Monthly Archives: August 2013

by | August 31, 2013 · 12:09 PM

Tammy Wynette, “Stand by Your Man”

God I love this song. When it first came out in 1968, the feminists went crazy, saying it was an anti-feminist song that encouraged women to stay with abusive husbands. Tammy thought the controversy was over until Hilary Clinton brought it up in an interview shortly before Bill was elected President. Hilary told the interviewer, “Well, you know, I’m not exactly a stand by your man type.” That brought the controversy back.

Six years later, Tammy died, possibly of a drug overdose. She had led an interesting but painful life, married five times with a famous affair with Burt Reynolds. Her most famous love was George Jones, the great country singer. A legendary drunk, once she hid his car keys so he could not go to the bar. He got on his motorized lawnmower and drove 12 miles into town to drink in the bar! That shows some determination!

I love a stand by your man type woman. I have had a few of them in my life, more in recent years than in the past. These are the best women in the whole world, devoted to their man. There is something special about that and what it does for a man’s ego. If you are a man, consider yourself lucky if you ever get a woman like this. The more “alpha” a man is, the more “stand by your man” the woman will be. It’s evolution at work. So that’s another compliment.

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Filed under Celebrities, Feminism, Gender Studies, Music, Psychology, Romantic Relationships

by | August 29, 2013 · 1:09 PM

A Look at the Slovene Language

From here.

A look at how difficult the Slovene language for an English speaker to learn. Slovene is a hard language, but probably a few other Slavic languages are harder. One nice thing about Slovene is that it has quite a few German loan words, so there is more familiar vocabulary. Despite its complexity, Slovene is a beautiful language.

Slovenian or Slovene is also a very hard language to learn, probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has three number distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It’s the only major IE European language that has retained the dual. Sorbian has also retained the dual, but it is a minor tongue. However, the dual may be going out in Slovenia. In Primorska it is not used at all, and in the rest of Slovenia, the feminine dual is not used in casual speech (plural is used instead), but the masculine dual is still used for masculine nouns and mixed pairs of masculine and feminine nouns.

In addition, there are six cases, as Slovene has lost the vocative. There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but five of them are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

   Singular Dual       Plural 
1. Sin      Sina       Sini
2. Sina     Sinov      Sinov
3. Sinu     Sinovoma   Sinovom
4. Sina     Sinova     Sinove
5. O sinu   O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom  Z sinovoma Z sini

There are seven different ways that nouns decline depending on gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules. The use of particles such as pa is largely idiomatic. In addition, there is a lack of language learning materials for Slovene.

Some sounds are problematic. Learners have a hard time with the č and ž sounds. There are also “open” and “closed” vowels as in Portuguese.

Here is an example of a word that can be difficult to pronounce:

križišče – crossroads

However, Slovene has the past perfect that is the same as the English tense, lost in the rest of Slavic. In addition, via contact with German and Italian, many Germanic and Romance loans have gone in. If you know some German have some knowledge of another Slavic langauge, Slovene is not overwhelmingly difficult.

Some people worry that Slovene might go extinct in the near future, as it is spoken by only 2 million people. However, even this small language has 356, 881 headwords in an online dictionary. So it is clear that Slovene has plenty enough vocabulary to deal with the modern world.

Slovene is easier than Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech or Slovak.

Slovenian gets a 4 rating, extremely hard.

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Filed under Applied, Balto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics, Slavic

by | August 29, 2013 · 1:03 PM

A Look at the Serbo-Croatian Language

From here.

A look at the Serbo-Croatian language to see how hard it is to learn fro an English speaker. Serbo-Croatian is legendary for its difficulty. Whether it is harder than Czech or Polish is somewhat up in the air, but probably Czech and Polish are harder. Few L2 speakers ever attain anything near native speaker competence. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating language.

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions. The vocative is still going strong in Serbo-Croatian (S-C), as in Polish, Ukrainian and Bulgarian. There 15 different types of declensions: seven tenses, three genders, three moods, and two aspects. Whereas English has one word for the number 2 – two, Serbo-Croatian has 17 words.

