psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5590 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French
| Message 161 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 4:06am | IP Logged |
You know you are a language nerd when you are able to distinguish real Chinese (or Japanese) characters of your friends' tattoos from meaningless designs and you point out the fake "words" to your friends, and, you are an even bigger language nerd when you wish the characters were real so you could learn whatever language it was.
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Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5566 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 162 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 7:09am | IP Logged |
psy88 wrote:
You know you are a language nerd when you are able to distinguish real Chinese (or Japanese) characters of your friends' tattoos from meaningless designs and you point out the fake "words" to your friends, and, you are an even bigger language nerd when you wish the characters were real so you could learn whatever language it was. |
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...when you notice somebody with a giant tattoo of the Chinese character for "and" (和), then you look it up when you get home and realize it can also mean "peaceful" or "harmonious" in classical and literary Chinese.
EDIT: Whoa, post #666. Good thing I'm not superstitious. :)
Edited by Levi on 18 November 2009 at 8:47am
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Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6767 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek
| Message 163 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
You're a huge language nerd when you watch a historical movie and are hugely disappointed that the languages
aren't accurate — or even worse, that ancient peoples all spoke British-accented English.
A special honourable mention goes to Michael Crichton's novel, "Timeline", in which Medieval languages play
a significant role and form a language barrier for time travel. A dishonourable mention goes to the movie of the
same name, which completely chucks out that aspect of the story and makes a terrible film as a result.
PS: Does anyone know if the Norse language spoken in The Thirteenth Warrior is authentic? (Or the Ancient
Greek, for that matter.)
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ennime Tetraglot Senior Member South Africa universityofbrokengl Joined 5903 days ago 397 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu
| Message 164 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 8:31am | IP Logged |
Captain Haddock wrote:
PS: Does anyone know if the Norse language spoken in The Thirteenth Warrior is
authentic? (Or the Ancient
Greek, for that matter.) |
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Latin not ancient greek, and it's I guess good (enough). Can't comment on Norse though...
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John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6041 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German
| Message 165 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 8:42am | IP Logged |
When the only reason you are learning a language is because you like it's grammatical structure. Me and Greek. lol.
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egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5695 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch
| Message 166 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
According to the wikipedia article, it was (modern) Norwegian. Though according to a review, some of it wasn't very good.
Articles are respectively:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Warrior
http://news.planetorigo.com/article.php?poarticle_id=542&s=X TEI1eYb3yCjObzm&
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DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6150 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian
| Message 167 of 3737 18 November 2009 at 4:14pm | IP Logged |
You watch a film with subtitles in a language you don't know, and never remember the plot, but instead have deduced how things such as the imperative tense function.
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Thaorius Diglot Groupie ArgentinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5542 days ago 40 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2
| Message 168 of 3737 19 November 2009 at 1:23am | IP Logged |
When you wish this thread had more pages (a LOT more pages).
When you happen to be reading a thread such as this when you should be working, you actually like your job, and you are eager to get back to it but can't seem to stop reading the damn forum.
When your 3 cats actually do what you say when you say it in English (My mother tongue is Spanish) but completely ignore you when speaking your native tongue.
When your dinner is about to burn and you are writing this post.
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