meichenxi

[meichenxi]

Currently sat in a summer school type thing we're hosting in work and some English architect is telling us about sustainable design in Wales, except she hasn't bothered learning a single Welsh name and if I have to listen to one more "I don't know how to say 'Welsh name' so I'm going to use 'shitty English name/nothing while laughing at it' I'm going to throw this slanty drawing desk at her head

[meichenxi]

the ladies call me the subjunctive mood the way I express desire, wishes, uncertainty, doubt and fear

[meichenxi]

Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?

[meichenxi]

All foreign films/shows should have two subtitle options. A localized one that better serves the original intent of the story and dialogue and a more literal one that awkwardly translates phrases in a preserved state, specifically for perverts who want to learn the language (me)

[meichenxi]

cdrama friends who watch Modern things

does anyone have any recommendations for a workplace / business drama that doesn't make me want to stab my eyes out? for language learning purposes. I can watch most modern day dramas with chinese hard subtitles as long as they don't mumble too atrociously or speak tooooo fast, and need to start watching Business Dramas for my Business Job. to acquire Business Vocabulary

[meichenxi]

Syntax: A Generative Introduction by Andrew Carnie

[meichenxi]

Have you ever been told you look like a different ethnicity?

Yes - by my parents

Yes - other

No

What??

[meichenxi]

Stop moving to Berlin. You can do ecstasy and wear a leather jacket in the city you live in

[meichenxi]

I have a free substack for fiction and poetry!!

subscribe!!!! all ye!!!! and YOU can get some truly hopelessly yearning queer poetry or strange short stories delivered RIGHT to your inbox every week

subscribe if you like:

queer possession and hate and consuming devotion

poetry in forgotten metres, unearthed, re-burnished, re-imagined

worship at black-vined shrines with hanging knottings

anthropological fantasy, bitter fantasy, queer fantasy, weird fantasy

a spider-skein miles-long and glittering

the crane-lord, gleaming with godhood, and the blood-weave scholar

alliteration and assonance and metre and rhyme

the terror in beauty and the beauty in the terrible, and finally:

denial, in your own halls

it's not chinese or about languages, but it would mean a very great deal to me if you did. once again, for those in the back:

subscribe!!!! all ye!!!! and YOU can get some truly hopelessly yearning queer poetry or strange short stories delivered RIGHT to your inbox every week

help a girl trying to transition from langblr to the actual world!!!!!

[meichenxi]

credit goes to calle börstell for this one

[meichenxi]

anyway it's kind of funny to me on a daily basis that falling face-first into a puddle of danmei novels and reading about dudes kissing dudes has landed me a job that involves using my chinese skills to move vast quantities of money and do the admin for trials that will improve real people's lives

update on the china bizniz job: today I took minutes in a meeting about pharmaceuticals and. bioreactors. I processed and corrected invoices. I am so far in over my head. the stress.

on another note, because I have never had an office job in english, I am already at the disturbing stage where I have been asked to translate things and I'm like I don't. know. how to say this

sounds wanky. sounds like humble-bragging. in actual fact it's more that I have no relevant experience and only really learnt what a sales invoice was three weeks ago. also chinese does compound words excellently.

so for example: 若按合同补足，需要补发1000美金. translating it is like

if we make the money sufficient. extra. making up the deficit. if we go back and make it sufficient according to the contract. then we need to extraly send 1000 dollars. then we need to send 1000 dollars in addition. then we need to send 1000 dollars in addition to make up for the lack of dollars. previously

like I feel like a fucking moron. a daily reminder that translation is a skill and it is VERY domain dependent.

[meichenxi]

update on the china bizniz job: today I took minutes in a meeting about pharmaceuticals and. bioreactors. I processed and corrected invoices. I am so far in over my head. the stress.

on another note, because I have never had an office job in english, I am already at the disturbing stage where I have been asked to translate things and I'm like I don't. know. how to say this

sounds wanky. sounds like humble-bragging. in actual fact it's more that I have no relevant experience and only really learnt what a sales invoice was three weeks ago. also chinese does compound words excellently.

so for example: 若按合同补足，需要补发1000美金. translating it is like

if we make the money sufficient. extra. making up the deficit. if we go back and make it sufficient according to the contract. then we need to extraly send 1000 dollars. then we need to send 1000 dollars in addition. then we need to send 1000 dollars in addition to make up for the lack of dollars. previously

like I feel like a fucking moron. a daily reminder that translation is a skill and it is VERY domain dependent.

[meichenxi]

post: el problema es el capitalismo

half of the people in the notes, predictably: good word!😱 it appears that, despite not being fluent in spanish, i have this strange intuition🧠 that “problema” means “problem” and “capitalismo” means “capitalism!”☝️ from there, i think🤔 i can put these words together to infer that this post says “the problem is capitalism!” 🤯🤯🤯 truly, this post transcends language!🙌

[meichenxi]

i was looking through mammal hieroglyphs just for fun (as one does) and i'm going to cry about this hieroglyph and its ideogram

[meichenxi]

[meichenxi]

Heard this stupid dad joke that killed me: Which Chinese word takes the longest to write? "Friend" (朋友) because it takes two months just to write half of it

[meichenxi]

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic