I may have more Afghans than African Americans in my FB feed. Definitely more French Canadians. Only one Uyghur, though. Couple of Hungarians -- both law professors. The Irish (both of whom are comfortable with that language) are a solicitor and a solicitor in training. I have some Swiss Germans, and it's fun to figure out their posts in the Swiss language. A bunch of German cousins-in-law. Some Dutch people. A Jordanian doctor.
No Assiniboine.
I get Swedish and Irish, sometimes, from folx I met here. I also get Greek from a college classmate. But really, I'm not very diverse on this front either.
Can we count women towards the diversity of our loved ones? My wife is a woman, and so is my mom, and my daughter is a girl.
I hate Facebook's interface with such a passion that since I no longer have to do it for my job, I pretty much only log in to see pictures of my nieces and nephews. So I only have about 20 friends. But anyway: Indonesian (the most mainstream one; I don't remember the name), Japanese, and Cambodian/Khmer are the most frequent ones.
On Twitter it's Spanish and Turkish most frequently, with Arabic somewhat less often.
The more fun thing is hosting international guests. I've started a wall map where my guests can put numbered pins into their birthplaces (or home locales) and sign a guestbook next to their number. It causes a LOT of comment. The other day my plumber's assistant spent about ten minutes looking at it and asking me questions. Cartography FTW!
Somehow international houseguests aren't very curious to work central Texas into their itinerary.
I don't have a Facebook. On the twitters it's Arabic by a long shot followed by Persian, Turkish, and French.
On Facebook: Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Nepali, possibly other North Indian languages that I can't distinguish, especially when written in the Latin script.
On Twitter: Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and French, but I've done much more self-selection by language.
3.last: that's awesome!
4: Their loss!
Seriously, I've hosted a fair number of Fu/br!ghts over the past decade, and many of them were studying in colleges across the U.S. South and other non-major-metros. It actually makes for more interesting conversations, since they have seen parts of the U.S. that NY/CA-centric television did not prepare them for.
I've started a wall map where my guests can put numbered pins into their birthplaces (or home locales) and sign a guestbook next to their number
My former workplace used to do that. It was very popular with the visitors. I really liked seeing them connect with our collection in such a personal way.
One of the most moving entries I can recall was by an older Palestinian man visiting with his daughter who wrote an address in Jerusalem that his family probably hadn't inhabited for at least 2 generations. He still had the keys.
Cartography FTW!
:-)
--
It's very weird how the first workday of my week ended over 3 hours ago and it's still Sunday morning in the US.
witt: that's a super-cool idea. barry, how is mordor treating you?
marginally on-topic due to international guests, are you coming to narnia this month, ajay? I'm leaving the 22nd but I'd love to have you over if you're around.
also, heebs, I hope you're feeling better. you've inspired me to re-book the objine appt I missed so that I can get my hormone levels checked and see if perhaps we can improve my migraines that way (it's dumb of me not to have checked properly). and I was thinking that you have been so brave to choose your surgeries and go forward with a plan that also included all the geeblets your heart desired. I think in your position I would have equivocated. I second the idea of allowing yourself to vent at every annoying person and excuse yourself simultaneously by explaining about the hormones.
barry: it's annoying when there's no new content on the internet all monday daytime. I mean, not no new content, but less. you have to wait for america to wake up. it can become the teo and al and barry show? oh man I am not looking forward to either 12-hour time change to america or my return to narnia in august: dulles to SFO to seoul to narnia. it's like, 3/4 of the way around the world. the girls and I agreed the garbage itinerary was worth it to fly singapore airlines rather than buy round-the-world tickets on united. and even the extra money. I think we may have to deplane and spend the night in SF because sis am departure from dulles, six-hour layover in SFO, two in seoul, fuck that. the girls and husband x did it in january and I think it was 36 hours door-to-door. no, he says it was 36 hours itinerary! I'll arrange an SF meetup if so! I'll make everyone come to my hotel suite instead of having to go out, like I did in NYC last time. room service can deliver shrimp cocktails and stuff; it's so satisfactory. I'll have to bribe someone to bring me soft tacos, though. I read an article that hotels in general are all phasing out room service--god why? room service is the best thing ever. (unless one wants one's eggs to be hot, but that's why one must order strategically.)
He still had the keys.
I bet some bastard's gone and changed the locks, too.
Finnish, Dutch, and Danish, most often. Something about those Northern Europeans. Also sometimes French, Spanish, and Korean.
yeah, but dutch isn't real. it's a made-up language which english-speakers of mentat ability employ as a sort of in joke.
barry, how is mordor treating you?