Case abbreviations below:
N = NAV – nominative, accusative, vocative
G = Genitive
D = Dative
L =Locative
I = Instrumental

Masculine inanimate gender
N dva
G dvaju
D L I dvama

Feminine gender
N dve
G dveju
D L I dvema

Mixed gender
N dvoje
G dvoga
D L I dvoma

Masculine animate gender
N dvojica
G dvojice
D L dvojici
I dvojicom

“Twosome”
N dvojka
G dvojke
D L dvojci
I dvojkom

The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imperfective and perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from the other, it seems irregular. This is the hardest part of Serbo-Croatian grammar, and foreigners not familiar with other Slavic tongues usually never get it right.

Serbian has a strange form called the “paucal.” It is the remains of the old dual, and it also exists in Polish and Russian.  The paucal is a verbal number like singular, plural and dual. It is used with the numbers dva (2), tri (3), četiri (4) and oba/obadva (both) and also with any number that contains 2, 3 or 4 (22, 102, 1032).

gledalac            viewer
pažljiv(i)          careful
gledalac pažljiv(i) careful viewer

1 careful viewer  jedan pažljivi gledalac 
2 careful viewers dva pažljiva gledaoca   
3 careful viewers tri pažljiva gledaoca   
5 careful viewers pet pažljivih gledalaca

Above, pažljivi gledalac is singular, pažljivih gledalaca is plural and pažljiva gledaoca is paucal.

As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing. Pronouns are so rarely used that some learners are surprised that they exist, since pronimalization is marked on the verb as person and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary, similar to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent – low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. It’s not the same as tone, but it’s similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in English, is unmarked. And when the word conjugates or declines, the pitch accent can jump around in the word to another syllable and even changes its type in ways that do not seem transparent. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.

The “hard” ch sound is written č, while the “soft” ch sound is written ć. It has syllabic r and l. Long consonant clusters are permitted. See this sentence:

Na vrh brda vrba mrda.

However, in many of these consonant clusters, a schwa is present between consonants in speech, though it is not written out.

S-C, like Russian, has words that consist of only a single consonant:

s – with

Serbo-Croatian does benefit from a phonetic orthography.

It is said that few if any foreigners ever master Serbo-Croatian well. Similar to Czech and Polish, it is said that many native speakers make mistakes in S-C even after decades of speaking it, especially in pitch accent.

Serbo-Croatian is often considered to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. It is harder than Russian but not as hard as Polish.

Serbo-Croatian gets a 4.5 rating, extremely difficult.

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Filed under Applied, Balto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics, Serbo-Croatian, Slavic

by | August 29, 2013 · 12:59 PM

A Look at the Polish Language

From here.

A look at Polish to see how difficult it is for an English speaker to learn. Polish is probably the hardest I-E European language of all. Its only competition might be Albanian. Among non-IE European languages, we are looking at Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian as competition. The Poles are quite proud of their langauge and even take pride in its difficulty. It is certainly an amazing language.

Polish is similar to Czech and Slovak in having words that seem to have no vowels, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels. That’s not so obviously the case with Czech. Nevertheless, try these sentences:

  1. Wszczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.
  2. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.
  3. W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

I and y, s and z, je and ě alternate at the ends of some words, but the rules governing when to do this, if they exist, don’t seem sensible. The letter ť is very hard to pronounce. There are nasal vowels as in Portuguese. The ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, sz, cz, dz, dź, dż sounds are hard for foreigners to make. There are sounds that it is even hard for native speakers to make as they require a lot tongue movements. A word such as szczescie is hard to Polish L2 speakers to pronounce. Polish written to spoken pronunciation has some issues – h and ch are one sound – h, ó and u are the same sound, and u may form diphthongs where it sounds like ł, so u and ł can be the same sound in some cases.

Kura (hen) and kóra are pronounced exactly the same way, and this is confusing to Polish children. However, the distinction between h/ch has gone of most spoken Polish. Furthermore, there is a Polish language committee, but like the French one, it is more concerned with preserving the history or the etymology of the word and less with spelling the word phonemically. Language committees don’t always do their jobs!

Polish orthography, while being regular, is very complex. Polish uses a Latin alphabet unlike most other Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The letters are: AĄ B CĆ D EĘ FGHIJK LŁ M NŃ OÓ QPRSTUVW XY ZŹŻ.

Native speakers speak so fast it’s hard for non-natives to understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Listening comprehension is made difficult by all of the sh and ch like sounds. Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to hearing their language mangled by second-language learners. Therefore, foreigners’ Polish will seldom be understood.

