Me neither. I don't have a TV. DVD is the only way to go.
Ah, you say that because you're not IN the group. I'm not claiming that ALL such groups (or even their words/ usage) have depth/ meaning, but it's part of the bonding process and a way of maintaining that bond. It's a more or less deliberately enforced estrangement of anyone who's not.... cool? hip?* What's the word they use these days? But you know what I mean.
Looks interesting. Thanks Signal*, I've added it to my Amazon Wish List, as a reminder to buy it when finances permit.
Yeah i understand where your coming from. I guess i was looking at it critically. I guess the real issue is the culture rather than the language itself.
Thanks Signal, I'll give it a read. I am very aware of my thought processes when i read and how I'm reading. I try to look through a eye of unaltered perception of what the author is trying to present to the reader but sometimes its hard.
Yep.
).She's quite a modernist and appreciates the dynamics of living languages. I have a two- or three-page glossary of words she has made up.
I see. Like the line from "Zip-a-dee Doo-dah": "It's the truth, it's actual. Everything is satisfactual."
There are several forms of non-standard language variants.
I never cared for it either. But I give it a lot of respect for spinning off "Angel," one of my all-time favorite programs.
The Korean writing system is phonetic. It looks like logograms to us because the letters of each (monosyllabic) word are arranged in a square instead of a line like ours. In South Korea a small number of Chinese logograms are still in use; primarily things like names. In North Korea they are illegal. Japanese uses a mixture of phonetic symbols (two different syllabaries, one for Japanese words and one for foreign words or acronyms) with a subset of 2,000 Chinese logograms.
As I noted earlier. Even if they spoke plain English we still wouldn't understand what a "charmed quark" is.
One swallow of Dubonnet Red on the rocks with a twist gets the summer off to a very good start.
Wow, that phrase is going to be rattling around in my head for weeks.
Stay tuned to China. They're about one generation away from browbeating the entire population into fluency in Mandarin. Once that happens, they can introduce the phonetic syllabary that's been under development for decades.
So you think that by the next generation, everyone worldwide will be speaking Mandarin? I know they're the #1 language in the world but I always just thought that was because the population in China is so fricken huge. I think they still have a long way to go to get Mandarin intergrated into the US. I mean, where in the US can you buy books or movies in Mandarin? (as far as physical locations, I don't mean where on the internet)
No, just everyone in China. As of today, tens of millions of Chinese people speak Cantonese and other languages and they can only understand each other in writing. (The non-phonetic writing system has maintained a 95-98% common vocabulary and syntax among all the Chinese languages but their phonetics have diverged so widely that they are not intercomprehensible.) The PRC government has been aggressively promoting Mandarin as the national language. It is taught in all schools and it is difficult to find formal classes in the other languages. Radio and TV are in Mandarin, although there are a few programs in the regional languages. With each generation a greater percentage of the population becomes fluent in Mandarin and it is estimated that in another 25 years it will be universal.
China has almost one-fifth of the world's population. India has almost one-sixth. The USA ranks a distant third with not quite one-twentieth. If their economies continue to modernize and liberalize, China and India will become the twin 500-pound gorillas of international politics and culture.
The Chinese have no agenda of spreading their language. Even they recognize the tremendous handicap of their writing system. Perhaps in another half-century when Mandarin is universal and they can adopt the phonetic system that is already prepared, it will be more practical to teach Chinese to foreigners.
These days most large American cities have a Chinese community. You can find Chinese seasonings, clothing and chochkes, as well as Chinese books, magazines, newspapers and videos. In the larger cities you'll find a Chinese movie theater.
The definition of "speak" is difficult to standardize for non-natives, and there are many charts like this with wildly varying numbers. This is the largest figure I've ever seen for English, and I assure you that half of those people are around 4 or 5 on my fluency scale. My Mandarin is better than that, and I would never claim to "speak" it.
Linguists refer to that as AAVE, "African-American Vernacular English."
AAVE is a dialect of English, so English is their primary language.
That's hardly crude. Today the term "black" is more common than "African-American" or "Afro-American," and it's certainly considered polite. Only linguists use the tongue-twisting full thirteen syllables. "Ebonics" is a more popular term. And nobody knows what AAVE is.
Apparently you're not old enough to have heard your parents describe life in Chicago during Prohibition. I am.
"Homie" and "homes" are just contractions of "homeboy," an American slang word that goes back 100 years and was still in use in its original form in the 1970s. "Dog" has been a slang word for "man" for at least three generations in my observation; as in "lucky dog."