Arrakis, alameida. Mordor's the big neighbor next door. And I like it very much indeed. I'm not in a proper compound, just an apartment building in the middle of a regular neighborhood so when I walk out the door I'm on the street. The Arab street, so to speak. Which is just how I like it. Unfortunately it's now too hot to do the 2 hour walk around after work to get acquainted with the neighborhood thing I was doing my first week here.
I'll have to add some content to the blog when I get off work. Though there is just so much to do there that I'm exhausted when I get home.
I'm at GMT +3. Also we're on summer hours now which means quitting time is at 14:30. And Ramadan hours will shave another hour off of that (with hour later start too, woohoo no getting up at 5:30 for a month).
Haven't read the thread or the other thread, but thought I should make my entry, because I might win the coveted booby prize.
No black friends (quite possibly no friends at all, but that's debatable), and not on Facebook.
Yeah, hm, let's see: Spanish (New World and Old), Russian, Serbian, French, Nepali, Hindi, Ukrainian, Chinese (Mandarin), Vietnamese, Hmong, Gaelic, Ojibwe, Dakota, Danish, Somali, Oromo, Amharic, Arabic, AAVE and probably one or two more I'm forgetting.
You know what's messed up though? One of my friends here in town posted about the fact that his step-sister had died under suspicious circumstances recently in another city, and apparently people started shooting their mouths off, saying that he was making it up as part of some kind of bid for extra sympathy/power within the scene. Which is ridiculous, 'cause 2 seconds of googling brings up plenty of information attesting to the reality of the case. People are awful.
Hmm. French (France French, Canada French, Algeria French), Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, German, Polish.
18 makes me glad to be a boringly civilized petit bourgeois liberal with occasional pretensions of leftism.
Hebrew, Swedish, Arabic, and I think one of you occasionally posts some Irish/Gaelic (what's the diff?). All vanishingly small.
o yeah a little French. No German, although I do have a few German friends.
20.1: Yeah, that's ultimately why I've cut off contact with so many of my former friends in the radical scene. Constant backstabbing may be "fun" for some values of fun, but it doesn't really get us anywhere vis-a-vis a revolution.
10: Thanks, al! I don't know if admiration is due exactly but it's a nice sentiment.
22: You just need to talk the agents of institutional oppression into joining the group. Then the revolution and the back-stabbing could go together!
That would never work.
The Revolution will not be Facebooked.
All the failed ones are Twittered though .
I used to follow an Assiniboine woman on Twitter.
At one point some Ukrainian guy (a friend of someone I knew slightly in college) friended me and was constantly posting links from some Ukrainian website, so there was Ukrainian all over my feed. I eventually blocked the website, so there's much less of that now.
Otherwise, my feed is actually pretty monolingual. Occasionally some Arabic, Irish, or Navajo.
I bet I have the most Turkish Sign Language on my facebook feed. I win!
I'm going to start putting Esperanto in everyone's feed.
This is a variant on Humiliation, right?
Define "friend".
If possible could you please schedule your layover in SF to coincide with one of my cake scaling etc weekends? We have got so much cake in the house. Everyone come eat CAKE!
Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hungarian and Albanian. And I'm sad to say I don't know which Indian languages my friends speak.
I sometimes wonder if I'm boring my foreign facebook friends, so it's nice to hear I make people feel cosmopolitan.
I've got French, Irish, and Norwegian in my FB feed. The Norwegian only because I have one Norwegian friend ('but some of my best friends come from Norway,' of course). The French is French-Canadian. I feel so provincial.
40: Well, sure. And Canada isn't a real country.
It's a lot closer to French than to English, thougn.
Both Facebook's and Twitter's translate algorithms think I have more languages in my feed than I actually do.
Oh, I do also have a Finnish friend, so Finnish shows up from time to time.
I've been listening to the Quebecois news on satellite radio while driving in an attempt to improve my lame French, and while it's been interesting there are two problems. First, it turns out that "worthwhile Provincial initiative" is almost (but not quite) as boring in French as in English. Second, while 2/3 commenters speak in a fairly comprehensible to me if slightly accented French, the remaining 1/3 speak with some intense, totally incomprehensible Quebec accent that just sounds like a honking goose, to the point that I wonder if some French Canadians are actually for real honking geese.
They don't call them "Canada geese" for nothing.
that I wonder if some French Canadians are actually for real honking geese.
Tabarnak! You surely don't really wonder anything of the sort.
The origins of French Canadian French predate the Parisian standardization of the language. Québécois French is an odd mix of regional variations which crossed the Atlantic before the French Revolution, along with some "English" Canadian (including English, Irish, and Scots immigrant) influences. The people who speak this language are not geese, I can assure you, and they pretty much own the production of maple syrup, along with the production of world-class hockey players. Calisse!
And, o, sorry to sound so earnest, but anything that smacks of anti-French-Canadian bigotry really gets my blood up. This has to do with the history of the Orange Order in Canada, and their institutionalized (and often quite powerful) disdain for the "lower," Catholic (both French and Irish) orders.
