Tag: languages
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Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American
When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!
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How far back in time can you understand English?
Colin Gorrie wrote an excellent blog post last month, in the style of a travel blog but where every couple of paragraphs the blogger jumped back a hundred years in time, switching to an earlier dialect of English as they do so, until they become gradually unintelligible to most readers. Fascinating.
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Heterophonic Homonyms
On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?
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What's that, girl? Two children are lost somewhere in this bookshop?
Yeah, I should probably find them and take them home for lunch.
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Dan, in a bookshop, holds a book called How To Speak Dog, alongside a French Bulldog.
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My 8-year-old asked me "In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽" (I assume the answer is yes!)
A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ =
U+203D, ⸘ =U+2E18. Nice.(And yet we don't have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar "cifrão" dollar signs...)
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Small-World Serendipity
We travelled 7,000km across the ocean only to find, by complete coincidence, that the Caribbean’s biggest cymruphile is the captain of a boat we chartered when we fancied a morning of reef-snorkelling and turtle-spotting.
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Came half way around the world to find a surprising boat with a non-English name I understand.
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Small six-seater day boat named 'Cariad', afloat. The letter I is dotted with a heart symbol.
("Cariad" is Welsh for "love")
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Hey Google, pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Wait, it isn't supposed to be pronounced "clan via Pokemon Go garage city of cocoa"? I've been saying it wrong my whole life! 😅
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What if Emails were Multilingual?
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a standard for multilingual emails? Oh wait, there is! Let's see how it works, and whether it's (ever going to be) ready for mainstream use...
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I replied to Steve Faulkner's 2022 post about screen readers and emoji, highlighting the underlying interpretation problem with emoji, and sharing a topical joke that Chris McCausland made on Would I Lie To You? a few years prior.
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For World Book Day (which here in the UK is marked a month earlier than the rest of the world) the kids' school invited people to come "dressed as a word".
As usual, the kids and teachers participated along with only around two other adults. But of course I was one of them.
This year, I was "magical".
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Dan, a white man with long hair (tied back) and a beard, stands in a Cotswolds-esque village green wearing a black jacket and holding three large novelty playing cards and a magic wand.
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[Bloganuary] Magpies are the Best Bird
Magpies are the best bird, nay, the best animal. Fight me.
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Solitary Nouns
Collective nouns are great and all, but what if we had solitary nouns?
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How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors
With commentary, Dan shares an article he enjoyed about specific examples of censor-evading wordplay from Chinese social media.
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Was a 10th century speaker of Old Saxon a "Saxophone"? 🤔