language is fun
Mar. 6th, 2026 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwI read (or at least skim) the columns from the Language Log blog (I see it on here). The posts from Victor Mair about Chinese characters are not relevant to my life, but I was looking through this morning and noticed this bit:
>>(there are numerous recherché characters for types of jade like that, as there are for horses, fish, usw.)<<
I noted this. I thought it was weird that he used a German abbreviation - usw stands for Und So Weiter, which basically means and so forth. Why didn't he use etc.? But et cetera is Latin, which isn't exactly English either.
I had an exciting (for me) experience this afternoon. The pungmul group was performing at an event at the Kennedy School, which is like a fortress if you don't have a Harvard ID. I called the number I was given for someone to let me in. She answered "여보세요" which is polite way to answer a phone call. It literally means "look here" instead of hello (whatever that means). That often makes me think of Alexander Graham Bell suggesting "ahoy-hoy" as the correct thing to say. Apparently Mr. Burns on the Simpsons did that as well. I certainly know it as a vocabulary word, but nobody ever said it to me before. I almost answered it back, but then I'd be committed to trying to say "I'm in front of 15 Eliot, how do I get in?" in Korean, which I would have to think for a while to manage. So I just said "Can we speak English?" and she said of course, and we went on from there.
Speaking of Korean, in this post about Cocona of the group XG, I said that I had never encountered the word for "they." https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/1009979.html
It showed up in a Duolingo sentence this morning, after all these years. It looks like "he" made plural, with an ending. Will I ever use it? Maybe not.
Instead of doing the regular homework, I have imagined a couple of projects - comparing the Korean workds for the planets and their corresponding days of the week, which seem to be counterparts of the Roman (and Romance language) ones. I don't know how far that will go. I also decided that I should learn how to say the multiplication tables.
>>(there are numerous recherché characters for types of jade like that, as there are for horses, fish, usw.)<<
I noted this. I thought it was weird that he used a German abbreviation - usw stands for Und So Weiter, which basically means and so forth. Why didn't he use etc.? But et cetera is Latin, which isn't exactly English either.
I had an exciting (for me) experience this afternoon. The pungmul group was performing at an event at the Kennedy School, which is like a fortress if you don't have a Harvard ID. I called the number I was given for someone to let me in. She answered "여보세요" which is polite way to answer a phone call. It literally means "look here" instead of hello (whatever that means). That often makes me think of Alexander Graham Bell suggesting "ahoy-hoy" as the correct thing to say. Apparently Mr. Burns on the Simpsons did that as well. I certainly know it as a vocabulary word, but nobody ever said it to me before. I almost answered it back, but then I'd be committed to trying to say "I'm in front of 15 Eliot, how do I get in?" in Korean, which I would have to think for a while to manage. So I just said "Can we speak English?" and she said of course, and we went on from there.
Speaking of Korean, in this post about Cocona of the group XG, I said that I had never encountered the word for "they." https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/1009979.html
It showed up in a Duolingo sentence this morning, after all these years. It looks like "he" made plural, with an ending. Will I ever use it? Maybe not.
Instead of doing the regular homework, I have imagined a couple of projects - comparing the Korean workds for the planets and their corresponding days of the week, which seem to be counterparts of the Roman (and Romance language) ones. I don't know how far that will go. I also decided that I should learn how to say the multiplication tables.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 06:01 am (UTC)I've seen both used in English and I have no idea if there are any meaningful connotative differences other than which you learned first.