У народов Океании "мужской дом", клуб для взрослых мужчин-воинов, прошедших инициацию, куда закрыт вход для женщин и подростков называется "хива" у полинезийцев и "кивунг" у папуасов.

Он стоит высоко на сваях и взобраться туда можно только по узкому бревну с небольшими зарубками. В зарубки можно вставить только большой палец ноги и этот акробатический этюд может исполнить только достаточно сильный мужчина.

Состарился? Ослабел? Не можешь? Тогда тебе нечего делать в собрании воинов.
Такой вот простой экзамен на ГТО.

Индейская "кива", дом воинов устроена по тому же принципу. Попасть в неё и выйти можно только через достаточно высоко расположенный люк, подтянувшись на руках и осуществив "выход силой".

☆ индейская "кива"



( Read more...Collapse )

My prof gave this supposed aphorism as an example of how you cannot really translate from a language that has articles into one that doesn't.

"Être homme n'est rien. Être un homme, c'est quelque chose. Être l'homme, c'est tout."

I know a bit of French, but I cannot grasp the meaning of this. I mean I can see some gradation here, like etre homme - belong to the human species, etre un homme - less biological, more psychological/intellectual and etre l'homme - to be the best of humans, fully formed, exemplary.

I googled the phrase but google didn't return anything except three Polish sources which ultimately point to a book by a certain Sobolew, issued in 1952. Maybe I'll be able to investigate it further on Monday.

So I have two questions right now:

1. Does this aphorism really exist?
2. Does it make any sense to a native speaker?

I found the explanation of "être homme à"
https://www.linternaute.fr/dictionnaire/fr/definition/etre-homme-a/
but it's not exactly what I was looking for.

I found a Chinese proverb "Etre homme c'est facile, être un homme est difficile" that seems to back up the gradation.

But Saint-Exupéry's "Etre homme, c'est précisément être responsable." seems to add more value to "etre homme" than the others do.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Is there a special word (phrase) for a (old master's) painting whose authenticity is beyond disoute and which is used as a benchmark, a point of reference for authenticating and establishing the authorship of other paintings presumably from the same period and / or by the same master? Many thanks!!!

Source is a 1934 film, Mandalay, starring Kay Francis. Her character, Tanya, is abandoned by her lover as they cruise the Far East in his yacht. She takes up the only work she can find, "hostessing" in a Rangoon "nightclub" until she gathers enough funds to escape that life. "Spot White is her name?" asks a patron as she makes a glamorous entrance one evening. "It ought to be Spot Cash." I get that reference, but why she would be called Spot White in the first place is a mystery. Any aid appreciated, thanks.

I am watching a lecture by Robert Sapolsky about human behaviour and similarities/differences to/from other animals, and and at about 00:13:20 he talks about male chimpanzees patrolling the borders of their territory, and then I cannot understand the logic of what he's saying.

"And what is very significant is almost certainly all of these male chimps are brothers or close cousins be really scared when the males in the next valley over are getting along with each other because this may be one consequence."

https://youtu.be/YWZAL64E0DI

What puzzles me is this "be" before "really scared". Does it make sense to you? Maybe he made some shortcut or maybe I didn't hear something. Could you please help me with this?

☆


"Dispilio tablet", 6 тысячелетие до нашей эры

✔ Какая письменность самая древняя в мире?

Сейчас общепризнанная хронология возникновения древнейших систем письма такая:
☆ 35 век до н.э. - Шумер
☆ 32 век до н.э. - Мохенджо-Даро (Индия)
☆ 31 век до н.э. - Элам (Иран)
☆ 30 век до н.э. - Древний Египет

Но в 1993 году греческие археологи обнаружили в пещере на севере Греции деревянную табличку со знаками неизвестной письменности, датированную ~5260 годом до нашей эры, то есть почти на две тысячи лет старше древнейших из известных систем письма.

( Read more...Collapse )

В древнем ИЕ языке было очень немного корней.
Собственно говоря, их и сейчас очень немного. Например, на весь корпус английского языка в миллион с лишним слов приходится лишь 1385 корней, от которых все эти слова и образованы. А русский корневой словарь имеет и того меньше - 1100 с небольшим "гнёзд"-корней.

