this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023

180 points (95.9% liked)

Ask Lemmy

32582 readers

1009 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world

TheSaneWriter@lemm.ee

TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com

Asudox@lemmy.world

lemmy_bot@lemmy.world

beefbaby182@lemmy.world

ModeratorCan@lemmy.world

neidu3@sh.itjust.works

asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev

candyman337@lemmy.world

candyman337@sh.itjust.works

180

What irritates you the most with your own language? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

NSFW 232 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Mine is people who separate words when they write. I'm Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct

Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.

Examples:

"Ananas ringer" means "the pineapple is calling" when written the wrong way. The correct way is "ananasringer" and it means "pineapple rings" (from a tin).
"Prinsesse pult i vinkel" means "a princess fucked at an angle". The correct way to write it is "prinsessepult i vinkel", and it means "an angeled princess desk" (a desk for children, obviously)
"Koke bøker" means "to cook books". The correct way is "kokebøker" and means "cookbooks"

I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] raldone01@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name. In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.

UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.

I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care. I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.

We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.

There are some good things. The time forms can be pretty fun to use.

All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.

[–] CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

As a norweigan, it is one of the easiest languages to learn

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago

eh i don't really understand why people are so obsessed with rules in language, like that's not how humans inherently learn language anyways and just memorizing rules seems like a great way to make yourself use the language wrong for a long time.

The ideal way to learn languages is immersion, expose yourself to the language as much as possible and your brain will just automatically start making sense of it, and when you do it this way the regularity of the language is basically irrelevant.

[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

English is not my native but I hate how they just assemble bunch of words together to make a single adjective out of it, and you can't know that until the very end. It gets obvious how stupid this is if I replace all whitespace with commas.

A desktop, computer, environment.

Air, missile.

Air, plane.

Pocket, record, player.

Water, beer, pong, table, thong. Okey I made this one up

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is very popular in newspaper headlines. It's sometimes called a "noun pile".

Times chief editor: Thirteen-word headline noun pile author firing race controversy rebuttal!

(That is: "The chief editor of the Times has responded in the matter of the firing of headline writer Joe Jones. Jones alleged that his firing from the Times was due to racial bias. However, the chief editor claims in response, that Jones was fired for writing a headline composed of nothing but thirteen nouns.")

Beer pong is a party game played on a table. If you put the table in the pool, you can play water beer pong. Attach some floats so it doesn't sink, and it is a water beer pong table. If you then strap a skimpy swimsuit to that table, the swimsuit is a water beer pong table thong.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”

Interesting idiom in English: To cook the books

This means to do dishonest accounting and make it look good for auditing. Might be two sets of books or similar fuckery.

I assume that "Koke boker" means to cook books physically on a stove or in an oven. But the way you stated it I might mis-interpret it to be dishonest accounting.

[–] CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Yes, it means to cook books physically on a stove. I don't think we have the same expression for "cooking the books" here in Norway except for "accounting fraud"

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments