Hannah O wrote:Talking of foreign Scrabble, I did try to get Russian Scrabble but the darned foreign language bookshop had sold out! With French accents, it's all about the é- if you say nous avons pensé it means "we thought", but if you say nous avons pense it sort of means "we have (I) think", since pense is first-person present, as in je pense.
In martial arts, white belt to brown belt is measured in "kyu", whereas black belt levels are measured in "dan", so if you're a 6th dan not even the most hardcore people will want to mess with you, but if you're 6th kyu, people would still take you on. By the way, if you can come up with what colour belt 6th kyu is, you get points! Also, in some karate styles, there's "ho", which is used to describe your provisional black belt "shodan ho", where "sho" means first. Also, it can be halfway to a belt- if you're 7th kyu ho, you are halfway to your orange belt, and in the karate I do you get an orange tip put onto your yellow belt to signify it.
I find English a bit restrictive in regards to creative writing and poetry- it's a SVO language, or a subject verb object language. Take a sentence like "I hit Boris", rearrange it and you get "Boris hit me", completely different meaning. In Russian (or even Latin! I don't know the exact details for German) where cases and conjugations dictate the language, as long as you stick the right ending on each word, you can use whatever crazy word order you want, like "me Boris hit" or "hit me Boris" and a Russian speaker will understand completely that Boris hit you, even if you put the verb first. In Latin poetry like Ovid, he threw in his verbs all over the place, even deferring them a line or two for scansion's sake and effect.
I think I did a Latin example of this on my blog (he blog is in French which complicates things even more!) I'll have found it by the time I have finished the post.
First thing, "nous avons pense" isn't really French, "nous avons, je pense" isn't great either because avoir needs an object, go for "nous l'avons, je pense" and I'm with you on that one. Most Romance languages drop the personal pronouns (I, you, he, etc) but French doesn't. I think this might be because it would be enormously ambiguous, as French takes all the Latin words, and whatever the ending of the word, it becomes and -e in French, or more rarely just nothing at all. The four Latin conjugations become three, with -are becoming -er (sometimes -ar in Old French), -ire become -ir and -ēre and -ere merge into one.
Take aimer (Latin, amare; Old French, amer)
j'aime
tu aimes
il aime
nous aimons
vous aimez
ils aiment
If you remove the pronouns and the silent letters, roughly speaking you get
aime
aime
aime
aimon
aimez
aime
So four of the six are homophones. Plus aimons and aimez are the imperative forms (aimons nos mères - let's love our mothers (yes it sounds weird ok)). So without the pronouns, you ended up with enormous ambiguity. The only ones where they drop the pronouns regularly are vais (no real homophones) and suis (a couple of homophones, not a bad one for puns this).
I do Spanish, and they do drop the pronouns which can sometimes cause confusion. Basically, for hablo and habló the stress is different, but if you miss that it changes from I speak to he spoke. The imperative hable is also exactly the same as the third person singular indicative, so if you add a pronoun it helps things a bit:
Hable francés (could be 'he speaks French' or just 'speak French')
Anyway, I suppose I should find that Latin quote.
Canis felem mordet
Canem feles mordet
NB this could be inaccurate because I did it myself using a guide-book. Basically, canis and feles are the nominative cases, so they are the subject (doing the biting) while the other two are accusative cases. I'd better stop now, I think.
If you cut a gandiseeg in half, do you get two gandiseegs or two halves of a gandiseeg?