И каждый исконный в языке корень даёт массу "побегов", как настоящий корень и порой "ветки" так далеко расходятся друг от друга, что сразу и не угадаешь, что они "выросли" из одного корня.

✔ Вот например слово "дуга". Какой в нём корень?

( Read more...Collapse )

☆


"Пуп земли"

Большинство жителей острова Пасхи не подозревают что они живут в Чили и их остров официально называется "Исла де Паскуэнсе".

Они называют свой остров "Те Пито о те Хенуа", "пуп земли".
Вот он на фотографии.

А финны знают, что они живут в Финляндии, но предпочитают называть свою страну "Суоми"-"озёрная".

Венгры называют свою страну "Модьёр", Magyar, а индийцы "Бхарат" - भरत.

А какие ещё страны их жители называют по своему?

Я пока знаю такие:

( Read more...Collapse )

In 2006, the band Snakeskin produced the album Canta'Tronic which included the song Cold Stone Hands. This song was performed by Tilo Wolff, Lacrimosa. As far as I understand, no written lyrics of this song exist, and I'm not sure if there are lyrics, actually. However, there are words there, and I'll be grateful to anybody who write them (or some part of them, for the song is long) down.
The song is available at youtube and some other sites. As for some lines that spread over music sites, they are copied from the album booklet and are (may be) just part of the lyrics.

"Do you want a street devil and a house angel, or vice versa?" meaning, "Is he nice to you in front of others but belittle you when you're alone, or does he rag on you in front of others but treat you well when it's just you and him?" regarding husbands.

Gran asked this occasionally when family women got together to discuss life, and I wonder if anyone else were familiar with the question.

How do you pronounce this word? Die-mension, or dee-mension, or dim-mension?
Is there any geograhical or social correlation?

Can anyone translate this for me? An acquaintance found it with his wife's father's papers.



Thanks in advance for your help.

In one version of the story of the Jostedalsrypa, the girl is supposed to have exclaimed "Mor – vetle rjupa". Although it should doubtless be obvious to me, I would be most grateful if someone could help me out by explaining what "vetle" means.

Given two sentences:

1. This paper may not [caesura] be entirely right
2. This paper may be [caesura] not entirely right

Do you (a) perceive them both as equally grammatical, (b) if yes, feel any difference in meaning, even very slight?

In particular, do you feel that (1) is a tiny step toward "This paper cannot be entirely right", which does have a distinctly different connotation?

As always, please indicate what version of English do you use.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Does the phrase sound OK? It's about the USA vis-a-vis North Korea and its potential threats. Thanks a lot!

So I'm trying to figure out the pronunciations of certain Navajo words for a novel of mine that has Navajo characters in it, and I'm getting a little confused by some of the things this site is saying. Here's one:

I/i - Like the i in hit or the i in police.

What the FRACK? The I in hit and the I in police are TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SOUNDS! The first is IH, while the second is EE. What is this person trying to say? At first I thought they were pronouncing "police" as "poh-lyse" rather than "poh-lease" (which would be hilarious, comparing police to little blood-sucking parasites), but given that the name of the Navajo people is Diné and I know for a fact that that is pronounced dean-AY, this means the site writer pronounces the English word "hit" as "heat." WTF???

Then there's this letter: ł . The site I'm on says this:

"This sound is a lateral fricative that doesn't really exist in English. The Navajo pronunciation sounds like the "ll" in the Welsh name "Llewellyn." Some English speakers can pronounce it well if they try to pronounce the "breathy l" in the word clue without the c in front of it."

What the FRACK does any of that even MEAN? The LL in Llewellyn is just a fracking L! I even checked with other sites that provide spoken pronunciations of words to verify that the LL in Llwellyn is just an L.

And what does "breathy L" even mean??? Also, I try saying "clue" without the C, and it's just "loo." To add to the confusion, another site said the word "Łizhin" is pronounced clih-djihn, meaning ł is said like cl, which contradicts the above. So... what the fraggedy frack? (Oh, and if the I in Navajo words is EE, shouldn't that be clee-djeen?)

