20 more awesomely untranslatable words from around the world If only you could use these words in Scrabble. Photo: Jeremy Mates When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. In the novel Shame, Salman Rushdie’s narrator suggests: “To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.” Here are 20 words that don’t translate directly into English; what may these words tell us about the societies in which they come from? 1. Arabic – [in-shal-la] While it can be translated literally as “if Allah wills,” the meaning of this phrase differs depending on the speaker’s tone of voice. It can be a genuine sentiment, such as when talking to an old friend and parting with “We’ll meet again, inshallah,” or it can be used as a way to tacitly imply you actually aren’t planning to do something. Photo: Shahram Sharif 2. 3. 4. 5. Photo: Ethan Prater 6. 7. 8. 9. A sample from The Joys of Yiddish: 10.
sleepyti.me bedtime calculator The Top 10 Relationship Words That Aren't Translatable Into English | Marriage 3.0 Here are my top ten words, compiled from online collections, to describe love, desire and relationships that have no real English translation, but that capture subtle realities that even we English speakers have felt once or twice. As I came across these words I’d have the occasional epiphany: “Oh yeah! That’s what I was feeling...” Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the "binding force" that links two people together in any relationship. But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair. Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.”
Adorn your wall with rasterbations. Rasterbating is by far the cheapest, easiest and coolest way to fill an entire wall with art. A rasterbator is a program that takes any image and expands it to any size desired whilst keeping its original quality. The way this works is that the program changes the image into a half-toned one. THAT basically means the program turns the chosen image into a lot of small dots that will not look like much up close, but from a sufficient distance they resume their original shapes. Besides using the name to make immature and hilarious puns, the best part of rasterbating is the fact that it is so customizable. One can upload any picture they would like, choose the size (up to twenty meters) by selecting the amount of pages to print it on, and also decide whether the image is achromatic, monochromatic or has full color. There are many downloadable or online programs that will rasterbate your images, but this one here seems to be the best.
Listen and Write - Dictation Why "High-Functioning" Psychopaths Rule The World In general, most people are very complex and can exhibit different personality traits at different times. But one can also say that there tends to be two distinct groupings in societies' power structures: Those who can be characterized as "normal," and those who view the world through a prism heavily influenced by psychopathy and sociopathy. My take (by trying to understand the world around me) is that the great majority of people operate under the "normal" approach, when it comes to power-plays and relationships. A very small minority could be characterized as high-functioning sociopaths and/or psychopaths. And it's not that the majority is "normal" as in not being afflicted by all kinds of personality, psychological, and psychiatric disorders... By "normal," what I mean is that people tend to say and do things in accordance to their real thoughts, emotions, views, ideas, beliefs. There is an angle to everything you say and do; to every relationship you choose to "nurture."
The Meanings Behind Words for Emotions Aren't Universal, Study Finds | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine In May 1993, Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist Haddaway posed a crucial query to the world: “What is love?” Haddaway asked his question in English, but he received a range of responses—in part, perhaps, because there were so many other languages listeners could use to answer. By analyzing words from nearly 2,500 languages, researchers have found that terms describing emotions—like anger and happiness—can have very different meanings depending on the cultures and geographies where they originate. “We walk around assuming that everyone else’s experience is the same as ours because we name it with the same word, and this suggests that that might not be the case,” study author Kristen Lindquist, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tells Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times. By mapping out colexification in emotional terms, the team was able to identify feelings speakers of a given language considered similar.
Playtype | Typographer's Glossary Serif: Serif's are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface that has serifs is called a serif typeface (or seriffed typeface). Some of the main classifications of Serif type are: Blackletter, Venetian, Garalde, Modern, Slab Serif, Transitional, and Informal. We Have a New Shortest Science Paper. It Also Has No Words, and Is Utterly Brilliant. To most laypeople, a scientific paper is a wordy jumble of jargon, the abstruse monotony occasionally punctured with a confusing chart, and maybe a table or two brimming with numbers. Many scientists recognize that this perception is at least partly deserved, and do their best to communicate their work clearly, correctly and as briefly as possible. To salute their efforts, last year, we drew attention to the shortest scientific paper ever published. Now, we can report that there is actually a tie for the distinction of "shortest scientific paper." "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax," published in 1972 to the journal Linguistic Inquiry, also had no words, and -- in its own fashion -- was equally brilliant. Then, in 1972, Linguistic Inquiry published the Fall issue of its 3rd volume, and on page 528 was a paper called "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax" by Robert Fiengo and Howard Lasnik on exactly this topic. (Image: John T.