Polish grammar is said to be more difficult than Russian grammar. Polish has the following:

There are five different tenses: zaprzeszły, przeszły, teraźniejszy, przyszły prosty, and przyszły złozony. However, zaprzeszły tense is almost extinct by now. There are seven different genders: male animate, male inanimate, feminine and neuter in the singular and  male personal and male impersonal in the plural. Male nouns have five patterns of declension, and feminine and neuter nouns have six different patterns of declension. Adjectives have two different declension patterns. Numbers have five different declension patterns: główne, porządkowe, zbiorowe, nieokreślone, and ułamkowe. There is a special pattern for nouns that are only plural.

There are seven different cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative, and the genitive case, which is irregular. Verbs have nine different persons in their declensions: ja, ty, on, ona, ono, my, wy, oni, one. There are different conjugation patterns for men and women. There are 18 different conjugation patterns in the verb (11 main ones). There are five different polite forms: for a man, a woman, men, women and men, and women combined. There are four different participle forms, three of which inflect.

Polish has seven cases, including the vocative which has gone out of most Slavic. Although the vocative is becoming less common in Polish, it is still used in formal situations, and it’s not really true that it is a dying form.

In an informal situation, a Pole might be more like to use nominative rather than vocative:

Cześć Marek! (Nom.), rather than
Cześć Marku! (Voc.)

However, in a more formal situation, the vocative is still likely to be used. In the case below, the Nominative would never be used by a Polish native speakers:

Dzień dobry panie profesorze/doktorze! (Voc.), rather than
Dzień dobry pan profesor/doktor! (Nom.)

Case declension is very irregular, unlike German. Polish consonant gradation is called oboczność (variation).

It also has seven genders, five in the singular and two in the plural. The genders of nouns cause the adjectives modifying them to inflect differently.

Noun
matka   mother (female gender)
ojciec  father (male gender)
dziecko child (neuter gender)

Modifying Adjective
brzydkiugly ugly

Singular
brzydka matka    ugly mother
brzydki ojciec   ugly father
brzydkie dziecko ugly child

Plural
brzydkie matki   ugly mothers
brzydcy ojcowie  ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci  ugly children

Gender even effects verbs.

I ate (female speaker) Ja zjadłam
I ate (male speaker)   Ja zjadłem

There are two different forms of the verb kill depending on whether the 1st person singular and plural and 2nd person plural killers are males or females.

I killed     zabiłem/zabiłam
We killed    zabiliśmy/zabiłyśmy
They killed  zabili/zabiły

The perfective and imperfective tenses create a dense jungle of forms:

kupować - to buy

Singular  Simple Past         Imperfect
I (f.)    kupiłam             kupowałam
I (m.)    kupiłem             kupowałem
I (n.)    kupiłom             kupowałom 
you (f.)  kupiłaś             kupowałaś
you (m.)  kupiłeś             kupowałeś
you (n.)  kupiłoś             kupowałoś  
he        kupił               kupował
she       kupiła              kupowała
it        kupiło              kupowało

Plural
we (f.)   kupiłyśmy           kupowałyśmy
we (m.)   kupiliśmy           kupowaliśmy
you (f.)  kupiłyście          kupowałyście 
you (m.)  kupiliście          kupowaliście
they (f.) kupiły              kupowały
they (m.) kupili              kupowali

The verb above forms an incredible 28 different forms in the perfect and imperfect past tense alone.

The existence of the perfective and imperfective verbs themselves is the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb – perfective or imperfective – is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just being conjugated differently.

The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish:

widziec
zobaczyc

Widziałem – I saw (repeatedly in the past, like I saw the sun come up every morning).
Zobaczyłem – I saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

Some of these verbs are obviously related to each other:

robić/zrobić
czytać/przeczytać
zachowywać/zachować
jeść/zjeść

But others are very different:

mówić/powiedzieć
widzieć/zobaczyć
kłaść/położyć

This is not a tense difference – the verbs themselves are different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to learn two different verbs. 95% of verbs have these maddening dual forms, but for 5% of verbs that lack a perfective version, you only have one form. The irregular forms may date from archaic Polish.

In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the same way – note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you can’t be doing something at this precise moment and at the same time have just finished doing it.

