Wapsi Square Forum

TheCollector wrote:Welp, nother ship to add to my plate.

You wouldn't happen to go by the name "FayeLovesBubbles" on a certain other forum, would you?

JSStryker wrote:To quote the webcomic Sheldon "The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary...it's the rock-soup of languages"

That's unusually imprecise for Sheldon - he failed to mention that the three blind dudes were drunk and the German dictionary was stoned.

English is the result of Norse sailors trying to pick up Saxon barmaids.

And it's just like all the other results of such transactions.

It isn't that simple. It's the result of Roman soldiers trying to pick up Celtic barmaids, Saxon soldiers trying to pick up their daughters, Norse sailors trying to pick up their daughters, and Norse-French soldiers trying to pick up their daughters.

English is rather unusual in another sense - just try to find a bunch of native speakers of French, or Japanese, or Arabic, or pretty much any other language, trading descriptions of just how impure those languages are.

Looking at the comic again, I can't help but be amazed at the extent of Daylla's hair... How much fixative does she use, to keep it in place like that? Especially the part that extends forward and off to the side? (Did she get hair styling tips from Atsali?)

Regarding the sources of English, I recently saw a critique of French. They said to learn Spanish, then learn Italian. Subtract the Italian from Spanish and you're left with French!

A couple of characters {in more ways than one} in on of "Manning Coleen's" novels speak native-level Spanish and French: when in Italy they get along quite well and that Spanish words with French endings...

{...or maybe the other way round - been a LOT of years since i last read that one.}

Since one of the authors was a British Intelligence officer who had successfully passed as a citizen of all three countries - and of Germany during World War One, I'm inclined to believe that it would probably work.

lake_wrangler wrote:

jwhouk wrote:Just remember what they always say about English:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Yeah, I know that. I even remember that someone had that as his signature, for a while...

But that applies to vocabulary, not grammar...

... English grammar is no better.

A large part of the problem with English grammar is its vocabulary not all coming from the same source, especially the verbs. The Germanic verbs conjugate differently than the Latinate ones and the Greek are also completely different, and then there are the ones from the various Native American tribes, and Far East languages incorporated in the 20th Century. English English is bad enough, but American English adds several layers of complexity.

Opus the Poet wrote:A large part of the problem with English grammar is its vocabulary not all coming from the same source, especially the verbs. The Germanic verbs conjugate differently than the Latinate ones and the Greek are also completely different, and then there are the ones from the various Native American tribes, and Far East languages incorporated in the 20th Century. English English is bad enough, but American English adds several layers of complexity.

Most of my brother's translators gripe about his habit of verbing nouns {English being one of the few languages where such is more-or-less acceptable - unlike, say, Italian, French, Spanish...}

His German translator just smiles and gets on with inventing compound words to fit...

Atomic wrote:Regarding the sources of English, I recently saw a critique of French. They said to learn Spanish, then learn Italian. Subtract the Italian from Spanish and you're left with French!

I've also heard, from people who speak all three languages, that if you read Spanish as if it were French you are speaking something close enough to really bad Portuguese to be mostly comprehensible.

(But then, the only people in Spain who speak Spanish are immigrants and tourists. The four official languages are Castillian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque - the latter being the only one that isn't a Romance language, for that matter it isn't even Indo-European. Meanwhile, linguists agree that Galician, North Portuguese, and South Portuguese are two dialects of one language and a second language, but they can't decide whether the odd one out is Galician or South Portuguese.)

lake_wrangler wrote:Looking at the comic again, I can't help but be amazed at the extent of Daylla's hair... How much fixative does she use, to keep it in place like that? Especially the part that extends forward and off to the side? (Did she get hair styling tips from Atsali?)

I could be wrong, but isn't Daylla the Metallic one? If so, her hair...

TazManiac wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:Looking at the comic again, I can't help but be amazed at the extent of Daylla's hair... How much fixative does she use, to keep it in place like that? Especially the part that extends forward and off to the side? (Did she get hair styling tips from Atsali?)

I could be wrong, but isn't Daylla the Metallic one? If so, her hair...

Yep.

You've run across the slang term for stylists, "hairbender"?

Even most stylists don't know it, but it originated among Daylla's para race...

You definitely don't want to be around Daylla when she does a hair flip.