The Latest & Greatest Resources Online Bookmarking useful websites in college is on every student’s to do list. Unfortunately, shuffling through your pages and organizing your online tools can be a hassle for everyone. When organizing my own weekly bookmarks this morning, I lost track of time and ended up spending 2+ hours picking the right pages, organizing by categories and, for the most part, getting distracted. That’s why I created a list of recent web pages & online tools for HC- saving you time and bringing you online updates you’ll definitely use at some point in your college career. There are so many useful sites out there today, and this is only a fragment of the lists I have put together in the past. Anyway, here’s my recent list of the latest and greatest resourceful web pages today. Education & Organization Google Scholar Google’s amazing web search for articles and legal documents only. Teux Deux A simple, free, browser based to do list. Task2Gather Free task and online project management site Web-O-Pedia Minutes.io Mint
Language Log » Alignment charts and other low-dimensional visualizations « previous post | next post » The current xkcd: There's a long history of similar diagrams in language-related areas. A century and a half ago, C.S. And this one: About a century ago, we get the "semantic triangle", from Charles Ogden and Ivor A. But those diagrams are not really in direct line to modern "alignment charts", since they represent a graph of pair-wise relations among concepts or processes, rather than points in a low-dimensional vector space whose dimensions have intuitive meaning. For a more appropriate proximate history, we can start with the idea of "semantic differential" spaces, based on the ideas in Charles Osgood, "The Nature and Measurement of Meaning", 1952. And another one: A similar set of ideas lie behind Valence-Arousal theories of emotion: Doug Biber used factor analysis to induce a set of dimensions for register/style/genre: [W]e conjecture that verbal meaning is irreducibly high dimensional. Permalink
How does language emerge? New study provides insights into the first steps -- ScienceDaily How did the almost 6000 languages of the world come into being? Researchers from the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have tried to simulate the process of developing a new communication system in an experiment -- with surprising results: even preschool children can spontaneously develop communication systems that exhibit core properties of natural language. How the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. Observations have shown that when deaf strangers are brought together in a community, they come up with their own sign language in a considerably short amount of time. The children's task was to describe an image with different motifs in a coordination game. How does a language emerge?
writing sijo Further reading: Sijo Primer (an introduction for those new to sijo) by Larry Gross (.pdf) Structure of the Korean Sijo by David McCann (.pdf) Sijo lectures by David McCann Part 1 (form and structure) Part 2 (history) Part 3 (sample analysis of sijo) The sijo (Korean 시조, pronounced SHEE-jo) is a traditional three-line Korean poetic form typically exploring cosmological, metaphysical, or pastoral themes. Sijo are written in three lines, each averaging 14-16 syllables for a total of 44-46 syllables. The first line is usually written in a 3-4-4-4 grouping pattern and states the theme of the poem, where a situation generally introduced. The second line is usually written in a 3-4-4-4 pattern (similar to the first) and is an elaboration of the first line's theme or situation (development). The third line is divided into two sections. Example: excerpt from "Song of my five friends"
The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear The United Nations, as you may or may not know, has designated 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. By fortunate coincidence, this year also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Alphabets Project. In 2009, its founder writes, "times were dark for indigenous and minority cultures." Television and the internet had driven "a kind of cultural imperialism into every corner of the world. 2019, by contrast, turns out to be "a remarkable time in the history of writing systems" when, "in spite of creeping globalization, political oppression, and economic inequalities, minority cultures are starting to revive interest in their traditional scripts." A variety of these scripts have found new lives as the material for works of art and design, and they've also received new waves of preservation-minded attention from activist groups and governments alike. Not all the scripts included in the Atlas are alphabets — "some are abjads, or abugidas, or syllabaries. via Kottke