Lotusm50 wrote:
Yes. One of the problems with Old Germanic Saxon (and dare I say, German) was that noun gender was really fairly arbitrary in most cases (Die Frau und Der Mann, notwithstanding).
same whith Latin based languages such as french and spanish
paulhofseth wrote:
1. ad ionizing radiation and dna the best analogy I have ever heard was from Karl Z Morgan : ionizing radiation acts towards cell DNA like a shotgun going off in a library. Most shots miss the letters, and when they take out a letter, in most cases, the librarian will understand what was there. But in some cases the meaning cannot be reliably ascertained and the dna cannot be reliably replicated. Hence the linear dose-response hypothesis. The "librarian" may not be quite awake sone nothing much ever happens , or very busy , so the cell repair mechanisms may possibly respond in an non-linear fashion. The jury may still be out on this, but my knowledge of these matters is ancient and always was rudimentary.
The result may be innocuous, illness or evolution. The shots may be few and far between like background radiation or more targetted. (remember the square root law of distance). So, for the Thorium elements in a lens, do not fuse them with your glasses and wear the contraption around the clock, but at the usual distance, not that much extra radiation.
p....Show more →
Interesting analogy. I've never heard that. Thanks for sharing it.
Haifisch M3 wrote:
I am no linguist but it has to do with the complex sentence construction in German which forces you to have to finish the sentence in your head before beginning to speak. Otherwise you might not be able to finish the sentence in proper German. Has to do with the verb often being at the end of the sentence.
Edward Finegan, in Comrie's The World's Major Languages, 1st ed., p82 mentions this hypothesis, stating that those languages, including English, that are spreading most widely as second languages are SVO (subject–verb–object) as opposed to SOV like German. No reference is given, and of course Russian has gone backwards since 1990. I don't know whether the recent 2nd ed. has anything to add to this. That edition is on Kindle at a sane price, but I don't know whether the specialist typesetting and diagrams made it across unmolested.
Alf Beharie wrote:
we are more likely to call them "cling ons"
In Australia these are usually called "dags" (when on a sheep) or "fartleberries". I had thought the second was invented by comedian John Clarke (appearing as Fred Dagg), but it turns out to be British, from 1811. And which American described the English preference of baths over showers as a desire to "wallow in their own excrement"? Perhaps it was a Scot; they favour showers too.
Got this the other day from a french canadian. His french differs from the european french but I can make out what he is saying, though my french is severely limited.
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
1. In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
2. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
3. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
4. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
5. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas. "
There was an other thread with the sentence (or close):
Ich bin hier = I am here = jag är här = olen täällä
Just pronounce the finnish words as nothing you have pronounced before and you wont be any closer. It´s quite fascinating to live in a bilingual community with two languages of such different, well, everything.
kosmoskatten wrote:
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
The original version of this came from Mark Twain. Brilliant.
It looks like the people at Google have become aware of us playing with their "listen" function and changed the text for that button to "beatbox" when you only enter consonants.
kosmoskatten wrote:
Got this the other day from a french canadian. His french differs from the european french but I can make out what he is saying, though my french is severely limited.
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
1. In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
2. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
3. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
4. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
5. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas. "
It looks like the people at Google have become aware of us playing with their "listen" function and changed the text for that button to "beatbox" when you only enter consonants.
If you want to have even more fun with it try translating from German into another language...From German to Greek is the slowest, with every letter being pronounced seperately, not much fun, but German to Czech and it sounds like its being read by a woman who has lost her voice, German to Haitian Creole and its sounds like your tuning a SW radio, German to Japanese and apart from the very end it sounds like a female Japanese newsreader speaking proper Japanese sentences, and German to Croatian sounds like an old two stroke motorbike!
Wrist watches manufactured up until about 1935 or 1940 often used VERY radioactive materials for the glowing tick-marks or numbers.
The result of wearing such watches 24/7 for 30 to 50 years was that less than 1% of people got skin cancer which had to be cut off. And of course grew back (with scar) some months later.
But that was so radioactive it glowed green too!
Another factoid: There's hundreds of times more radiation coming from a cinder-block then there is these lens elements. Do you have cinder-blocks around your house? Geiger counters go nuts around cinder-block walls!
Granite and some other forms of natural rock produce very much more radiation (because of difference in mass) around your body than these lenses do. Do you live around such rock formations? Geiger counters click fairly rapidly around boulders!
Bifurcator wrote:
Another factoid: There's hundreds of times more radiation coming from a cinder-block then there is these lens elements. Do you have cinder-blocks around your house? Geiger counters go nuts around cinder-block walls!
Granite and some other forms of natural rock produce very much more radiation (because of difference in mass) around your body than these lenses do. Do you live around such rock formations? Geiger counters click fairly rapidly around boulders!
Why would that be? I know about wood impregnated with heavy metals, and naturally occuring radon in rock/soil, but radioactive cinder blocks?
I'll answer in english, regarding the trouble for danes to understand swedish.
carstenw wrote:
Det er det heller ikke altid Men når Luka skriver:
"Ordern är uppfattad och skall verkställas"
Så bliver jeg nødt til at slå det op, fordi jeg kender hverken "Ordern" (selv om jeg kunne gætte det) eller "verkställas". Der er mange ord der er ens på Dansk og Svensk, men også mange der er anderledes. Tycka, prata, og overhovedet Det vil sikkert ikke være så svært som det har været at lære Tysk (eller Fransk), men man skal stadig arbejde på det
OK, I see what you mean. I understand every single word of the above, but in several cases based on guessing. I think the problem is that swedish has more german loaned words than danish, which is a bit funny. "Verkställa" must be german at least.
In Sweden, most people have some knowledge of older words that aren't used nowadays, but are the same as in norwegian and danish. So danish is a bit like reading older swedish, at least to me.
Z250SA wrote:
Deutsch_English_Svenska_Suomea
rennen=running=löpning=juoksu
There's an older swedish word; "ränna" ("ä" is pronounced almost like "e" in german "rennen"), which obviously is the same as "rennen" and "running". "Löpa" (infinitive of "löpning") is derived from the same indo-european word as english "leap" and german "laufen". They don't mean the same anymore, but are still close.
Examples such as these are more common than you might think, but they have often changed so much that it's hard to see (or hear) the similarities if you're not consious of the relationship between the languages.
Makten wrote:
"Löpa" (infinitive of "löpning") is derived from the same indo-european word as english "leap" and german "laufen". They don't mean the same anymore, but are still close.
Makten wrote: cogitech wroteMaybe closer to the English "lope" or "loping" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lopingAh! I didn't know of that word. Interesting with the substantive, which is the same as "lopp" in swedish. I think all of them are related.
Indeed, with a common root: [... from Old Norse "hlaupa".]
uranium decay products. it occurs in many, many rocks. that's where the radon comes from.
Herb...
AhamB wrote:
Why would that be? I know about wood impregnated with heavy metals, and naturally occuring radon in rock/soil, but radioactive cinder blocks?