pedagogy, or current educational policy and still become the secretary of education: Not particularly Orwellian, but definitely incompetent and terrifying and infuriating. Not Orwellian. Millions of people losing their healthcare if the Affordable Care Act is gutted is heartless and evil, but not Orwellian. Trump having globe spanning conflicts of interest, when people made Jimmy Carter sell his goddamn peanut farm for be president, but apparently we’re just going to sit here and let Trump run his billion dollar businesses because who the hell cares and where are his tax returns?- ridiculously hypocritical and infuriating, but not Orwellian.

But-Thinking about Putting an Anti-Vaxxer in charge of the Vaccine Safety Committee? That’s Pretty Orwellian. Insisting again and again that his inauguration crowds were huge and shouting down any evidence that says otherwise as “fake news” and pressuring the park service to find photos that support his version of events- That’s Orwellian. When are people renaming Neo-Nazis as “the Alt Right”: Kinda Orwellian. When the House Science Committee chairman says that people should get their facts from the administration, and not the news….Orwellian. When Trump says he has “drained the swamp” and gotten money out of politics, and his appointed cabinet is richer than ⅓ of America combined? That’s some DoublePlus UnGood DoubleThink. And it makes me UnBellyFeel.

1984 is a bleak vision of the future, a future that suggests that resistance is futile if the government gains so much control that it can literally brainwash citizens.

And here is where I’m going to get...extra political. I know that the first two weeks and counting of SprayTan McBabyPaws’s presidency has been alarming and stressful for many, myself included. But we are not Airstrip 1. We are not Oceania. We do not have Big Brother looming over us, ever vigilant for ThoughtCrime. We are in a frightening situation as a country right now, but we will persist if we stick together. We preserve the past. We fight for what is true. We resist propaganda and fear mongering, revisionist history and scapegoating. We can’t allow ourselves to ever believe that 2 and 2 make 5 just because the party says so, we can’t allow ourselves to fall into fatigue and complacency.

We can do this. We can do this together. Call representatives. Go to marches. Speak out.

Stay strong.

Thank you for watching this video. I’ll see yall down in the comments. As always, if you’ve enjoyed listening to this queer millennial feminist with a BA in English, feel free to subscribe.