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Us, arriving to Austria to a tiny family hotel owned by an elderly lady

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Us: yeah that works

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I was wondering if “drat” had any particular meaning and apparently it’s a clipping of “god rot”, which sounds to me like a pretty intense thing to say to a person. I’d have to be pretty mad at somebody to say “God rot you”

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if someone told me their pronouns were attack/helicopter I would just use them

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One thing I didn’t expect from my new worldbuilding book is the author, roughly my dad’s age, including his opinions on furries

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Spanish is a wonderful language for how it lets you add "-ito" to the end of a word to immediately make it small and cute.

Saw a children's book at work called "Vlad, el vampirito fabuloso" and I spent the rest of the workday going "Vampirito. Vampirito. Vampirito" in my head like a broken record

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"Ma'am, your penis is barking"

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Part of my goal for the script is something that generates distinctly esoteric-looking glyphs. It's why I based it on astrological/alchemical symbols.

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When I studied abroad, I thought my host family just had difficulty pronouncing my name. They didn’t try very hard before deciding that they’d just call me Brahim and be done with it.

This kept happening no matter where I went in Morocco. Even fluent English speakers decided to give me alternative names, and I just shrugged it off as the consequence of one of the syllables being very unusual in Arabic.

That is, until one day I was talking to a shopkeeper in the souk and he asked me my name. I gave him my English one, and explained that I also answer to Brahim (and Daud, and… more than I can remember). He laughed hysterically and looked shocked, calling his friend over from the back of the shop.

“Tell him your name,” he said excitedly. I did so.

The other man’s face cycled through several expressions very quickly—surprise, anger, suspicion, and then exasperation when he realized his friend had set me up.

They very kindly explained to me that my name spoken with a Moroccan accent sounds very much like an Arabic profanity, and that I should definitely introduce myself as Brahim or give an alternative English name when meeting new people, because shaking hands with strangers and saying “Hello, I’m Fuck Your Mother’s Religion” is not a greeting that will win me many friends.

So. Brahim it was.

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A loanword is a word taken from another language, such as ‘angst’ or ‘tsunami’ or ‘calque’. A calque is a literal translation of a word from another language, such as rhinestone (from French caillou du Rhine) or blueblood (from Spanish sangre azul) or loanword (from German lehnwort).

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Many books of the Bible that didn't make it to the official canon(s) and other incredibly important pieces of scripture and literature are only known today because they were preserved in the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia. It is very likely that there are lots of other texts dating to the earliest days of Christianity that are still to be "found", only because there aren't enough international scholars who know the Ge'ez script or work in Ethiopia. There are many, but not as much as it deserves. (Important note is that Ge'ez is both a liturgical language, like Latin, and also is a script, much like Latin or Chinese characters, used by many Ethiopian languages, but others can be written and indeed are written in Ge'ez script, this is why it has preserved such a range of literature)

Ge'ez looks like this:

ሀሎ! ይህ በአማርኛ ቋንቋ እና በግእዝ ፊደል የተጻፈ ነው! ለእርስዎ እና ለቤተሰብዎ በረከቶ���!

There was briefly a very bad taste meme calling it a "demon language", with people even copypasting random religious literature in Ge'ez thus making it seem more "sinister". I won't comment on how ignorant and offensive that is.

Ge'ez is an important script and language, much like Greek or Latin, because of its connection to major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ethiopia is a wonderful country with a deep, rich history, and is an example of how Africa has always been part of world history. But like all languages, it's also a cultural heritage on its own, worth cherising, preserving, and learning about, regardless of its importance to the rest of the world. Instead of being ignorant for a racist joke, we could always take our time and learn and appreciate such things.

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I always feel like I am made of so many pieces that don't fit together, but the beautiful thing about making my own conlang is that it is mine, and I can use it to write the most cursed smut or translate religious verse.

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really enjoying this series

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Also shout-out to the Swedes for just borrowing the French "adieu" into their vocabulary and just spelling it "adjö"

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Our Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology "food" isn't very distinguished from specifically "rice" until it was pointed out to us that in English "meal" is "loose roughly ground grain"

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The origin of the word “apricot”