It’s often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least eight tenses:

Indicative         grać       to play
Present            gram       I play 
Past               grałem     I played
Conditional        grałbym    I would play
Future*            będę grać  I will play
Continuous future* będę grał  I will be playing
Perfective future  pogram     I will have played*
Perf. conditional  pograłbym  I would have played

*będę grać and będę grał have the same meaning
**Implies you will finish the action

There is also an aspectual distinction made when referring to the past. Different forms are used based on whether or not the action has been completed.

Oddly enough, the present can be used to describe things that happened in the past, although this only applies to very specific situations.

Juliusz Cezar po tym jak zdobywa Galie jedzie do Rzymu.

Julius Caesar after that when he (is) conquer(ing) Gaul, he (is) go(ing) to Rome.

Whereas in English we use one word for go no matter what mode of transportation we are using to get from one place to another, in Polish, you use different verbs if you are going by foot, by car, by plane, by boat or by other means of transportation.

In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look at the following nouns:

hat      kapelusz
computer komputer
dog      pies
student  uczen

All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate, and student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently.

I see a new hat – Widze nowy kapelusz
I see a new student – Widze nowego ucznia

Notice how the now- form changed.

In addition to completely irregular verbs, there are also irregular nouns in Polish:

człowiek->ludzie

However, the number of irregular nouns is very small.

Let us look at pronouns. English has one word for the genitive case of the 1st person singular – my. In Polish, depending on the context, you can have the following 11 forms, and actually there are even more than 11:

mój
moje
moja
moją
mojego
mojemu
mojej
moim
moi
moich
moimi

Numerals can be complex. English has one word for the number 2 – two. Polish has 21 words for two (however, only 5-6 of them are in common use):

dwa (nominative non-masculine personal male and neuter and non-masculine personal accusative)
dwaj (masculine personal nominative)
dwie (nominative and accusative female)
dwóch (genitive, locative and masculine personal accusative)
dwom (dative)
dwóm (dative)
dwu (alternative version sometimes used for instrumental, genitive, locative and dative)
dwoma (masculine instrumental)
dwiema (female instrumental)
dwoje (collective, nominative + accusative)
dwojga (collective, genitive)
dwojgu (collective, dative + locative)
dwójka (noun, nominative)
dwójkę (noun, accusative)
dwójki (noun, genitive)
dwójce (noun, dative and locative)
dwójką (noun, instrumental)
dwójko (vocative)
dwojgiem (collective, instrumental)
dwójkach
dwójek
dwója
dwójkami

Polish also has the paucal form like Serbo-Croatian. It is the remains of the old dual. The paucal applies to impersonal masculine, feminine and neuter nouns but not to personal masculine nouns.

Personal Masculine

one boy    jeden chłopiec
two boys   dwóch chłopców
three boys trzech chłopców
four boys  czterech chłopców
five boys  pięciu chłopców
six boys   sześciu chłopców
seven boys siedmiu chłopców
eight boys ośmiu chłopców

Impersonal Masculine

one dog    jeden pies
two dogs   dwa psy
three dogs trzy psy
four dogs  cztery psy
five dogs  pięć psów
six dogs   sześć psów
seven dogs siedem psów
eight dogs osiem psów

In the above, two, three and four dogs is in the paucal (psy), while two, three or four men is not and is instead in the plural (chłopców).

Polish, like Hungarian and Finnish, can also have very long words. For instance:

pięćsetdwadzieściajedenmiliardówdwieścieczterdzieścisiedemmiloionów-trzystaosiemdzisiątpięćtysięcyczterystadziewięćdziesięciopięcioletni

is a word in Polish (There is no dash in the word – I was just dividing the line).

A single noun can change in many ways and take many forms. Compare przyjaciel – friend:

                           Singular       Plural
who is my friend           przyjaciel     przyjaciele
who is not my friend       przyjacielem   przyjaciół
friend who I give s.t. to  przyjacielowi  przyjaciołom
friend who I see           przyjaciela    przyjaciół
friend who I go with       z przyajcielem z przyjaciółmi
friend who I dream of      o przyjacielu  o przyjaciołach
Oh my friend!              Przyajaciela!   Przyjaciele!

