Seriously. Boo, boare. First conjugation verb. It's nice that ghosts try to politely explain, what they are just doing. Using ancient and dead language, quite fitting if you ask me.
I just read a folktale collection from 1915 where all the unsavory details of the stories were written out [in Latin like this]. I am greatly amused. I guess the idea was that Latin makes naughty things sound more dignified 😂
What kills me about learning #Latin is you’re effectively learning two languages at once. You’re learning the actual vocab, conjugations, declensions etc – and you’re also learning the language of #grammar itself: what the grammatical rules and parts are called and how they map to particular functions of language
Latin is the kind of language that, in the past, used to be drilled by asking discipuli things like “what is the passive second person plural subjunctive” or whatever the fuck
This means that a lot of the language learning tools I’ve encountered are based on the assumption that you already know this ‘second language’ of grammar, so eg the vocab flashcard lists I have found have got verbs in four different forms, and I’m like “what the fuck do those mean? Which is which and how do I know which one is called for in which situation?”
Like, I can tell that one of them is the infinitive and one of them looks like the first person present indicative – and by the way, these are terms that I only know because I’ve had to teach myself grammar in order to edit other people‘s work – what the fuck are the other two??? I’m just looking at them going, “well, you know, it’d be nice to know that”
If you are a native English speaker aged under 50, you probably didn’t learn grammar at school in your first language, and you probably don’t even know how to apply these words to your native language!
As a copyeditor in my own first language, English, I have had to teach myself the language of grammar in order to explain why certain choices I intuitively know are right or wrong. I am an EXCELLENT editor and yet I still have to look up English.stackexchange to find out what the word is for the function of language I am trying to explain
I’m honestly not sure if the traditional rote learning method or the intuitive ‘immersion’ method of language learning Duolingo uses is better for Latin
because Duolingo’s weakness is that it is based on guessing: you never learn the rules and so you don’t know why something is correct or not correct, which can help you analyse what a certain sentence demands
Basically Duolingo wants to make everyone into the same kind of speaker that I am in English
Surely there’s a happy medium
(Unfortunately I suspect it is ‘formal language classes such as one takes in school’)
The word lesson came to English from French leçon, which itself came from #Latin lection(em). The word originally meant reading, and is related to words like legible.
The word lecture ultimately goes back to the related Latin word lectura, which also meant reading.
Both words went through the same shift in meaning at different times: from a reading from a book in a school, to (academic) instruction in general.
Happy 2nd global-sun-setting-exactly-due-west day!
We often use the generic statement "the sun sets in the west", but that's only globally true on two days, the equinoxes. And one of those is today; though of course whether it's the vernal or the autumn one depends on whether you're in the southern or northern hemisphere respectively.
I think #Latin#equinox or #equinoctium is quite interesting on how it relates to night, while #German Tagundnachtgleiche and #Dutch dag-en-nachtevening literally describe that day and night are equal. I must admit the Dutch one is quite funny since, from a multilingual perspective, it seems to include three times of the day. 😉 #Norwegian jevndògn, #Danish jævndògn, #Icelandic jafndægur (equal day), and #Swedish dagjämning (day equalisation) do the opposite of Latin and relate to day instead; also mirrored in #Finnish päiväntasaus. #Arabic sees a different angle and calls it الاعتدال"alaietidal" (moderation). #etymology#language#linguistics#astronomy
#LilyTomlin and #JaneFonda being in this doesn't surprise me at all, but this is the first I'm aware of #SallyField's hypocrisy. #RitaMoreno is just another light-skinned #Latin person who mistakenly thinks they're going to let her be #white.
Me: I do have another one, @dpnash, but I post a lot about #Neurodiversity topics, so I'm planning to do more of that here. For one thing, the character limit in posts is larger here, so not only is it a bit easier to post longer-form items, you fuzzballs get to have longer conversations with me.
Some weirder, more specific ones? Fine. #StudioGhibli. Indoor #Rowing. #Languages, currently learning #Spanish and #Latin. I geek out a lot about astronomical data and I maintain a widely-used database of stars (the HYG catalog, and its new extension, the AT-HYG catalog with Gaia data) at https://github.com/astronexus.
Yes, I'm a geek. But you still put up with me, right?
epulor: I feast
Minimus is entertaining amici (friends); parus (a bluetit) and passer (a sparrow). He is serving amygdalum (an almond), nux avellana (a hazelnut) and panicella (bread rolls) for prima mensa (the first course), then culices (gnats) and caseus (cheese), of course! #LatinVerbs
@Minimus
🥥 Reading the adventures of @Minimus is a painless and entertaining way to pick up the #Latin origins of so many words now in the English language.
Thank YOU for this #FREE source of continuing education! 🥥
This year has been a reminder to tend to the little spaces on the internet I call my own with more care, starting with https://indiastreetlettering.com/.
I set up this website years ago to collect photographs I take of street lettering around the country, but I’ve been terrible at keeping it up-to-date. That changes now. And if I can keep myself motivated, I’ll share a picture from it here every week 🤞🏼
I am all for this marriage of Mirza Ghalib with art deco in the sign for a cultural institute in Delhi that celebrates the famed poet’s work and legacy.