centuriesofwords

[centuriesofwords]

[centuriesofwords]

remember when Qatar confiscated a Pernambuco state flag 'cause they thought it was a queer flag?

I think about that a lot. It lives rent-free in my head.

[centuriesofwords]

i hate that "that that" is grammatically correct. why is english the joke language

[centuriesofwords]

fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,  Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.

[centuriesofwords]

Gotta start treating english like monolinguistic english speakers treat other languages

Did you know English doesn't have a word for the Irish word 'mar'? Instead they have to say 'is the cause' of or 'because' for short

[centuriesofwords]

if parks and rec was still being made they’d do a bit where ron swanson has to wear a pronouns name tag and it’d just be “???/???” And it’d cut to a talking head of him going

“I’ve been a fool all this time. It’s bad enough the government knows my name, but now they want to know my gender? So I’m not letting them know my preferred pronouns. As far as I’m concerned, no one in this building should refer to me at all.”

[centuriesofwords]

[centuriesofwords]

In Brazil we say nossa! to mean "wow!". This is just one of the many ways of contracting the expression nossa senhora (our lady). There's also vixe, one of the many contractions of virgem maria (virgin mary). Oxe is one I love cuz it's said in the northeastern part of Brazil, which is where I come from. It comes from oxente and it's basically an interjection of surprise. Eita, another interjection of surprise, is a classic. Absolutely everyone in Brazil says this one. Since all of these expressions I said here are interjections, they can't be literally translated. Besides, English doesn't have that many interjections and there are many more we say in Brazil which I'm not able to remember now.

Sextou is another expression that roughly translates to "fridayed". When you embody the spirit of fridays of parties and drinking and let go of the week's worries we say that.

Hello! I'm doing a research for a project. Can you tell me if there are untranslatable words in portuguese? (I already found the most known as saudade, cafuné, morabeza, desenrascanço) Thank you for your help!

Hmmm... Let me think...

Do mal (literally, "of evil") is kind of untranslatable. It usually gets translated as "evil" or "bad" but it it's not quite right. That'd be more malvado.

To say a character is do mal is more like you're saying "They're in Team Evil" rather than that they are evil. It's nuanced, but there is a difference.

Another one is armar barraco. Like, there’s “pick a fight”, but that’s not really right; armar barraco is less about fighting and more about drama (thought it’s not not about fighting either…).

Can anybody think of any other untranslateable words?

[centuriesofwords]

[centuriesofwords]

[centuriesofwords]

Made that feature you requested boss

[centuriesofwords]

Let us begin with the fact that the ubiquitous phrase is almost exclusive in its application to Africa: ‘precolonial Africa’. How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents? If not, what explains the peculiar representation – treating the continent as if it were a single unit of analysis – when it comes to Africa? I am afraid it comes from a not-so-kind genealogy that always takes Africa to be a simple place, homogenises its peoples and their history, and treats their politics and thought as if they were uncomplicated, each substitutable for the other across time and space. Once you are thinking of ‘Africa’ as a simple whole, it becomes easier to grossly misrepresent an entire continent in the temporal frame of ‘precolonial’. In reality, ‘precolonial’ Africa never existed.... [...] For one thing, the role of African thinkers in the evolution of Christianity becomes elided by a periodisation that does not see a continuity between African events and events elsewhere, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. It also makes it difficult to track demographic continuities when it comes to cultural hybridities, including citizenship, in different parts of the Mediterranean continuum. And, as long as Roman colonialism lasted in North Africa, the region was not hermetically sealed from the rest of the continent, both across the Sahara, and east to the northern reaches of present-day Kenya. As used, the term ‘precolonial’ Africa and the distortions it represents cannot illuminate our understanding of Africa and its history. More importantly, it is wrong to think of colonialism as a non-African phenomenon that was only brought in from elsewhere and imposed on the continent. Africa has given rise to a rich tapestry of diverse colonialisms originating in different parts of the continent. How are we to understand them? For example, if ‘precolonial Morocco’ refers to the time before France colonised Morocco, it must deny that the 800-year Moorish colonisation of the Iberian Peninsula, much of present-day France and much of North Africa was a colonialism. For, if it were, then ‘colonial Morocco’ must predate ‘precolonial Morocco’. I do not know how any of this helps us understand the history of Morocco. Similarly, a ‘precolonial’ Egypt that refers to Egypt before modern European imperialism would also deny Mohammed Ali’s colonial adventures at the head of Egypt in southern Europe and Asia Minor. Was ancient Egypt part of some precolonial formation? That strains credulity. To conceive of the history of Africa and Africans in terms only, or primarily, of their relation to modern European empires disappears the history of Africans as colonisers of realms beyond the continent’s land borders, especially in Europe and Asia...

[centuriesofwords]

[centuriesofwords]

if parks and rec was still being made they’d do a bit where ron swanson has to wear a pronouns name tag and it’d just be “???/???” And it’d cut to a talking head of him going

“I’ve been a fool all this time. It’s bad enough the government knows my name, but now they want to know my gender? So I’m not letting them know my preferred pronouns. As far as I’m concerned, no one in this building should refer to me at all.”

[centuriesofwords]

i ended up liking how gendered french is solely because i can say that i want people to use he/him pronouns for me the same way they use it for angels, blood and blunts