If you’re reading this I hope in 2019 you get
- Language books
- Cute stationery
- New friends to practice your target languages with
- To travel to the countries where your target languages are spoken
- Fluency
DICTIONARY MASTERPOST
- pons [Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish]
- shabdkosh [Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu]
- wordreference [Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish]
- dict.cc [Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish]
- bab.la [Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Swahili, Turkish]
- linguee [Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish]
- cambridge [Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese]
- dicts.info [73 languages]
- dict.com [30 languages]
- larousse [French, German, Italian, Spanish]
- hablaa [73 languages]
- glosbe [2150 languages]
- freelang [267 languages]
Afrikaans rieme.co.za
Albanian argjio
Amharic abyssinica, amharicdictionary
Arabic arabdict, almaany, firdaous
Armenian nayiri, english2armenian
Bengali / Bangla bword, english-bangla, ovidhan
Burmese burmese-dictionary, myordbok
Cantonese cantodict
Catalan catalandictionary
Croatian hrvatski-rjecnik
Dutch vandale
Estonian sõnastik, dukelupus, eki.ee
Farsi dictionary-farsi, farsidic, aryanpour, ariadic
Georgian lang.interes, translate, targmne, nplg.gov, margaliti
German langenscheit, leo
Greek greek-language
Hawaiian hawaiiandictionary
Hebrew morfix
Hindi hindi-english, hinkhoj, hindi wordnet
Hungarian sztaki, dictzone, topszótár
Icelandic snara
Irish irishdictionary, potafocal
Italian garzantilinguistica
Japanese tangorin, excite, jisho
Javanese kamusjawa
Kazakh lugat
Khmer angkor-planet, kheng
Latvian letonika, latvianforyou
Lithuanian anglu-lietuviu, dict.lt
Macedonian time, off.net.mk
Maltese mlrs.research, englishmaltesedictionary
Mongolian bolor toli, englishmongolian
Norwegian ordnett
Palauan tekinged
Portuguese portuguesedictionary
Punjabi ijunoon, learnpunjabi
Russian multitran
Spanish spanishdict
Swahili kiswahili, africanlanguages
Swedish ord
Tagalog pinoydictionary, tagalog-dictionary, tagaloglang
Tamil tamildict, tamilcube, agarathi, tamildictionary
Telugu andhrabharati, telugupedia
Tibetan eng-tib
Thai thai-language, thai2english, longdo, linedict
Turkish tureng, turkishdictionary, turkishclass
Ukrainian slovnenya, cybermova
Urdu urduword, urduenglishdictionary, urdu123, studypart
Uyghur uyghurdictionary, yulghun
Uzbek zangorikema
Welsh geiriadur
Vietnamese vietdictionary, vdict
Zulu isizulu
there’s a chinese exchange student in my composition class and we were being presented something about how you can use brackets to signify translation and there was chinese text on the screen and the prof said to him “what does that say?” and he deadpanned “i can’t speak chinese” and everyone sat there in dumbfounded silence and then the presenter clicked to show that the text literally said “i can’t speak chinese” with the most shit-eating grin on his face
Chaotic Neutral
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.
This is very true, along with the (very incorrect) idea that sign language is just finger-spelling or “acting out” the words. The common ableist assumption is that d/Deaf or hard of hearing people are deficient or missing a sense, and so their language must be similarly deficient.
It’s not even something most linguists explore unless they are d/D/HoH or have some personal motivation to include signed languages in their corpus of study. It’s 2019 and we’re just now questioning the “basics” of linguistics — how do we teach phonetics and phonology for non-spoken language? How do we expand the definition of phoneme and morpheme to include kinetic units? Where does sign language development fit into child language development and what, if anything, does it mean for ideas of critical periods? How do we reinforce the fact to the public that there is not just one universal signed language, and that the sign languages aren’t just an adaptation of spoken languages but a language all their own, sometimes with vastly different origins than the spoken language in the same area?
All of these questions that shouldn’t have taken this long to address.
During my fieldwork among Khoe-speaking San in southern Africa, I discovered that pretty much the entire speech community was fluent in their Village Sign Language - even though there were, by the time I was there, only two d/Deaf people living there. Not only were they fully integrated into the community, seeing everyone - including the kids - could talk to them, they also had jobs and were perfectly comfortable in their working environment.
Hearing people used their SL between each other all the time, in the bush, in the fields, on hunts, when transmitting secret messages not meant for the boss/the police/the teachers to hear, in the supermarket across aisles, in the bush, etc.
They also taught me some basics (like “hello, how are you?”+replies) because they thought it was impolite if I wasn’t returning their greetings when they signed to me across the street whenever we randomly met in town.
In this community, I learned that there is a wealth of uses for SL, a lot of them also relevant/useful for hearing folks!
GUYS THIS IS AMAZING
SERIOUSLY
6000 YEARS
STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS
STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW
STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME
STORIES
GUYS LOOK AT THIS
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS
GUYYYYYSSSS
“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.”
How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?
“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”
This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.
For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:
(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering. In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).
Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits. I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.
Small Town Story (小城故事) by Teresa Teng (鄧麗君). 1979.
Teresa Teng (1953-1995) was a Taiwanese singer known for her sweet voice and romantic ballads. She recorded in many languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Hokkien, Cantonese, and English. In the 1980s, mainland China imposed a brief cultural ban on Hong Kong and Taiwan, but Teng’s music nonetheless was circulated through the black market and reached the people. Because the focus of Teng’s music was so different from that of the revolutionary songs that mainland Chinese people were exposed to previously, many people such as artist Guo Jian and political activist/writer Liu Xiaobo credit Teng for inspiring their generation.
Small Town Story describes a small town in Lukang, Changhua, Taiwan. It was first recorded in 1978, and also became the theme song of 1980 film The Story of a Small Town (小城故事) directed by Li Hsing (李行). Small Town Story is one of Teng’s most famous songs, and over the years was covered by many artists including Fei Yu-ching (費玉清) Harlem Yu (庾澄慶) and Coco Lee (李玟).
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So after going to IKEA, having an epiphany, and checking the internet, it appears that ONLY English refers to “turning trays” as “Lazy Susans”
So uhh wtf English and let me know if your language has a cool word for the Lazy Susan