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You don’t have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl. jachten), which means “hunt”, and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
Yes, and a Polish person tells me this is the correct way to make the Yah sound at the start of the English word, yacht.
I imagine it’s the same for the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Though perhaps not for the French or Spanish.
fun fact: the word “Yacht” derives from old german “Jagd”, which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as “Yacht” and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we’d have yacht airplanes.
Yacht is also feminine in german (instead of the more pleasing das Yacht…) for the same reason as you say:
https://lemmy.ml/post/31227837/19058439
(thanks to @ephera@lemmy.ml and @barsoap@lemmy.ee for the explanations)
Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
- die Fregatte, die Trireme, und die Galeone unter anderen sind aber auch weiblich und sind auch Fremdwörter für bestimmte Arten Schiffe.
Yeah I’m non-native. Natur is another one that triggers me, mostly because of the mother nature connotation in english
As a person who learned English as an adult, u can tell you that the word that gave me the most trouble early on was “weather”. I mean these sounds are impossible!!
Monolinugal people thinking that the pronounciation of some rare words is the big issue when learning languages…
Dude, try memorizing the correct grammatical gender for every single noun or every single exception to regular declinations. And that’s just for a medium-difficulty language like German.
You know how there’s simple English versions of news articles? The same thing exists with German. And the language in these Simple German articles is more difficult than the regular English version.
English is THE easy mode language of the world, which is why e.g. pretty much anyone in Europe defaults to it if they are speaking to anyone who speaks a different native language. Like, if someone from Austria speaks with someone from Ukraine, they will use English.
try memorizing the correct grammatical gender
Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either. We just start using words. German is the same. Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
What the fuck do you think learning vocabulary by reading is, if not memorization? You’re just doing it subconsciously rather than intentionally.
Language acquisition and rote memorisation aren’t exactly 1:1.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
It’s like the difference between reading a dictionary and only going forward after you’ve learned a page by heart vs simply starting to read simpler novels even when you don’t understand all the words, and picking it up as you go along. Understanding form context.
Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either.
… because it doesn’t exist in English. Of course you don’t remember things that don’t exist.
Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
Yep. That’s why you can pick out every American stumbling through German even after they spent 20 years in the country, because they can’t get any of the things that you have to memorize right.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
If you think that what they teach in American schools in German, then maybe. But seriously, pronunciation is so not the hardest part about learning languages.
And as I said, German isn’t even a hard language either. That goes to e.g. Finnish or Hungarian (at least for western languages). But English is an easy mode language.
If English was easy, then native speakers wouldn’t make so many mistakes.
Maybe you mean English is forgiving? As in, even though you’re bad at it, I can understand you.
i mean, no, the reason english is the default language of the world is due to (british, and then american) imperialism
french and latin were once the default languages of europe for the same reason
and how hard a language is to learn is kinda irrelevant, because it will always depend on what language(s) you already know. for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
“for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem”
Not necessarily. I’m German and I still have to learn French grammatical genders by heart, because they don’t necessarily match ours. Familiarity with the concept doesn’t make it any easier, just less weird.
Example: The tower. LA tour, feminine. DER Turm, masculine.
That’s more of a Germanic vs Latin languages. Most genders on french and Spanish match.
What? no
I know portugueses and spanish and I’m learning french and it make it all even more complex
Since in one language it’s something, in anofher it’s something else
Lol, they don’t even match consistently between Portuguese and Spanish which are much closer, even when the noun is literally the same (e.g.a água vs el água)
but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
The problem is not wrapping your mind around the concept of grammatical genders, but that you have to memorize them for every word. And they are different in any language with grammatical gender.
For example:
- Italian: La luna (female), il sole (male)
- German: Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)
or
- German: Das Huhn (neuter)
- Italian: il pollo (male)
- Spanish: la gallina (female)
Knowing the grammatical gender of something in one language won’t help you one bit when learning another language. In fact, it might be even detrimental, because it’s different in every language.
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
tu penses mon nom d’utilisatrice vient de quelle langue?
of course not every language has the same grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with them, you don’t have to learn the concept, you already get it
when learning Spanish in school, grammatical gender was really not an issue, cause i already speak french (to be fair, french and spanish will often gender the same words the same way, which greatly helps ofc)
to me, it was much harder to grasp the distinction between ser and estar, for example. two fundamental verbs that, in french, get translated to the same thing
English is THE easy mode language of the world
hahahaha, no, it is not. A significant amount of words are ambiguous if isolated from their context (take “fire”: as in fire a shot, a flame, fire a worker, “this is fire”?), pronunciation is all over the place, it feels like there are more exceptions than rules when it comes to past-present-future verbs
The old man the boat.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
I’m so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn’t.
Imagine bad language on the internet.
Just do a search for a bit of the text before posting this stuff. It’s super easy to find the uncensored version.
POST THAT. Let’s kill off this censored trash.
Bitch please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O’s in the middle.
As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is “brought” and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that’s it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say “Scotland, Ye cannae show I’m wrang”As a native English speaker I can pronounce English words I’ve never seen before pretty easily. I’d say that there is a general system to it, but it just has a metric fuckton of exceptions. Though to be honest, it’s not really all that different from having to learn the genders for every single noun in gendered languages coming from a non-gendered language. At least pronunciation in English follows a certain kind of logic (albeit one heavily influenced by loanwords). Gendering of nouns has always seemed completely arbitrary and is just straight memorization.
Yeeeah maaaybe still I would think that at least in my language is easier in english seems to be more crazy maybe I’m biased IDK.
See gendering in spanish has a general rule with few exceptions
Ends with -N, -O, -R, -S, -L, -U -I 99% chance of Male gendering
Ends with A, -DAD, -TAD, -ED, -SION, -CIÓN, -DEZ, -TIS, -IZ 95% female gendering. Some words that end with -MA, -PA and -TA can be male many exceptions there watch out. Now you would be asking there should be many more endings to words… And I’d say male gender for everything unless the subject is established to be female. Now yes there are tricky ones that change the meaning with the gender
El cura - the priest
La cura - the cure
El papá - the dad (note it also has a tilde)
La papa - the potato
I believe anyway the ambiguos ones are not many really if they are more than a hundred I’d be surprised more than 2 hundred nearly impossible but I’m no linguist.Now I think this would be a summed up version of the rule but I’d say is pretty close to the thing and fits a paragraph, personally for what I’ve seen I think the hard thing is getting used to handle gendering without thinking in gender. That’s confusing for many English speakers and some Japanese complaint bout the same.
We have a park here…
Champoeg state park.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champoeg,_Oregon
Sham-pooie.
Because in Old Dutch, the letter g is pronounced like a y when it’s at the end of a word.
Old English you mean? I’m Dutch and I’ve never heard of a word where g is pronounced like y in Dutch
Nope, Old Dutch. Same for names like Solveig.
That’s a Scandinavian name, not a Dutch word
When I learned that the proper pronunciation of the word queue is basically a letter q followed by a bunch of silent letters, I had to take a break for a while. I enjoy the sound of English language, so that kept me going afterwards, but I am still salty.
You can thank the French for that one.
To be fair, most of the weirdly spelled words come from other languages. Especially French.
Sure we did that. But look at how you spell and pronounce them ! What a slaughter.
French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this
I think phonetic alphabets are a pretty good idea (though I suppose they’re mostly phonemic).
I’m surprised more people don’t make fun of abjads.
There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I’m sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.
“Strictly phonetic”—no. But more-or-less-strictly phonological, yes. Finnish is also one of those.
