The Get-to-know-the-board-members thread

Originally posted by Arch
I'd study four years of German in high school. And it's an interesting language. It is very structured. Now, I'm studying Swedish for fun, and it has a few vocabulary words similar to German, which I am familiar with.
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I've studied German for 8 years now, and I still feel like I know nothing :s And yes, it IS very structured, I've almost studied all the grammar you can study, now I'm trying to learn a huge amount of words. Quite a job :eek:

French and German are nice and interesting languages, but sometimes I just feel hopeless and frustrated when I don't understand some grammar thing, I don't find the right words etc. I chose Fench because it sounded so cool :)

Swedish is fun, and quite easy to learn :)
 
Originally posted by Blue Moon
Actually Astarte your french is pretty good ; the only mistake was to be "j'en conviens" ; the rest is perfect :D In fact you made more mistakes in the following sentence, wich is in english ;)
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:rolleyes: well..... you misspelled wich :p

I agree with VultureCulture: anyways, i like accents in english, they make a language more vivid imo. the scandinavian accent f.e. is very funny to listen to (there once was a voice thread on the opeth forum). but others are really disgusting in my ear, like all this yo-yo-muthafuka-slang-stuff.
I like Scandinavian accents, i prefer British to NorthAmerican, German accent is funny but i like it. I don't like hispanic accent, specially mine :)
 
LOL I thought about letting that last reply for like 12 hours just to see the reactions but I guess I didn't have the courage of trying to convince you all it was only a joke half a day after it happened :lol:

@Fathervic : hey don't worry pal, I didn't take it as an offense against the best language of the world ;) I see your point, but I guess we won't agree on the subject...

@|ngenius : Well I was more talking about the poetic diversity of the language than romanticism per se, I guess the sentence was badly written. Anyway, I'm not saying English is a bad language (or any other language for that matter) ; it strikes me as being very simple though, so it's good to learn as a second tongue, but I can assure you that most people I have met that spoke english first (and I live in Canada, and I've been to the States) didn't know another language. I don't think it's agood thing, personnally. Once again I want to be cautious with my words, I don't want to offend anyone, but I still think that a complex language is more versatile, you can play more with it, so you can construct sentences with more richness, more substance. (okay, I want to say for now : if everybody disagrees, or even one person, I don't want to talk about that for weeks, okay ? I just shot myself in the foot for saying all this, I read it again and I'm thinking about the hard time I'd have trying to defend my opinions :cry: )

I can understand why someone would not agree with my views, though, but I still don't agree at all with Rahvin on the issue : I mean, I can be pretty straightforward all the time, we french speaker don't always speak in verse, you know ;) ... I'm hungry = J'ai faim, after all.

@Soulscar : the example you gave with the humongous word made me think about something I really like about your mother tongue : you can "legally" create new words, if I'm correct ? That's what I heard... Like "a black wooden table with a medium-sized ashen-grey rabbit" can become, err, "schwarzentablenwüdenmediumsizenashengreyishrabbittein"
if you want it, you can make it up like this and it's correct... ?Whoa. I love it :D And I would love to know german just to check out the poetry you guys have...Oh well I can still read the booklets of Lacrimosa, but I guess this is not worth a nobel prize...

@Terria : Cool, camarade :)

@Kovenant : Would you please explain :confused: I never had the chance to read 1984... I know the Big Brother thing, but...

@Astarte : :( :p

EDIT : changed some sentences so they'd have a little bit more sense :)

Blue Moon (who never thought he'd write this much about this not-that-interesting subject... Err, I should have studied physics)

(hell no ;) )
 
@bluemoon: of course i was referring to being straightforward about concepts slightly more complex than 'help! police!'. ;) let's consider questions, for instance: how does do you ever think? sound in french? i usually find the riches of a language like french totally wasted in - say - newspaper articles and the like. it's possibly a good thing for poetry, but i don't like poetry in general (the only exception being t.s. eliot, and he wrote in english as we all know).
in songs, i tend to like french only in its most aggressive forms (in punk songs, for instance, i find it's really interesting). german - as far as i can understand it, which is not that far at all - only ever works along with violence imo, whereas i happen to like spanish a lot. italian is merely funny, i'm afraid. :)

rahvin.
 
Greetings.

@Rahvin : Well I can translate do you ever think ?for you if you want ; this is the closest translation as far as I know : t'arrive-t-il de penser ? Not very difficult to write, when you consider that this "-" ponctuation is quite common in french.

I don't really understand your point concerning the newspaper, though. I mean, probably that we use more ink to write the same sentence (words in french are longer than their homologue in english, most of the time), but it remains the same in substance ; as I said, we have more sinonyms, but it hardly changes anything. But if you write, let's say, a description of a meal (its taste, its smell, etc) in french, I can bet that it would be more complex, but certainly not a loss of space or time, as there are very specific words for tastes, smells, textures, so the description would be more precise, in order to pinpoint the closest possible feeling you want to express. French is oriented towards the senses, so a good writer will make you taste the food before you even look at the picture :)

Anyway, I think you already know this, as itallian is maybe the closest language to french, so I guess it's the same for you...

Heh, hope nobody's bored :)

Blue Moon, who is going to sleep right now. G'night !
 