There are 12 forms of the noun friend above.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones, whether you have two or 1,000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many telephones you have:

two, three or four telefony, but
five telefonów.

Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands:

four ręce, but
five rąk.

There are also irregular diminutives such as

pies -> psiaczek

słońce -> słoneczko

Polish seems like Lithuanian in the sense that almost every grammatical form seems to inflect in some way or other. Even conjunctions inflect in Polish.

In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a sentence. You can use up to five negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence:

Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedział.
Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Like Russian, there are multiple ways to say the same thing in Polish. However, the meaning changes subtly with these different word combinations, so you are not exactly saying the same thing with each change of word order. Nevertheless, this mess does not seem to be something that would be transparent to the Polish learner.

In English, you can say Ann has a cat, but you can’t mix the words up and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat five different ways:

Ania ma kota.
Kota ma Ania.
Ma Ania kota.
Kota Ania ma.
Ma kota Ania.

The first one is the most common, but the other four can certainly be used.

In addition, Polish has a wide variety of dialects, and a huge vocabulary. However, the dialects are for the most part quite similar. Similar to Hungarian, there may be many different words for the same thing. There are 43 different words for ladybird. The following are 30 separate lexical items (not case-inflected terms) for ladybird, for which the main word is biedronka:

maryszepka, sarynka, katrynka, petronelka, skobrunek, skrzipeczka, panienka, makówka, letewka, kruszka, kropelniczka, guedzinka, motilewka, matoweczka, dzegotka, podlecuszka, maleneczka, pągwiczka, popruszka, markowiczka, parzedliszka, prochowniczka, krówka jałowiczka, karkukuczka, rączepiórka, borowa matinka, motuszka kruszka, marianna, mróweczka, and boża krówka.

Although Polish grammar is said to be irregular, this is probably not true. It only gives the appearance of being irregular, as there are so many different rules, but there is a method to the madness underneath it all. The rules themselves are so complex and numerous that it is hard to figure them all out.

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish children do not reach this milestone until age 16. Even many adult Poles make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly. However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language (though a few hate it) and even take pride in its difficult nature.

On the positive side, in Polish, the stress is fixed, there are no short or long vowels nor is there any vowel harmony, there are no tones, and it uses a Latin alphabet.

Polish is one of the most difficult of the Slavic languages. It is probably harder than Russian but not as hard as Czech, though this is controversial.

Polish gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

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Filed under Applied, Balto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics, Polish, Slavic

by | August 29, 2013 · 12:55 PM

A Look at the Albanian Language

From here.

A look at the Albanian language from the viewpoint of how hard it is to learn for an English speaker. Albanian is an ancient Indo-European language and it is said to be very hard to learn. Albanian may be up there with Polish as the hardest European language.

Albanian is another obscure branch of Indo-European. Albanian nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine), five cases including the ablative, lost in all other IE. Both definite and indefinite articles are widely used, a plus for English speakers. Most inflections were lost, and whatever is left doesn’t even look very IE. The verbal system is complex, having eight tenses including two aorists and two futures, and several moods, including indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conjunctive, optative and admirative. The last three are odd cases for IE. The optative only exists in IE in Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Manx. Active and passive voices are used.

Similarly to Gaelic, Albanian is even harder to learn than either German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.

Albanian is rated 5, hardest of all.

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Filed under Albanian, Applied, Balkan, Illyrian, Illyro-Venetic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics

by | August 29, 2013 · 12:48 PM

A Look at the Armenian Language

From here.

A look at the Armenian language focusing on how hard it is to learn for an English speaker.

An obscure branch of Indo-European, Armenian, is very hard to learn. Armenian is a difficult language in terms of grammar and phonetics, not to mention the very odd alphabet. The orthography is very regular, however there are some irregularities. For instance:

գրել , written grel but spoken gərel (schwa removed in orthography)
խոսել, written xosel but spoken xosal  (a changed to e in orthography)

However, the alphabet itself presents many problems. Print and cursive can be very different, and upper case and lower case can also be quite different. Here are some pairs of letters in upper and lower case:

Ա ա
Յ յ
Փ փ

All in all, this means you have to memorize as many as four different shapes for each letter. However, the grammar is very regular.

