Buried the lede. If French for a centipede is mille-patte, what do they call a millipede?
It's a simple 10X conversion factor, I guess. That's why in France they say "vingt pieds" instead of "bipedal".
According to the Google, a centipede is a mille pattes and a millipede is a mille patte. French is a subtle language.
Secret plot to make it harder for English speakers. The circonflex is cool because it tells you where there used to be an "s" in a word that got dropped in modern French but not in the medieval language that was close to Anglo-Norman and thus English. So côut is "coust" or "cost"; "hôtel" is hostel (OK, that one is easy anyway); château is "chasteau" which is more like castle, mâitresse is "masitresse" which is more like mistress, etc etc. I mean it doesn't always work but it helps.
||> I had a Polish physics prof in undergrad for mechanics. When using Newton notation he got a real kick out of referring to second derivatives as "umlauts". So, where most people would say, for instance, "x-double-dot", he'd say "x umlaut". He thought it was the funniest damn thing in the world.
what do they call a millipede?
As of yesterday, "you're fired".
I thought that this had already happened. But I guess the deal is that I was told in a class ages ago that it was going to happen and now it has.
5: They only got rid of the circumflexes over i and u, so all of your examples are still safe.
Shades of the Soviet "reforms" of Russian spelling in 1917! Those Communists understand the power of language!
I'm kind of surprised Putin hasn't moved to restore the hard sign.
After I spent all that time learning when to use the goddamn circumflex? Bâtards!
5 beat me to it. Another example is "arrêter," which means "stop," or "arrest" for the purpose of this exercise. Or my own name. "L'évêque" is "the bishop." "Levesque" is how it was written 400 years ago. Canadians are old-fashioned.
5: I never knew that, and it's pretty cool.
Kai loves the fact that knight used to be pronounced kaniggit*.
*I know, not really
15. Wait! Wait! The "k" in "knight" was once pronounced, wasn't it? "Kuh-nig-teh" rather than "kuhniggit," but please don't harsh my illusions. If I lose Monty Python, what do I have left?
15, 17 - Cniht in Old English, roughly "C'nite." It meant "youth" or "boy" unlike most other Euro languages where the word for knight is "horseman." I learned this while unproductively wasting my time this year.
Which is the same word as "Knecht" (meaning, basically, boy servant or slave) as in "Knecht Ruprecht," as in a guy who likes visible nipples and doesn't comment anymore.
All nipples are visible at least some of the time.
Japan saw major writing system reform during the occupation - it's why the name better written/pronounced Inoue is usually spelled Inouye among Japanese-Americans.
The Chinese communists also simplified Chinese characters, which Taiwan uses as a sign that communists are dumbing things down, which would be the case except the KMT originally decided to simplify Mandarin and the CCP just stole the idea from them. Of course, once the CCP did it, the KMT then couldn't. Same with pin yin, which is a clearly superior Romanization system to Wade-Giles, except the Taiwanese can never use it because the Mainlanders got there first.
According to the Google, a centipede is a mille pattes and a millipede is a mille patte. French is a subtle language.
A wonderful distinction when only one is poisonous.
21: Did you see the Twitter account for the Man in the High Castle show, supposedly from the occupying Japanese authorities? They used many more traditional kanji than you'd see in reality (e.g. 國 instead of 国) for precisely that reason.
22: Should Taiwan get any credit for Bopomofo? It's basically kana.
23
When I attended a 'spreading socialist values' class in China, I learned that the CCP replaced 國with 国 because the first is militaristic and violent and the second is patriotic, because it means the homeland is valued as a treasure.
24
Yeah, bopomofo is probably better than pin yin as a phonetic system for Chinese, except the Mainland can't use it because the Taiwanese do.
25: Most of these got their starts as informal simplifications, right? That's one character which Japan and the PRC reformed identically.
27
Yeah. During the cultural revolution there was a second attempt to simplify some characters even more, though it never got anywhere. Now on the Standard Mandarin exam required for certain professions, writing traditional or doubly simplified characters both count as wrong.
If China ever gives up their ridiculous, beautiful characters, it will be typing in pinyin that does it. How often do people actually handwrite anything?
P.S. Bopomafo is inferior simply because regular keyboards use Latin characters.
Some people like pork in their bopomafo, but I think it's delicious with just tofu.
I learned both traditional and simplified characters, and maybe it makes me a reactionary, but the latter suck. They're less elegant, and they make it harder to identify semantic elements.
Socialist governments have tended toward anti-semanticism.
We're allowing foreigners to tell us how to spell in French now? Not on this American's watch, garçon!
All nipples are visible at least some of the time.
Some of the nipples are visible all of the time. But you can't see all of the nipples, all of the time.
But you can't see all of the nipples, all of the time.
You'd be surprised what you can see if you ask the right way.
21: Did you see the Twitter account for the Man in the High Castle show, supposedly from the occupying Japanese authorities? They used many more traditional kanji than you'd see in reality (e.g. 國 instead of 国) for precisely that reason.