Oh and I have no fracking idea how nasal vowels are supposed to work. Their explanation doesn't help me, their examples, French words with nasal vowels, all end in consonants, I don't know how to remove the consonants to say the vowels.

“The trust-building measures led to the signing of the trade agreement in 2000, and the economic assistance agreement, the next year, in 2001.” (In 2000 the trade agreement was signed; in 2001 the assistance agreement was signed.) Both "the next year" and 2001 sjpi;d be present in the phrase, for emphasis. Many thanks!

Запись сделана с помощью m.livejournal.com.

Hoare had never heard of a Captain Kent. "A bit of a jump for him, isn't it?"
"Yes. He was slated for Eager, 28, but Their Lordships at the Admiralty had to give her to Plummer. Then Kent's uncle, Featherstonehaugh, put up such a row in the House that they gave him Vantage instead to keep him quiet."
"A Plummer for Kent, eh?" he whispered. Hoare surprised himself at the words. He could not remember the last time he had uttered an impromptu joke.
-------
Year 1805, talking of royal navy officers

Dictionaries give me various words for baskets and small baskets and shopping baskets but I very specifically need something that would translate to "handbasket". Any help? Thanks.

"The words of Luke 12:25 are important as they are perhaps echoed in Brueghel’s overall conclusion; the merry spirit and intrinsic beauty of his painting leads one away from morose reflections on mortality and JUDGMENT to an affirmation of the essential joy of life, which prevails in a world ruled by Good, despite the challenges of the human condition". (Caps Lock is mine)

(Luke 12:25 ‘And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the measure of his life?’)

What does JUDGMENT mean in this context? Many thanks!

The passage from a description of Lucas Cranach’s “Golgotha”:
“Against a jigsaw of jagged-edged clouds, rising ever denser into a thunderous mass of gloom, hangs the crucified Christ, flanked on either side by a thief in three-quarter profile. Beneath them crowd an impossible arrangement of figures, lovers, loathers, and the merely curious. In their amorphous arrangement Cranach manifests a blatant disregard for visual perspective, indeed of any understanding of space whatsoever; his interest, instead, lies in the attainment of the greatest possible visual impact. Thus piled on top, and squashed up against, one another are a cacophony of moustachioed and bearded onlookers, families and soldiers clad in armour, their spears and axes breaking the horizon formed by the tops of the myriad of heads, hats and helmets. As an exercise in perspective it is a peculiarity that works neither from below nor above but which achieves the effect of an uproarious denouement of shock, anger, gloating and motherly anguish.

        The formula, in fact, varies little from that of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Crucifixion of 1538 in the Art Institute, Chicago (see M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London, 1978, pp. 144-145, no. 377, illustrated), which itself is the culmination of over twenty years’ worth of compositional evolution, starting with the Düreresque 1503 Crucifixion in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich which SHOWS THE SCENE SIDE ON (op. cit., p. 66, no. 5).” 

I understand everything but “shows the scene side on”. What does it mean in the context? Many thanks!

"The Stadt- und Pfarrkirche St. Marien zu Wittenberg (Town and Parish Church of St. Mary's) is the civic church of the German town of Lutherstadt Wittenberg". Thanks to all who care to reply!

"Next year, a French trading house built in Muscovy a compound for its merchants - doings therein were governed by French laws alone". That is, not by Russian laws, as anywhere beyond the compound, but by French ones. Does the phrase sound grammatically OK?

☆ On the genesis "Adam's apple in Russian

***

Одно из самых смешных слов в турецком для меня - "кыкырдак", кадык, kıkırdak.

Но происхождение его в русском для меня неясно. Может быть, это всё таки трансформация исконного слова "горло"?
По-польски горло - "гардло". И может быть оно упростилось до "гардло" - *гардлык - *гардык - *кардык - кадык ?

★ Для сравнения - это же слово в других европейских языках :

( Read more...Collapse )

I'm not sure I've understood correctly.