In addition, many letters very closely resemble other letters, which makes it very easy to get them mixed up:

գ and զ
ե and է
դ and ղ
ո and ռ

There are voiced consonants and an alternation between aspirated and unaspirated unvoiced consonants, so some mix up the forms for b, p and pʰ, for instance.

There are many things about the grammar that seem odd compared to other IE languages. Part of the problem is that due to its location in the Caucasus, Armenian has absorbed influences from some of the wild nearly Caucasian languages. For instance, an extinct NE Caucasian Nakh language called Tsov is thought to have contributed to the Hurro-Ururtian substratum in Armenian. So in a sense when you learn Armenian, you are also learning a bit of Chechen at the same time.

People who have learned both Arabic and Armenian felt that Armenian was much easier, so Armenian seems to be much easier than Arabic.

Armenian is rated 4, very hard to learn.

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Filed under Applied, Armenian, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Indo-Irano-Armenian, Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics

by | August 29, 2013 · 12:46 PM

A Look at the Faroese Language

From here.

A look at the Faroese language focusing on how hard it is to learn for an English speaker. Faroese is spoken on the Faroe Islands, and it is still doing very well. However, it is about as hard to learn as Icelandic, and Icelandic is legendary for its difficulty.

North Germanic
West Scandinavian

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.

Faroese has strong, weak and irregular verbs. It also has a strange supine tense.

The Faroese orthography is as irrational as Icelandic’s. There are so many rules to learn to be able to write Faroese properly. Faroese, like Icelandic, prefers to coin new words rather than borrow words wholesale into its language. Therefore the English speaker will not see a lot of obvious borrowings to help them out. Some argue against this nativization process, but maybe it is better than being buried in English loans like German and Dutch are at the moment.

computer – telda (derived from at telja – to count. Icelandic has a similar term.
helicopter – tyrla (derived from tyril – a spinning tool for making wool or loom.
music – tónleikur
pocket calculator – telduhvølpur (Lit. computer puppy), roknimaskina (Lit. calculating machine)

Faroese has the advantage of having no verbal aspect, and verbal declension does not differ much according to person. However, Faroese has a case system like Icelandic.

Faroese gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

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Filed under Applied, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Language Families, Language Learning, Linguistics

by | August 29, 2013 · 12:37 PM

Bigfoot News August 29, 2013

Position on the Rick Dyer case. My position is that the Tent Video and the screenshot from the Shooting Bigfoot movie very definitely show real Bigfoots. Whether it is a single Bigfoot or two different Bigfoots is not known, but those are probably two different photos of the same one. I also think that Rick shot loaded bullets at a Bigfoot on September 6, 2012 and that soon afterwards, the Bigfoot crashed into Morgan Matthews, the movie director, badly injuring him. In my mind, all of these things are simply beyond dispute.

Now we move into areas that are a lot harder to prove. Do we know that any of Rick’s bullets hit the Bigfoot that night? No. Do we know that the Bigfoot was killed that night? No. Further, there is not yet any good, hard evidence that the dead Bigfoot, if there is one, was then transported by Rick to Las Vegas, where it was held at a US government research lab for some time. There is certainly some evidence that the above is true, but we don’t have the same good hard evidence for these things as we do for the first paragraph.

So it is still up in the air whether Rick shot a Bigfoot that night and whether, if he did, he killed the Bigfoot. It is also up in the air whether there is a dead Bigfoot at all, much less that either Rick Dyer, the US government or Rick’s investors are in possession of it. And we don’t know if it was stored at a US government research for a long time. Perhaps all of these things are true, but at the moment the evidence for them remains inconclusive.

Dyer’s own words define him as a bloodthirsty narcissist with zero intellectual curiosity. Millions Against Sasquatch Slaughter posted this devastating video of Rick Dyer advocating the extermination of all Bigfoots.

Dyer says Bigfoots are nearly extinct. This is another example or Rick’s extreme narcissism. Rick believes that after thousands of years of evolution, Bigfoots are now going extinct. He thinks there are only four or five left in the whole of North America, and they are all old and no longer reproducing. It just so happens that just before they blink out and vanish off the face of the Earth, Rick Dyer (The God of Taxonomists) comes along and kills one! Narcissism par excellance!

Why Christopher Noel still (still!) believes Rick Dyer has a Sasquatch body.

Here is an excellent statement from the great Christopher Noel about why he still believes the Rick Dyer story.