@bluemoon: i've studied french in school, and i knew that rendition of do you ever think? you mentioned... i'm not very proficient in that language though, so i feel i might be awfully wrong in debating the stuff, but...
if i say do you ever think about being a bear?, i do agree that t'arrive-t-il de penser d'etre an ours? is a good translation (although i feel it misses the ever part... maybe adding jamais somewhere?). on the other hand, i find the synthesis implied by the simple t'arrive-t-il de penser? as a translation of do you ever think? (meaning: is thinking an action that occurs to you from time to time?) to be much poorer than the original. there is possibly another, more peculiar sentence in french to express the same thing (and you surely know it, whereas i don't :) ), but i guess it's longer and it lacks that certain in-your-face bonus which i think it's specific of the english language (but i don't know all languages in the world, so i surely can't tell).

as for newspaper articles, my point was not just a matter of space (and yes, it happens in italian too ;) ). i feel that to simply report some piece of news and comment on it, english not only takes less time/words, but it beats less around the bush.

as a side note, i just noticed how my italian - unfortunately - creeps in through my structures: why in the world would an english native speaker ever write 'beats less around the bush'? something probably either does it or doesn't. and yet i keep on applying (deceiving?) shades of significance to matters that are maybe best seen in black and white...

rahvin. (hoping no english teacher from his uni ever sees this forum)
 
i forget the exact name they use for the language in 1984, but the syntax went something like this from english to it:

good = good
very good = plusgood
more than very good = doubleplusgood
more than very bad = doubleplusungood

as you can see, it gets kinda annoying... and i realize the english on the left wasn't so great but im bored in school right now...
 
I couldn't learn french if my life depended on it, cause they talk so fast I can't even notice a separation between words. A sentence sounds like one big word! And in the rare case that I am able to distinguish one word from another, it takes me all day to figure out what they mean!
Yes, I'm slow
 
@ Blue Moon: Errr, well...it doesn't work exactly like that, I mean, you cannot make words that are THAT absurd.

Maybe it's just the fact that we put together words in writing that English people would keep separated, like, to use my example again: "Personenbeförderungsschein" is literally a "licence for the transport of people", we can just row nouns like that, you see?
We have a lot of those things in legal or administrative language:
If you want to run a pub you`ll need a Gaststättenbetriebserlaubnis; a high voltage long distance line is a "Hochspannungsüberlandleitung" and so on - it can be monstrous.....


If you want great German lyrics, which are imho really artistic, then check out a German band named "Subway to Sally", they play some sort of Metal with some folk and some mediaeval elemts, but they are a class of their own, hard to describe. They've got the finest German lyrics I have ever listened to!

Just check www.subwaytosally.de and then the songs

"Wenn Engel hassen" ("When Angels hate"), "Herrin des Feuers" ("Mistress of the flame" - sounds stupid in English...) and "Kleid aus Rosen" ("Dress made of Roses").

OK, I have now seen that the magic of those words just goes away, as soon as they are translated .....English doesn't get the mood! But I have just noticed that there are official translations, too - I don't like them.....:)
 
Well, in 1984 the language they used was called Newspeak.
The Big Brother (ie government, form of power) tried to control thought in various ways, and one of them was by forcing people to use this language, which through time would lead in its predominance and the extinction of other languages, such as Oldspeak (not sure about the term here, but anyway it is the term for English as we know it, the common language people spoke).
So, Newspeak was based on limiting the language as much as possible, by constantly reducing the number of words, getting rid of the "disturbing/wrong" words, and limiting the meaning of the remaining words to "acceptable" ideas.
Also grammar structure and syntax were simplified as much as possible, eg they had only one word to express the verb/noun/whatever that had to do with a meaning (for example they had one word to express the meaning of cut-knife-cutting etc).
This way people in a few generations wouldn't even be able to think (let alone express) "dangerous" ideas and meanings.
 
Originally posted by rahvin
:wave:

i play real-strategy games like warcraft, heroes of might and magic, empire earth, then go around repeating dumb sentences picked up from military units in such games;
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Somebody called for an exterminator? :lol:
 
:) I'm new I'm new I'm new :)


/me getting on your nerves :loco:



Siren (aka smartass of the forum... :rolleyes: )
 
Originally posted by Siren
Well, in 1984 the language they used was called Newspeak.
The Big Brother (ie government, form of power) tried to control thought in various ways, and one of them was by forcing people to use this language, which through time would lead in its predominance and the extinction of other languages, such as Oldspeak (not sure about the term here, but anyway it is the term for English as we know it, the common language people spoke).
So, Newspeak was based on limiting the language as much as possible, by constantly reducing the number of words, getting rid of the "disturbing/wrong" words, and limiting the meaning of the remaining words to "acceptable" ideas.
Also grammar structure and syntax were simplified as much as possible, eg they had only one word to express the verb/noun/whatever that had to do with a meaning (for example they had one word to express the meaning of cut-knife-cutting etc).
This way people in a few generations wouldn't even be able to think (let alone express) "dangerous" ideas and meanings.
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They used that language so that people would start loosing words to protect themselves, think for themselves… I was expecting the end. If you don’t agree with the “system” then it will try to assimilate you, if it fails then… it destroys the host… for I have the opinion that it isn’t our society who serves us as hosts… we are her hosts because without us she would collapse.
 
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