Or CHF 0.87. It’s incredible how close the world’s top currencies are right now. My dad learnt 12 Fr. to 1£ and 4 Fr. to 1 US$. And his dad used to tell him ‘you will live to see a time when a dollar will be less than a franc.’ When I was a teen we counted 1.50 Fr. for 1 € and 1.60 or even more for the pound.
@bugcat what can you tell us about the value of Roman currency?
@Sanonius I covered that topic earlier in the thread, do a search for bronze coins and you’ll find it.
Video related:
Exercise: All Things Great and Small
What adjectives does your target language use to talk about size?
In Latin we have:
breuis (short, small; in height, distance, or time) root of “brief”
humilis (low, lowly, small) _ – root of “humility”
paruus (small, cheap, unimportant)
paruulus (small, young, insufficient) – this is actually a diminutive of the regular paruus
paulus / polus (small, a small quantity of, a little bit of)
quantulus (how small or trifling)
pusillus (tiny, petty, insignificant)
magnus (large, great, important) – root of “magnificent”
amplus (large, roomy, abundant) – root of “ample”
capáx (wide, large, spacious) – root of “capacious”
grandis (full-grown, large, powerful) – root of “grand”
(This also goes to show an interesting fact about English – lower-class speakers would likely almost never use any of these Latin-derived words, preferring Anglo-Saxon alternatives: thus quick for brief, roomy for capacious etc. If you’re from the English working-class and I’m wrong, feel free to correct me…)
Thinking of learning another language, to go along with the Latin; this time a living language, and probably an Asian one as well.
Chinese is going to be too hard for me, and Korean culture isn’t super-interesting, so perhaps it’s time for another stab at Japanese. I am very tempted by Tamil, though…
Do any of you have a good resource for learning spoken go terms in Chinese? I’m most familiar with pinyin phonetics, and not so interested in reading the characters for go terms.
I just moved in with some Chinese housemates, and one plays go, so I’m in a very good position to practice speaking and listening while playing.
Then your best resource is probably your Chinese housemate, right?
Sensei library.
If you can understand Chinese, you can try some weiqi videos and guess then the specific words.
Then your best resource is probably your Chinese housemate, right?
Well, that’s slow and inaccurate, because his (the main player with interest) English and go experience are very limited.
Sensei library.
Yes! This is what I wanted. Thanks.
The Big Bag of Languages I Want to Learn but Probably Never Will right now runs, West to East:
Of these, Russian is going to be the most useful and probably the easiest to learn. I’m not going to quit Latin, of course.
Thanks to your post, I see that OGS and the forum are missing an integrated translation functionality. (Like in WeChat or other apps)
Ok, time to finally come back to my promise and talk about prepositions in Japanese.
First problem: there aren’t really any prepositions in Japanese, or at least, they’re nothing like in English. I’ll focus on the spatial prepositions in English, as shown in the diagram.*
In English, when we say “John stands outside the school”, we see the school as the main part of the location, and the preposition outside is just attached to the front. In Japanese this is flipped around. Japanese has nouns for the locations, in this case the noun 外 / そと, and the school is added to this noun attributively: ジョンは学校の外にいる. So in English it’s like you’d say “John is on the school’s outside”.
Sometimes (English) prepositions are used as prefixes / suffixes in Japanese, but this is with compound words, such as 外人 “outside person”, i.e. foreigner. In these cases, since these nouns are compounded of two kanji, the Chinese reading is used instead of the Japanese reading.
Anyways, here are the nouns that correlate to the pictures:
*the temporal ones are arguably even trickier, I don’t really understand them completely myself, yet… Grammatically they work the same, but their meaning does not correspond one-to-one with the English meanings.
Here’s an interesting paper about the perspective of time in different cultures / languages: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265244639_Spatial_time_in_the_West_and_the_East
Let’s learn vocab with flags (uexilla). Info left in the filename for guessing pleasure.
Black (atrum)
Green (uiride)
Red (rubrum)
Turquoise (caeruleum[?])
White (candidum)
Yellow (flauum) / Gold (aureum)
Stripes (uigae[?])
Circle (circulus)
Triangle (trigonum)
Cross (crux)
Sun (sol)
Star (aster)
Swords (gladii)
Temple (templum)
Anchor (ancora)
Boots (caligae)
Flower (flos)
Hills (colla)
Key (clauis)
Horse (equus)
Elephant (elephas)
Camel (camelus)
Bear (ursus)
Can you add an asterisk specifying that they are postpositions? Also, aren’t what you showed common nouns which are often used with の to express concepts which would be translated into English with prepositions, whereas に was actually the postposition in that sentence?
に is a particle specifying grammatical case, not a postposition, and the part in front of の is an attributive noun to the main part that follows の, so also the translated 内 of the English preposition inside is in no way a postposition.
To add some confusion as to how a language can handle prepositions over time:
In Homeric Greek, prepositions are floating around wherever the poetic metre seems fit, before or after the noun they belongs to. But even if they have a close relation to a verb and form what would be a ‘phrasal verb’ in English:
hetairous, hoi kata bous êsthion ‘the companions who down the oxen ate’, i.e. who actually ate the oxen (and did not just nibble a bit). The preposition kata ‘down’ has the force to give the verb’s action a sense of completion. So when you want to look this word up in the dictionary, you don’t look under esthio and kata separately, but under the compound katesthio, even if the parts are standing far away from each other! If you translate kata as a pure preposition modifyin bous, you end up with ‘who ate along the oxen’ or ‘according to the oxen’ which is not the intended meaning.
But as one could see from other examples, the distinction between a preposition modifying the noun or a situational adverb modifying the verb is not very clear. ‘to put soldiers around the city’ or ‘to aroundput (i.e. surround) the city with soldiers’ can be one and the same sentence in Greek.
The consequence of this is, that direct objects of such ‘phrasal verbs’ or compound verbs in many cases don’t take the object case of the base verb (usually accusative), but the case required by the preposition/preverb.
Coptic is also a really big fan of phrasal verbs, but has no case inflexion.
We do this in Dutch too (and in German), for example “aanbieden” is a verb composed of aan, meaning on, and bieden, meaning to bid, where aanbieden means to offer. In its infinite form, it is written as one word, but often it splits up in other forms, such as:
Counter to the Homeric Greek, it’s not grammatical to just place these anywhere in the sentence, which makes it a bit tricky for learners.
I know a person from Poland who was learning German, and for a short while she wasn’t sure wether you could say Ich stehe dich ver. ‘I stand you under’. That has become our running gag.
And your example sentence is so verdammt close to German, that I think I’d like to learn how to speak or write Dutch.
我学中文学了一年了，还是菜鸟。
I speak Swedish and English fluently. I learned German and Russian in school. I am studying Chinese, Japanese and Korean now. I think the hardest part is the input method (Cangjie, Sebeolsik, KKC).
Chinese is very easy to pick up and start learning. I would strongly recommend it. I think people in the West are mainly confused by the 4 tones, but surely you can learn 4 things?
The Korean alphabet is extremely clever. I think everyone should learn it.
Chinese is easy… As long as you don’t want to write / read it.