Though I will no longer be dealing with Rick Dyer–because he lied to me directly and extensively on the phone even though he did not need to in order to perpetrate his “baby prank” — I still fail to understand why, if the underlying claim of the Sasquatch body were not accurate, his team would continue to stick with him, including my long-time friend Chris Sands (who is obeying his Non-Disclosure Agreement and not breathing a word even to me, yet who remains a loyal team member and has not warned me privately about a hoax). The reason for this loyalty simply cannot be the mesmerizing strength of Rick’s personality.

Three men (excluding Chris and of course Rick himself) have told me personally and in great detail about seeing the Sasquatch body. My best guess is simply that they are telling me the truth, that they saw this specimen, that others on Team Tracker have seen it too, and that this fact itself, above all else, is serving as the glue that keeps Rick’s team together; otherwise, these men’s own moral cores would have forced them long ago to jump off the death ship of a malignant hoax.

Some suggest that the explanation for this loyalty must lie in money, but I can’t believe that all of these people would sell off their integrity and reputations so easily. And don’t forget, if money were the sole mechanism at work here, Rick would have to be regularly paying the dozens of people on Team Tracker in order to keep them in line. If even one felt underpaid, he or she would “squeal” and blow the lid off the whole thing. This has not happened, and I find that meaningful. Finally, ask yourself this: how would Rick even have this kind of $$ if in fact he is lying about the body and therefore is not backed by “investors” at all?

I asked Christopher the question that skeptics always throw out there – Wouldn’t anyone who really killed a Bigfoot or owned a dead Bigfoot take it immediately public in order to get rich and famous? Christopher stated that the investors were first working hard to scientifically document the specimen taxonomically in accordance with the norms of biological science. Only after this was completed would the body be released to public. He brought up the example of the olinguito. Christopher also brought up the skeptic argument that Rick could not possibly have any investors because if he did, he would not be so broke. His answers to both questions were excellent.

It took the scientists who discovered the olinguito — a species of mammal — ten years to complete their work and present it to the world. And yet, when it comes to the San Antonio specimen deniers, one of their favorite arguments is that “there is no way it would take this many months to present the Bigfoot body to the world!”

Reality check: how much more thorough and diligent do researchers need to be in nailing down their analysis of a newly discovered species of human-like primate than they were in the case of the olinguito, a relative of the raccoon?

It’s just plain stupid for people to declare that a Sasquatch body “would necessarily” be released in a timely fashion. “Timely” in their narrow, unscientific worldview.

And how does Rick keep relocating if he’s so broke?

Pinkfoot Cindy Shafer is not Mata Hari. Pinkfoot has requested without informing anyone of who “Mata Hari” is, to tell everyone that Mata Hari is definitely not Pinkfoot! It does sound like Cindy knows who it is, though. I agree with her. I do not think Mata Hari is Cindy.

Very odd video from Sasquatch Ontario. Another very weird video from Sasquatch Ontario showing possible Bigfoot vocalizations. Many people say this fellow is a hoaxer, but there is no evidence yet that that is true. The charge that he is making these audios via the use of some audio equipment remains unproven. These are very interesting videos, and those may well be Bigfoot vocalizations, I have no idea. I do not necessarily agree with the various glosses he is giving for this speech though.

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Filed under Animals, Apes, Bigfoot, Canada, Mammals, North America, Regional, Wild

by | August 28, 2013 · 1:24 PM

Cool Word of the Day

Recrudescence – it means something like there was once this bad thing around, and it went away, and now here it is coming back again, thanks a lot! Or the return of some lousy thing we thought we got rid of once and for all.

I was once having an email war with this insane anti-Cuban Zionist Jew from Florida. I forget what it was all about. He went and read one of my articles and saw that word. He wrote me back and he said he had decided that he liked me now after all because I taught him a new word! One of the rare cases where you brain can transform an enemy into a friend.

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Filed under English language

by | August 28, 2013 · 1:10 PM

USA! USA! USA!

Idiot releases Bald eagle into chapel at Oral Roberts University. Nation’s symbol flies around a bit, gets confused probably trying to fly outside to get out of the chapel and flies right into the window, crashing to the ground. The Empire has fallen.

Good! Serves those patriotards right!

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Filed under Animals, Birds, Conservatism, Humor, Wild