#and from different language speakers

[frownyalfred]

how do you pronounce "ra's"? as in ra's al ghul? the apostrophe always threw me off because i didnt really see why it was used in the spelling; i think i've heard it pronounced "race"/"raesh"(?) before but i have no idea where, could've hallucinated it :/ i personally always read it in my head as "ross" but a slightly more open vowel, halfway between "aw" and "ah" if that makes sense

[dkettchen]

she would've told them unlike her canon! version who decided not to be an ally smh

[uncanny-tranny]

Okay, if I had to simplify my gender into one song, it would absolutely have to be Libiamo ne' lieti calici. Like, I am going absolute feral right now. Do you see this vision of mine.

[04tenno]

I will say a fair amount of localization discourse is predicated on the idea that people who speak the same language cannot come away with different interpretations of media or disagree on media which is asinine just on its surface

[aohisworld]

In my soulmate au for Aohi and the boys, Aohi actually isn’t as fluent as the idol!Aohi.

I think it’s endearing that Aohi somewhat has to speak broken Korean with the boys (except Ri-ki and Jay) and I’m getting giddy with all the cute interactions I have planned in this fic :3

[lanshappycorner]

Rollo is also French but he looks at Rook and is like ‘you’re the scum of the earth why are you exaggerating your accent’

In other words I want Rollo to say “Je’taime” to Yuu and Yuu needing to ask Rook what it means

ain't rook like...fake french lol hes from afterglow savanna right💀💀 cater, vil, and jack are the real french kids.....

but i think that would be really funny rollo just looks at rook like "u fake bitch🤨". and yuu having to ask rook what that meant is kinda cute ngl but rollo would probs get so embarrassed that yuu went to go ask rook sjfjsd

[momowoah]

god I love linguistics classes you could be learning literally anything and suddenly your professor will just drop life changing knowledge about your and your country's relationship with your language on you and go on like nothing happened while the whole class just sits there silently

[weirdfishy]

i was thinking abt this bc my cousins and i went out to eat and when we placed our order my cousin used "lee" -- i hadn't thought abt it before even though ik she's been using it for awhile, but recently i've been getting coffee and i've been using "sam". i asked her brother while we were waiting, and he uses "v".

all of our names are Hawaiian, and i personally mostly only really use Sam when i'm on the continent, though if i'm in honolulu/waikiki i do have a tendency to use it

[peregrineggsandham]

But that’s wrong? Someone can say “Its raining”, but that doesn’t mean the other person hears or even understands them, even if they speak the same language. It means nothing.

I mean, we can just talk about the sequence of sounds that we can write out phonetically as /ɪts ˈreɪnɪŋ/. And yes, those are inherently meaningless. It's just a bunch of noises! As I said, nothing iconic, or even remotely evocative of rain.

But meaning is formed around that sequence of sounds by those who create and hear it - speaker and listener alike. And that meaning is predicated on a wonderful mix of speaker intention, listener bias, historical context, shared cultural knowledge, and a host of unspoken conversational maxims and patterns.

I was definitely focusing on the meaning as interpreted by the listener in that last post, so I'm sorry if that confused things. And I was sort of assuming that the listener and speaker were in an ongoing conversation and understanding each other. But even if they weren't, even if the listener couldn't understand the speaker, that doesn't mean the utterance itself "means nothing". If said with the intent to communicate, then it definitely means something at the very least to the speaker! Like you said - someone can say it! And there lies a full half of the meaning.

Conversation is inherently a collaborative act, but it starts with the speaker's intent behind an utterance. They're taking a complex idea - the concrete "rain", the more abstract "-ing" and "'s", the somewhat idiomatic "it" - and turning that combination of ideas into the movement of a stream of air, following a strict set of patterns and rules that developed organically over thousands of years. That's neat!

If the listener doesn't speak the language, or mishears, then they may not pick up on that meaning. It could just be sounds, to them. Or they may even misunderstand, and pick up an unintended meaning. If they lack some of the required context (e.g. by not knowing a word), or if the speaker is flouting one of those unspoken maxims (e.g. by being sarcastic) and the listener doesn't realize it, the meaning may be warped.

The utterance of the sounds /ɪts ˈreɪnɪŋ/, the writing of the phrase "It's raining", you're right that these aren't inherently meaningful. If the sequence "itsraining" happened to appear in a randomly-generated string of letters, I wouldn't personally assume any meaning to it. And since this train of thought did start on the topic of magic, I'll say I find nothing particularly magical about a string of random sounds or letters either.

(Now, if you did see meaning in that random string, I think you'd effectively be practicing some kind of divination, by believing that there was intent behind the randomness. That the universe or whoever or whatever produced the string was actively trying to communicate with you. That's a pretty common idea when we talk about certain kinds of "magic". I think it's interesting that words, symbols, and communication from some unseen "speaker" are so integral to our understanding of it, and I think there's something to be said there for seeing language itself as an inherently "magical" thing regardless of whether your interlocutor is just your next-door neighbor or... whatever you personally believe is at the other end of an alectryomancy session. But dammit Jim I'm a phonetician, not an occultist.)

Point is, in conversation, in the context of a person speaking to another (regardless of whether it's understood), an utterance (or any sequence of symbols) is meaningful because of the intent behind it. Not the sounds themselves, but the very act of turning ideas into symbols - and back again.

...

I apologize if I'm repeating myself a bit - it's quite late and the question of "what does it mean for a utterance to have meaning" is actually a really interesting and complicated one, anon!

I'm admittedly being more flowery and less technical about it here because in the end my other main point is just "Isn't language really astoundingly neat?", but this is the stuff from which journal articles are written. (Usually involving a surprising amount of predicate logic.) It's an important line of inquiry because it can help explain a lot of where communication goes right and wrong, how misunderstandings happen, and how to effectively convey ideas to others.

That said, to be fair this isn't my specific area of expertise - I'm in the phon/phon corner where we ask people to make noises and stare at spectrograms all day, this is more the sem/prag corner where they put lambda calculus and philosophy in a blender.

@cryptotheism Ach, look what you made me do, I'm rambling about sounds.

[transfemstarscream]

i’m not going to lie. i think people who refuse to engage with any film, show, comic, animation, etc. just because it’s not in english or hasn’t been dubbed in english are kind of lame. i don’t see the benefit of limiting your catalogue and scope of a medium just because it’s “foreign” and not giving things a chance just because you may have to put subtitles on. i feel like you miss out on so much by doing that.

[fabulouslygaybean]

i need to work on learning spanish again

[tokruta]

*working on my Outer Rim Slave language* Conlanging is fun :)

*trying to create a good lexicon* Conlanging is not fun :(

[elusiveowl]

I set my phone language to German for ✨learning purposes✨

A while ago I set my Facebook to they/them pronouns

I just looked to see how that is handled for the extremely gendered German language

(he/she)/(him/her) pronouns I guess

[old-memoria]

The biggest shame of my life would be being able to speak only my native languages + English

[mrfoox]

Actually I love accents. Like no matter how good you become at languages you still have some sounds/letters you pronounce in a specific way, that's actually very cute