this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 219 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.

Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.

Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

See, those are essentially the raw goods now. Finished goods are entertainment and the internet.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

How long until internet slang/lingo snowballs out of control and becomes an actual language? I mean, it's already constantly spawning words and a diverse enough environment.
I notice sometime I lack an optimal word to describe a concept IRL that an internet term would fit perfectly but would be cringe or meaningless unless the listener was also terminally online. There's also stealing terms from other languages that catch on, but that don't work offline(IE. Zeitgeist, pantsdrunk, kawaii) that get spread around enough to be generally know, even if a bit odd.

Yes, including brainrot. Especially brainrot. It's not all pleasant.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago

Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (15 children)

The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.

The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"

The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.

Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you're trying to spell/pronounce in order to get ... oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Ah, what you're saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.

For example, here's how to ask a yes/no question in...

  • Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for "yes", but still has this sort of question.)
  • Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
  • Polish - start the sentence with "czy".
  • German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
  • English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support "do", then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that "do" instead. Noting that semantic "do" also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support "do", yielding questions like "did you do this?"

Then there's the adjective order. In Latin for example it's just a "...near the noun? Whatever, just don't be ambiguous." Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don't you dare to switch them - "your famous blue raincoat" is a-OK, but *"your blue famous raincoat" makes you sound like a maniac.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

The alternative is Czech.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A Polish colleague of mine once accidentally picked Czech in an online work training exercise and then spent the next 30 minutes giggling to himself. I asked him afterwards what was up "Czech sounds like baby talk"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So I've heard. The feeling is mutual, oddly enough.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Bezwzględny Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz wyruszył ze Szczebrzeszyna przez Szymankowszczyznę do Pszczyny. I choć nieraz zalewała go żółć, niepomny następstw znalazł ostatecznie szczęście w źdźble trawy.

EDIT: copy/pasted from somewhere, this looks incredible to pronounce! The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.

You're right, you know just one word in Polish, because it's Żubrówka you filthy peasant.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It may look hard, but those are more of a spelling nightmare than pronounciation ones

Hard ones to pronounce are for example: "Chrząszcz brzmi w trzczcinie w szczebrzeszynie" or "stół z powyłamywanymi nogami"

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I feel like we'd all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn't in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody's cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Did Hungary annex Slovakia again or what?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Are you sure it wasn't "brzeczyszczykiewicz" (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

I'm completely sure, like 100%, fully positive without a single doubt... that I misspelled it and I would never be able to access the server again.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Can we also get some translation or something. This might shock you, but not all of us are polish.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

There is no translation, it's just a hard to pronounce Polish surname.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Kinda weird to isolate Polish when Hungarian, Finnish and Basque are actually all their own distinct language families.

Polish actually isn't in a distinct language family and shares a lot with other western Slavic languages like Czech, and Slavic languages in general.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (8 children)

I don't think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

but we can all agree hungarian isn't

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

You could if we had won. /s

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Sure you can everyone in france know theirs is the only real language. Don't believe me? Just ask someone from france.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (13 children)

It's not spelling, it's the grammar and ortography that would make you want to peel your skin off.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Took 2 years of Polish at University. I spent more time on that one class than all my other classes combined... And I went to school for Education.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Po twojej pysznej zupie

Nie ruszam dupy z klopa

Ta zupa była z mlekiem;

Na mleko mam alergię

Po twojej pysznej zupie

Nie ruszam dupy z klopa

Ta zupa była z mlekiem;

Na mleko mam alergię

...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (11 children)

I wonder if we had ž etc like Czechs would it make it easier for foreigners to read

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Me, a non European who only speaks english, so true

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz z Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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