It's just one of those odd, quirky, Canadian things.
Carry on!
A quirky, Canadian thing like ... being part goose? We already know what you people do with bears.
Apart from my own two languages, I see occasional French, Czech, Italian and Swedish from facebook friends. I can understand most of the French but not the others. I don't get any German which I would partly understand.
I'm assuming that belonging to several Facebook translators' groups counts as cheating.
9: I am indeed coming to Narnia, but a month later - at the end of July/early August, not end of June/early July as normal - which in Narnian time is about 300 years so all the malls, chicken rice joints, quirky furniture shops etc will be overgrown by the jungle and only the occasional chess piece will remain as evidence that they once existed. Anyway I'll drop you an email with dates etc.
My facebook feed is mostly English but occasionally breaks out into Mandarin, Tagalog, Malay, Hungarian, Spanish, Hebrew, French, German, Sloane and Valley Girl. And Pashtu and Arabic but that's not being posted by people whose first language is Pashtu or Arabic.
Facebook: English, German, Irish, Bulgarian (why? search me).
Twitter: waay more diverse. Quite a bit of Arabic.
53: aw, crap, I'll miss you. I do sometimes think how long would it take for all of narnia to be eaten up by the jungle if everyone were to ghost. not all that long, is my feeling. conversely, we have 1000% more glass-sided condo towers than when you were here last. condos built in the 90s have gotten torn down to be replaced with buildings that alternate between glistening expanses of glass and actual vines, trained up onto 20-story-high laser-cut metal lattices. it's eco-friendly somehow, allegedly. better than the glass-only ones that need continual frigid air-conditioning, I suppose, but they mainly exist to look attractive IMO--at which function they serve very well. they have purple flowers.
This seems like the perfect thread to ask whether anyone here knows of a reputable certification or placement test for Arabic language skills in the US? Looking for something that would lend itself to college applications. Thanks in advance!
56: damn. Small God-Daughter and family will be away as well... just me and the dragons this holiday then.
ASL for "I am typing," but only if you read between the lines.
Wait there are Esperantists here? I always kind of want to learn it and then I'm like "wait, but [obvious observation.]"
I submit that Indonesian should be the universal language. It is so far devoid of annoying characteristics, like it has neither inflection nor intonation, but then I'm only on Lesson 13 and haven't learned 3rd person pronouns yet so it's possible I'm completely wrong. Also of course in contrast to Esperanto the root system is 100% unfamiliar and nothing sounds like anything known to the English speaker with the exception of the statement "yes, ma'am," which sounds for all the world like you are saying leeringly "yeah, boo."
54: Tagalog!!! Of course, it was very silly of me to forget that one.
60: I spent more time than I should have learning it in my free time in college. Thankfully, I'm horrible at languages. I've also taken it up again recently because it was added to Duolingo just last week.
It's stupidly easy so if you want to use it to talk about hundidoj kaj katidoj--because that's basically the limit of my vocabulary--I'm up for it.
I spent almost an entire day feeling kind of embarrassed that I didn't have any black friends, or regular faceposts in different languages. But I reassured myself that I don't have that many friends anyway and also my friend list on facebook is limited to people I actually know and are at least somewhat friends with.
Then I remembered that I did actually have a black friend, and that Spanish, German (almost exclusively from a Chinese guy, which is kind of hilarious) and Korean posts also show up pretty regularly on my wall, and the fact that I have such a so few friends and such a small friends list went from making me feel a little better to making me feel a lot worse because clearly I'm an idiot.
57 Definitely sounds like the kind of thing I should know about but don't outside of what's given at various universities within their programs. But I bet that dagger aleph would know all about it.
63: Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo.
(The only Esperanto phrase I know.)
"There appears to be a frog in my bidet"?
Don't be subjective. Insist upon the reality of the frog.
My kid was explaining Esperanto play-on-words jokes to me yesterday. With great glee and relish.
65: thanks! Hopefully dagger aleph will show up soon-ish...
I was going with "lasagna is a frog in my bidet" which I thought maybe was an ancient esperanto saying.
We already know what you people do with bears.
This is coming from Emerson, isn't it? I never should have told him about that Marian Engel book.
Without even looking I know I have black friends who are , collectively, fluent in Spanish, French, Portugese, Italian, Dutch, Ibo, and Swahili. One of them probably knows Hebrew, and another probably knows Russian. And they're not even just Facebook friends. Some of them even know a smattering of Bengali and Hindi; one of them is a scholar of Sanskrit.
A few black friends left from the larger number of them when we were in middle/high school together. Languages other than English include German, Georgian, Greek, Russian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Polish, French, Dutch and Italian.