“n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.” — The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: heartworm (via caesarborgia)

ostkrieg:

c’est whatèvre

• This is Korean: 안녕하세요
• This is Japanese: こんにちは
• This is Chinese: 你好
•  They're different.

japanese vs finnish

pati116:

st-chair:

Japanese: hai, aisenai - yes, not love

Finnish: hai, ai se nai - shark, oh it’s fucking

japanese vs polish

Japanese: daisuki - I really like you

 Polish: daj suki (you say it the same way) - give me bitches

divineirony:

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

thedearest-themostvaliant:

I love languages with all my cold shriveled little heart but man I wish I could just download new ones into my brain???

theymademed00it:

The only French you will ever need.

did you know that “I’m scared” translates to “Ich habe Angst” in German?

yeah that’s how I feel about Game of Thrones Season 3.

barricade-on-a-cloud:

How to pronounce the name of the characters from Les Misérables by the tumblr blogger barricade-on-a-cloud.

In order :

Jean Valjean

Javert

Fantine

Cosette

Ephrasie (Cosette’s real name)

Eponine

Thénardier

Gavroche

Marius Pontmercy

Enjolras

Coufeyrac

Combeferre

Grantaire

Jehan

Feuilly

Prouvaire

Joly

Bishop

Fauchelevent

Montparnasse

Lesgles

Mabeuf

every single time a celebrity admits to have studied at least one language i’m all

BUT SAY SOMETHING SHOW ME THE RECEIPTS I REQUIRE PROOF

oswinses:

enjorlaas:

skuboglesby:

bilingual my ass. your either heterolingual or homolingual

#you’re not bilingual  #you’re confused  #stop being greedy   

#it’s just a phase #you’ll meet a nice language and settle down

in case you were wondering, I’m that asshole

maddierose:

A Collection of Rare and Obscure Words

Cheiloproclitic - Being attracted to someones lips.
Quidnunc - One who always has to know what is going on.
Ultracrepidarian - Of one who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge.
Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone.
Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you.
Tarantism - The urge to overcome melancholy by dancing.
Autolatry - The worship of one’s self.
Cagamosis - An unhappy marriage.
Gargalesthesia - The sensation caused my tickling.
Capernoited - Slightly intoxicated or tipsy.
Lalochezia - The use of abusive language to relieve stress or ease pain.
Cataglottism - Kissing with tongue.
Basorexia - An overwhelming desire to kiss.
Brontide - The low rumbling of distant thunder.
Grapholagnia - The urge to stare at obscene pictures.
Agelast - A person who never laughs.
Wanweird - An unhappy fate.
Dystopia - Am imaginary place of total misery. A metaphor for hell.
Petrichor - The smell of dry rain on the ground.
Anagapesis - The feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.
Malapert - Clever in manners of speech.
Duende - Unusual power to attract or charm.
Concilliabule - A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot.
Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say “to hell with it”.
Lygerastia - The condition of one who is only amorous when the lights are out.

Ayurnamat - The philosophy that there is no point in worrying about events that cannot be changed.
Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads no where.
Baisemain - A kiss on the hand.
Druxy - Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside.
Mamihlapinatapei - The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move.

finlandfacts:

The many meanings of Vittu, the most common Finnish swear word:

• vittu - “cunt”
• vittu! - ”fuck!”
• vitut. - ”fuck it”
• vitut! - “bullshit!”
• vitun - “fucking”
• vitusti - “a lot of/much”
• vittua? - “what the fuck?”
• vitus? - “why the fuck?”
• vittuilla - “fuck with”
• vituttaa - “I’m pissed off”
• vittumainen - “fucking annoying”
• vittumaisuuttaan - “out of pure dickishness”

It is also a filler word, that can be vittu used at vittu any point in a vittu sentence.