Irving Finkel is talking about distracting Lamashtu by giving her some "feminine things", like comb or hair pins, but at the very beginning of that list he says something that sounds like "a sandwich box". Which would be very strange in ancient Mesopotamia, so he's either joking or saying something else.



if embedding doesn't work, it's at about 5:10 in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOT75GB64Hw

Is it OK to say that "the exhibition scored XXX visitors" (meaning wow, that was a success!), instead of just "the exhibition was attend by XXX visitors"? Thanks!

Dear linguaphiles,

Linguistics needs your help! Well... I need your help. ;) I am currently writing a paper on word-finding difficulties in older adults - arguably one of the most common complaints when older people talk about their language abilities. I am doing a behavioral study on whether older adults experience more or fewer word-finding problems when the words they had to produce or recognize were related to specific movements that you perform when you interact with them or when you perform the action they describe.
Of course, in addition to my old people who have to process these words, I also need independent people who tell me whether they consider these words to be related to motor skills or not. Could you help me with that?

There are three different questionnaires, depending on your native language:
English: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/?q=base06
German: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/
Dutch: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/?q=base07


I would be very grateful if you could help me out with this! :) (And if you do, please make sure to read the instructions and examples carefully because in the past I've had people misunderstand what I mean when I say "movements" - my mistake, not theirs, so I clarified this a bit.)

Thanks so much in advance!

From Agatha Christy's "The Double Clue". EDIT: eeep! her name was Christie...

Poirot and Hastings have just left Mr Hardman's house.

‘See you, my friend,’ said Poirot to me, as we left the house together, ‘he has one law for the titled, and another law for the plain, this Mr Hardman. Me, I have not yet been ennobled, so I am on the side of the plain. I have sympathy for this young man. The whole thing was a little curious, was it not? There was Hardman suspecting Lady Runcorn; there was I, suspecting the Countess and Johnston; and all the time, the obscure Mr Parker was our man.’

Why does Poirot say 'see you' instead of 'you see'? It seems he's talking to Hastings, meaning 'you know, you understand', and not saying goodbye to Hardman.

This is a presentation of new linguistic community in Russian LiveJournal.

***
Это сообщество не претендует на опровержение автора лучшего пока этимологического словаря русского языка Фасмера, хотя и названо ★ anti_fasmer .
Фасмер точен в 95% своих этимологий.

Но он не икона в золотом окладе.
Поэтому здесь можно писать на любые темы связанные с любым языком.

Предвижу, что будет и явное лингво-фричество, но пусть будет.
Пусть каждый имеет возможность высказаться.

Классические толкования будут по тегу : ☆
Альтернативные гипотезы : ★

Правило пока одно: 1 пост от участника в сутки


Welcome to anti_fasmer !

.

Запись сделана с помощью m.livejournal.com.

A coworker gave my dad this bottle of vodka (it has grass in it!), and I'm dying to know what the text says. Can anyone help?

.............. a good thing that the teacher didn't see you.

According to Pearson "That's" is not correct in this sentence. Could anyone tell me why?

A question: how would you call this mythological being in one word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domovoi

I've been playing Tabikaeru for a while despite having no knowledge of Japanese, but today a message appeared in the game and it stayed rather than disappearing after I clicked out. Can someone please translate?

English-Thai translator needed to translate a text containing 934 words. Please kinldy PM me with your rates and email. Thanks in advance.

Do these phrases denote more or less the same thing (in the context of natural resources development) or there are meaningful differences? Thanks a lot!

I'm trying to resolve a problem with a package that was sent to Russia three months ago (an eBay sale) and has been returned unopened with a label saying it "wasn't collected". Basically, what I want to know is if the address was the person's home or a Post Office box.

the address was

(name of person)
KIMa 9 xx (xx is a two digit number)
Sant-Petersburg,
199155
Russian Federation

It's a bit of a mystery since he has never made any claim for a missing item, or given me any reason to suspect it hadn't arrived. I want to get my facts straight before I contact him.

solved - it's a flat number - I think that they must have tried to deliver it but failed, then he didn't collect it from the post office or something. That helps a lot, many thanks to everyone who responded. I've now contacted the buyer and am waiting to hear back from him on ways to sort this out.