That's a cool detail, and also makes me wonder what counts as a "character" for twitter purposes. Code point? Byte?
pin yin, which is a clearly
superior Romanization system to
Wade-Giles, except the Taiwanese
can never use it
Except now they do! But only sometimes! So you have to keep your Wade-Giles handy too. I'm told people use bopomofo for texting, but physical keyboards are all qwerty with (I think) simplified Chinese as second characters. And people do handwrite traditional characters routinely.
Ah well. Does anyone still wear a hat?
Although even he seems to be wearing the hat less lately.
Maybe Rubio should accuse him of secretly being French.
The OP makes me wish I were French so I could have strong feelings on the matter. As is, the circumflex is my favorite diacritic, but only in a genteel Anglo-Saxon manner.
There's no accounting for taste.
36: Code points, not bytes. Kanji and full-size kana are double-byte, but count as single characters for Twitter purposes.
I finally got Roc Island! Wow, that one is very good. (I think.)
I finally got Roc Island! Wow, that one is very good.
Chapeau.
The one that got me was Narnia. For about a year I was pretty sure it was Wisconsin...yeah, not so much.
"Always winter but never Christmas." Easy to make that mistake.
At the risk of sounding neoliberal, I'll just complain that Whole Foods bagels are stupid fluffy and that if they put the cardboard with the salmon into the package the other, it would be easier to grab a slice or two.
So fluffy I feel antisemitic just eating them.
7, 16: I love that it was the clear intention of the corps to work to rule that was the last straw. He may have had some value in bringing a different perspective to an astonishingly rigid institution but it's satisfying to see that gratuitously insulting the lowest-ranked professionals in the national press will bring serious reprisals.
Au sujet de l'OP, this episode of Merci Professeur with Bernard Cerquiglini is charming and informative, as they all are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu0P1BHhezw
Charming because the man himself is vastly so, as well as being erudite in the best possible way. Last time I heard him speak about the status of the longstanding campaign to tame the little hat he was wonderfully, jovially amused by the entire spectacle. And his book on the little hat is a great read: http://www.leseditionsdeminuit.com/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=1990
The title of this post keeps making me think of, "Brother said it was a hat, and so I put it on. Now Daddy's saying, 'Where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?'"
53:
My life changed for the better when I discovered the best bagels in Texas are down the street from my apartment.
Not only do I not get "Roc Island", I don't even know who uses the phrase.
Are we talking the elephant-eating bird or the '90s series starring Charles S. Dutton?
I'm not even very picky about bagels. Just that they aren't supposed to be fluffy.
There's a reason nobody eats salmon on white sandwich bread.
I'm partial to well-cooked eggplant as well.
Roc is an acronym. (If I am reading it right.) Mossy Character's nom de place.
Narnia being in Wisconsin makes sense if Roc Island were in Illinois.
The Quad Cities are where I vomited once.
Obviously, I held it until I got to Iowa.
Somebody should open a vampire-themed Italian restaurant called "Toccata and Fugue"
65 - i knew that Moby "the Hammer" Hick was into that "come on the train, and ride it" crew. infrastuctute, bitches!
I guess that was obscure. Some of you may recall the song "C'mom the train ... And Ride It" by Quad City DJs. For years, I've sung it to myself as "C'mon the train .. And Vomit."
I basically haven't understood the last 20 posts on this thread. Bernard Cerquiglini? Roc Island? The relationship between vampires and "Toccata and Fugue"? I briefly wondered if I'd had a stroke.
Youtube should at least clear up the toccata reference. Natilo's reasoning in considering it apposite may however remain obscure.
I got the toccata reference. I don't get the vampire connection.
I was driving from Ohio to Nebraska and must have eaten something bad the night before I left.
One time when my old band was on tour, we played Kansas City, MO, and decided the next morning to pop over the border to actual Kansas just to add another state to the list of states visited. Shortly after we crossed the border, the bassist got violently ill, so we pulled over on the highway shoulder, where he promptly deposited the contents of his stomach. Later that day he remarked that he was really glad that, of all the states to barf in, he got to barf in Kansas.
57: like being valedictorian of summer school.
Listen to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Total vampire music.
I am often confused during discussions involving vampires because we refer to Horowitz as "Vlad the Impaler". And really he seems to have been a nice enough man when not allowed near a piano, where he becomes like a heat-seeking destroyer of taste. Although I'll freely admit that this reaction seem unjustifiable given that we regularly play Godowski "variations" for enjoyment. I think the distinction is that Godowski is beyond taste.
75: It's the music from the ancient Mac game "Dark Castle".
Also this is the best reaction to the "death" of the little hat: https://twitter.com/Lohanomi/status/696372229026750464
I think English should bring back the medial 's'.
Pokémon is Japanese-animated white-face. That's not why I hated it, but it sounds better than saying I want to watch the kids die because of their squeaky little voices over-explaining everything. (On topic because of the funny mark over the 'e'.)