Darkoshi

gender inclusive job postings in Germany

2022-08-07T20:19:03Z

In German, many words that refer to people have an extra suffix ("in" for singular; "innen" for plural) when used to refer to women. To refer to both men and women with that word, you can't use only the masculine term; you need to use both.

So for example, the German word for "teacher" (masculine singular and plural) is "Lehrer". The feminine singular form is "Lehrerin"; the feminine plural is "Lehrerinnen". To refer to both male and female teachers in speech you would use "Lehrer und Lehrerinnen".

Based on the linked site, you can also put the feminine form first, ie. "Lehrerinnen und Lehrer", but this sounds quite awkward to me. My knowledge of the German language is mostly from my childhood however, not from the past 30 years, so perhaps the latter form has become more common nowadays.

To simplify this kind of expression in writing, various short forms have been devised, as shown on the above (www.genderator.app) website. Some of these short forms are inclusive of non-binary genders too. Here I have listed the nominative case forms from that site:

Paarform (unabbreviated):
👤 die Lehrerin bzw. der Lehrer
👥 die Lehrerinnen und Lehrer

Schrägstrichschreibung (using slashes):
👤 der/die Lehrer/-in
👥 die Lehrer/-innen

Klammerform (using parentheses):
👤 der/die Lehrer(in)
👥 die Lehrer(innen)

Binnenmajuskel (using internal capitalization):
👤 der/die LehrerIn
👥 die LehrerInnen

Gendersternchen / Genderstar (nicht binär) (using asterisks; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der*die Lehrer*in
👥 die Lehrer*innen

Genderdoppelpunkt (nicht binär) (using colons; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der:die Lehrer:in
👥 die Lehrer:innen

Gendergap (nicht binär) (using underscores; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der_die Lehrer_in
👥 die Lehrer_innen

Today I came across some job postings on a German website. The advertised jobs include:
- eine(n) Schlussredakteur(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Software-Tester(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Systemadministrator(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Postmaster(in) (m/w/d)

I wasn't familiar with the (mwd) abbreviation.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/mwd-meaning

https://fashionunited.info/news/business/q-a-about-m-w-d-german-gender-regulations/20190725147

It stands for "männlich, weiblich oder divers" - "male, female or diverse".
The 2nd page explains about the legal reasons for including this in the job postings.

In November 2017, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) ruled that civil status law must allow a third gender option, besides "female" or "male". The changes are aimed at all those who can not or do not want to be assigned to any gender within the so-called binary gender system and protect their “right to personality”.

This means, for example, that birth certificates cannot have blank gender entries for intersex and/or nonbinary people and as of mid-2018, they need to provide a third option. The deadline for the Federal Government to improve the civil law accordingly was 31 December 2018. As of 2019 employers and recruiters should comply with the same rule, by not excluding non-binary people and offering gender-neutral job advertisements.
...
In Germany, according to the General Equal Treatment Act from 2006, employers are not allowed to discriminate against an applicant on grounds of gender. The gender identities of people are diverse. This must be considered also in recruitment circumstances, job postings included so that no gender is discriminated against.

Another interesting German-language topic:
“Freundin“ means both friend and girlfriend. How do you differentiate between the two in conversation?

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heuer = this year

2022-06-25T07:38:07Z

https://www.wordsense.eu/heuer/

adverb (regional, southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
heuer: this year

Example: Der Münchner Christkindlmarkt fällt heuer aus. (GMX, 30 October 2020)

Note to self: It does not mean "heutzutage" (nowadays).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heuer
Etymology:
From Middle High German hiure, from Old High German hiuro, hiuru, from hiu (“in this”) +‎ jāru (“year”).

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Smart Cat and other random things

2021-05-09T07:44:52Z

I like the short Exercise with Smart Cat segments on PBS that are shown between some children's programs.
I can do that! It's fun, easy, *and* good for me, yay! It gets me up from my chair whenever it comes on.
I have the TV on to drown out the sound of the neighbor dog who is barking.

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I've got a headache but no fever, which isn't unusual for me.
I worked in my yard for several hours today.
The back of my neck is achy. It may be exacerbated by stooping down to pull weeds, which I did Wednesday and today. It was bad enough yesterday that I started considering getting one of those neck braces like the pharmicist lady on the Doc Martin TV series was always wearing. Maybe those things support the head, taking stress off of the neck? Or maybe they prevent you from turning your head... I'll have to read up on it.

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Heard on TV: "The moose is on the loose!" hahah

I tried something out, using dandelions as an artistic tool. Coming soon to a universe near you! Maybe.

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I'm trying to clean off my table. It is taking very long and I'm only making small inroads.
Oh that's right, I wanted to try out the new Wyze sensors that are sitting there in that box.
And I also wanted to buy a raspberry PI to see if that makes the old sensors work more reliably especially as I wasn't able to get their bridge to reconnect after it had a problem last week.

There's the folder with my tax docs. I can put that away now; I've already gotten my tax refunds by direct deposit, as well as this year's stimulus payment too.
There, that is done.

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You know how in some commercials they have the legal stuff spoken very quickly at the end?
You know how, to a native English speaker, Spanish sounds like it is spoken very quickly?

Well, I saw a commercial on a Spanish-language TV channel, and the legal stuff that was spoken at the end of it sounded even more blisteringly fast than the English-language ones.

