• Lauchs@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)

  • Davel23@fedia.io
    0·
    1 year ago

    I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          Damn. I wish someone got ME a kitten for my birthday. I would be like “Hey! Kitten! Why you so cute???” and she would just look at me, because she’s a kitten and doesn’t speak english. She might meow though.

    • WFH@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      “To be” being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there’s worse. In Spanish, “ser” and “estar” both mean “to be”, but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.

    • viralJ@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      “be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.

      • dblsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.

        For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”

        And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).

        A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.

          But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.

      • kureta@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        Not in Turkish. It is “olmak” but the actual “to be” as it is used in “I am, they were, etc.” is, now unused “imek”. it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.

    • Lauchs@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      “To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:

    • inflammable means the same thing as flammable

    • “the/a”. If you’re a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn’t look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn’t until then that I learned that most languages out there don’t have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say “cat”, you can say “cat”. English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat” – the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you’re talking about is unique or not. That’s an unusual feature for a language to have. It’s baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn’t work that way.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation

      Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world’s major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.

    • “data”. It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like “water” or “air” or “love”. It’s not the only word to do this, but it’s unusual.

    • “deer”. It’s not the only word to do this either, but it’s one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English (“deers”, “fishes”, etc).

    • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
      0·
      1 year ago

      Japanese doesn’t have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn’t even used when plural unless there’s specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.

      I’m also learning modern hebrew (Arabic’s writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that’s now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”

      Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: “The water’s warm”, “I’d like a water”, “Water is a liquid”.

      PS. It’s called the zero article.

    • viralJ@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!

      Edit: typos

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    pwn

    When I run grep -v "[aeiouy]" /usr/share/dict/words|less on my system, it’s the only non-abbreviation word that comes up that doesn’t have a “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”, or “y” and is a real word – like, Mirriam-Webster lists it:

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pwn

    slang

    : to dominate and defeat (someone or something) : OWN sense 1b, ROUT entry 2 sense 1a

    Online gamers use “pwn” to describe annihilating an opponent, or owning them. The word came from misspelling “own” by gamers typing quickly and striking the letter P instead of the neighboring letter O.
    — Christopher Rhoads

    No government, including Britain’s, should have the power to pwn the Internet, and destroy it in the process.
    — Amie Stepanovich

    Why pwn the noobs from your couch when you could do it in front of an audience at New York’s first-ever Fortnite In The Heights Tournament?
    —Eva Kis

    Then, a bunch of federal attorneys general got pwned in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding their prosecution of medical marijuana businesses, which is a pretty big deal.
    —Vince Silwoski