I've been thinking recently about the following phenomenon that I am reluctant to call a coincidence.

It seems that when Jews were scattered away from Palestine, for a while they were readily adapting local languages as their vernaculars. In Spain it was Spanish-based Ladino, in Germany Germanic Yiddish, in Persia Fors (Farsi, later to be called Bukhari)). Later on, the same Jews would move to other countries, but now they would shlep their newly created languages along with them. Thus, in Poland and Russia they would keep Yiddish for many centuries, in Bulgaria or Greece, Ladino, in Uzbekistan, Fors.

Any thought as to why such a (suddenly acquired) conservatism?

☆ The language of the tribe of the Piraha (Pirahã) , living in the Amazonias is
considered one of the simplest on the Earth.

It has only 8 consonants and 3 vowels. At present, a full body of all texts in the language of the piraha is compiled. Translated and glossed texts, direct
and reverse piraha-English dictionaries indicating the frequency of use,
as well as video recording of the text on a pirate with subtitles - here:

https://rus-sumer.livejournal.com/60210.html ★

Work on the corpus of
texts continues, But it is already possible to draw some preliminary
conclusions.
. # 1 Phonetics: In the piraha 8 consonant phonemes. In
the orthography of Everett, they are transcribed as p - [p] b - [mp],
prenasalized (nasal) [p] t - [t] s - [s] k - [k] g - [ng], prenasalized [g] [ŋ] x
- [ʔ], glottal stop & h - [h]

Prenasalized [mp] and [ng] are clearly audible in
the video on site "b" and "g", which confirms the linguistic universal
about the presence of nasal sounds in any language. The vowels "a-i-o"
are phonetically closer to the classical "triangle" A-I-U, but are slightly
more biased towards the center, that is, they are realized as [ɪ-ʊ-ɐ].

# 2
Raising and lowering the tone can fall on any vowel in the root of the
word, or absent at all. Therefore, we can say that the piraha is not a
tone language.

# 3 In the piraha, the category of past tense is clearly
identified, expressed by the suffix "-s, -sa, -sai", which does not allow
talking about it as a language "without time".

# 4 The presence of a
large number of identical translations (up to 20 or more, as in the case
of "do", "go", etc.) for words of a pirate with different roots, as is
evident from the above glossaries, makes a more thorough analysis of
the presented dictionary .
☆☆☆ If to say it is easier - not everything
written in Wikipedia about the language of the piraha, which was made
an icon of "uniqueness" in linguistics, corresponds to the truth.


☆ Язык племени пираха, живущего в Амазонии считается
одним из простейших.на земле.
В нём всего 8 согласных звуков и 3 гласные.
В настоящее время составляется полный корпус всех
текстов на языке пираха.
Переведённые и глоссированные тексты, прямой и обратный
пираха-английский словари с указанием частоты
употреблений, а также видеозапись текста на пираха с
субтитрами - здесь:
https://rus-sumer.livejournal.com/60210.html
★
Работа над корпусом текстов продолжается, но уже можно
сделать некоторые предварительные выводы.
#1 Фонетика:
В пираха 8 согласных фонем. В орфографии Эверетта они
транскрибируются как
p - [p]
b - [mp] , преназализованное (носовое) [p]
t - [t]
s - [s]
k - [k]
g - [ng] , преназализованное [g] , [ŋ]
x - [ʔ] , глоттальный стоп
h - [h]
Преназализованные [mp] и [ng] отчётливо слышны на
видеозаписи на месте "b" и "g", что подтверждает
лингвистическую универсалию о наличии носовых звуков в
любом языке.
Гласные "a-i-o" фонетически более близки к классическому
"треугольнику" A-I-U, но немного более смещены к центру, то
есть реализуются как [ ɪ - ʊ - ɐ ].
#2 Повышение и понижение тона могут падать на любой
гласный в корне слова, либо отсутствовать вообще.
Поэтому можно говорить о том, что пираха не является
тоновым языком.
#3 В пираха отчётливо выявляется категория прошедшего
времени, выраженная суффиксом "-s , -sa, -sai" , что не
позволяет говорить о нём как о языке "без времён".
#4 Наличие большого количества одинаковых переводов (до
20 и больше, как в случае с "do", "go", и так далее) для слов
пираха с разными корнями, как это видно из приведённых
глоссариев, заставляет провести более тщательный анализ
представленного словаря.

