Posts by tommi
In English, at least in USA, people write $3 and mean three dollars (rather than dollars three), while other units are written after the number; no c99, h13, min22, '5, etc. to be seen. Why is it $...
In many Germanic and Finno-ugric languages there are many compound words. One does not write "yhdys sana", but rather "yhdyssana". Learning to write these correctly is notoriously hard for people, ...
In Portuguese a male speaker thanks with an «obrigado», while a female with an «obrigada». I am reading a text (some thank you notice for buying some mass-produced industrial product with no obvio...
When playing house with a child, they say things like "Nyt se meni nukkumaan." when they mean that I should have the toy I am playing with go to bed. Similar use of the simple past / imperfect tens...
I have read somewhere that Swedish is more conservative than the other continental North Germanic languages, Norwegian and Danish. Clearly Icelandic is more conservative then these all. But is the ...
In normed Finnish language hän (he/she) refers to people, while se (it) refers to non-people. However, in spoken language, at least in many dialects, se is used also for people. (Both hän and se ar...
Having language tags capitalized and others not might increase their visibility or specialness. This would not be a bad thing. English likes to capitalize some strange things such as language n...
I have mostly self-learned Norwegian without much emphasis on grammar. Occasionally I see expressions like "skulle gjort", sometimes with "gjort" replaced by another verb. I would expect to see the...
Quoting from https://svenska.se/tre/?sok=ohyra&pz=1: sedan första årtiondet av 1500-talet (Helige mäns lefverne); fornsv. ohyra ’odjur; stor mängd’; urspr. ’ngt otäckt, otrevligt’ Se...
In this quiz on Yle's website I met the nice word "murremestari": https://yle.fi/a/74-20058169 Obviously this means one who masters dialects, but in that meaning I pronounce it as "murremmestari"....
For background, there exists a stereotypical Danish pronunciation of English. "Danglish" can also mean other things, but this is what I am referring to, here. I lived one year in Denmark and can r...