☆☆☆
Если сказать проще - не всё написанное в Википедии о языке пираха, который сделали иконой "уникальности" в лингвистике, соответствует истине.

Two questions for speakers of Swedish:

- Trygghet: I've seen it translated as "security, safety, confidence, certainty, trust".  Wiktionary also describes it as "all the comforts and securities we have grown used to back in Sweden".

So, to me it sounds like the kind of security people feel about their daily lives, e.g., about their employment, about health care.  But can you use "trygghet" to denote a profound feeling of safety and comfort instilled in you by a certain experience, such as being around certain people or in a particular environment, or even just a visual or auditory stimulus - something that makes you feel safe, like when you were a child?

- Gökotta: I've seen it translated on the web as "waking up early to hear the first birds sing", but the Swedish Wikipedia says (in Google's translation):

"Gökotta is a Swedish tradition to go out on bird watching and picnics at the time of spring and morning when the cuckoo begins to go out. In parts of Sweden, it has been common to celebrate gökotta, especially on the day of Christ's heavenly journey, and earlier also the day of treason and the days before Midsummer."

Is modern-day gökotta mainly a religious activity in Sweden?  Or can someone who is not religious just wake up early on any random day during spring or summer and go bird watching (and perhaps have a little "fika" along the way), and still call it "gökotta"?

Thanks!

Is there a difference between 諦める and 諦めがつく?

These are from a novel from Philip Roth. I'm sure the author doesn't speak Arabic, so presumably he had somebody to translate and transliterate those. He gives the pronunciation and the English translation.

I need to know if the English translation and transliteration are accurate.(I tried to Google-translate them and the results were rather dissappointing)

1\ Ad-daroori lih achkaam. ‘Necessity has its own rules.’

2/'the shifting sands'--ramal mutaharrika

I am having trouble understanding what "グズグズ" means in this sentence: あのグズグズだった頃の俺の心がお前となぁなぁになる事をまだ許していないのは確かだ

Could someone explain?

I wonder, is there a rule of thumb explaining how to form an adjective from a name? We say Kafkaesque, but Shavian, Marxist, but Trotskyite, Ptolemaic but Tolstoyan. And it is not that there is no system at all: recently, I needed to use an adjective derived from Putin, and only Putinesque sounded right (an not only to me).

While we are at that, a more specific question: what would be the antonym of Keynesian? Monetarist, monetarian? Fridmanian? Chicagoan? Somehow, only monetarist sounds right...

Hi everybody,

When it is said, that a person has depression stored in his/her software, what does it exactly mean? Pent-up, or deep seated, or long existed?

Thank you in advance.

Abkhazian and Abazin languages ​​are considered as "record
holders" for "economy", which are "dispensed" by two vowels: A and Y [ә].

In Russian, for example, there are 6 of them: A E I O U and Y [ә] .

The same pair of vowels (A, Y) with the addition of a long "A" cost
Kabardino-Circassian, Adyghe and Ubykh languages. And there is a
suspicion that all three vowels of these Caucasian languages ​​are only
variants of a single phoneme [ә].

* Are there languages ​​with a single vowel sound?

☆
[Нынишняя арфаграфия в рускам языке слишкам слажна и ни атражаит саврименава звучяния слоф.
Как вы щитаите, настала время привисти её в саатвецтвие с риальным праизнашэнием] ?


Нынешняя орфография в русском языке слишком сложна и не отражает современного звучания слов. Как вы считаете, настало время привести её в соответствие с реальным произношением?

★ [Dhe karent oothogrefi in Inglish iz tuu kompleks aend daz not riflekt dhe saundz ov weedz.
Du juu think its taim tu bring it intu lain widh dhe riel prenansieishen] ?


The current orthography in English is too complex and does not reflect the
sound of words. Do you think it's time to bring it into line with the real
pronunciation?