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A note I wrote on a paper on the table:

"My hands look old.
My skin is dry and textured."

They don't look quite as old to me today as they did then.

Starting in December I went 4 months without any significant menstruation, only minor spotting. It was great. Last month I got a period again. Maybe the note was from the dry period, an unwelcome side effect.

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On Thursday, I had saved a short audio recording... it was after my laptop microphone hadn't been working, but then it worked again. In it, I said:

"Testing One Two Three... NOW why is it working!!??.. But fine, it's working, right?"

I was idly playing around with that recording. I selected short clips of it and played them back several times in a row. Then I reversed one of those selections ("NOW why...") to see what it sounded like backwards. I did NOT expect it to same the same backwards as it did forwards, but it DID, which blew my mind.

forwards
backwards

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I saw this beginning clip of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" on TV the other night, and it made me laugh so good! I happened to be laying on the floor while watching it to begin with, so it was really a ROTFLOL moment.

I didn't end up watching the whole episode, as I had to finish up my work, but I need to watch the full thing (again? not sure if I've seen it before) one of these days.

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Tết Tết Tết Fireworks!

2021-01-18T02:26:11Z

I like this Vietnamese song, it's rather catchy:

Video title: Liên Khúc Nhạc Xuân 2021 Remix KHÔNG QUẢNG CÁO - TẾT TẾT TẾT ĐẾN RỒI Mừng Năm Mới Phát Tài Phát Lộc
Posted by: Kho Nhạc Xuân Remix
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEmLZpsuUM
Date posted: Jan 11, 2021

The above video is simple but oddly mesmerizing A young woman smiles a lot and walks through some flower beds and blossoming trees, in slow motion. There are fireworks effects overlayed. I wondered if those fireworks are meant to reflect how the woman feels (bursting with happiness about something/someone), or how someone else feels about her.

Not until watching the next video with another version of the same song, and translating the song name (Tet Tet Tet is coming), did I remember that Tet is the word for the Vietnamese New Year's celebration.

These are the BEST fireworks I've ever seen in a video. If you missed seeing ones in person this year, this may be worth watching in full screen:

Video title: Liên khúc nhạc xuân: Tết tết tết đến rồi + Xuân xuân ơi xuân đã về
Posted by: Trung Bui Thanh
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaN85BSLnMU
Date posted: Jan 28, 2019

(Did that firework display really go on for 32 whole minutes?!!)

The laser light effects in the beginning of the next video are spectacular (and the fireworks are nice too though they don't show up nearly as clearly as the prior video).
Based on the comments, they told people there wouldn't be a display this year to avoid crowds from gathering, but then did this after all and broadcast it live!

Video title: London's 2021 fireworks 🎆 Happy New Year Live! 🔴 BBC
Posted by: BBC
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJIg_3DnLk
Date posted: Streamed live on Dec 31, 2020

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blankets of white

2021-01-14T08:03:01Z

A layer of fog persisted here past noon today. It felt quiet and muted and calm, like after a snowfall.

An Austrian radio station mentioned a "Schneeflockdown". Schneeflocke is German for 'snowflake'. So Schneeflockdown is a cute bilingual way of saying "snowed in".

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While debugging, I came across this comment in angular.js:

// Insanity Warning: scope depth-first traversal
// yes, this code is a bit crazy, but it works and we have tests to prove it!

(I didn't write down what version of the file we are using, so am not able to find it online right now.)

This is the code that followed the comment. After that comment, I didn't bother trying to make sense of it. It wasn't related to what I was debugging anyway:

   if (!(next = ((current.$$watchersCount && current.$$childHead) ||
         (current !== target && current.$$nextSibling)))) {
       while (current !== target && !(next = current.$$nextSibling)) {
         current = current.$parent;
       }
     }
   } while ((current = next));

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"sure thing" vs "you're welcome"

2020-09-06T01:19:16Z

A co-worker thanked me for something small while we were Skyping. When You're welcome feels awkward or too formal, sometimes I reply No problem. This time I typed Sure.

But then the word on the screen looked odd to me, and I wondered if that wasn't a well-known response after all. Maybe it looked odd to the other person too.

I'm of the impression that using Sure in this way is short for Sure thing to imply it's a sure thing, ie. a certainty, that one is always willing to help out like that, and it's no big deal.

But when I checked a few dictionaries, neither the definitions for "sure" nor "sure thing" mention it being used in this way.

So I looked up "saying sure instead of you're welcome". These pages mention saying "sure":

30+ Things You Can Say Instead of ‘You’re Welcome’ - this is quite a good list.

10 Ways to Say “You’re Welcome”

This page confirms my belief that "Sure thing" is also used:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30554/can-sure-thing-mean-youre-welcome

Yes, this is why "you're welcome" feels awkward to me sometimes:

Why Don’t We Say ‘You’re Welcome’ Anymore?

If you’ve done something for someone and you say ‘you’re welcome’ after they thank you, the implication is kind of, ‘Yeah, I really did you a favor and you should be grateful,” she said. “So ‘certainly’ or ‘of course’ means you’re kind of belittling what you just did, which is more courteous.”

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sign language alphabet

2020-07-17T17:39:00Z

random thought:
It must be horrible to be intubated and not even able to communicate something as simple as "I am very cold, please give me blankets".

It would be good to learn to finger-spell the alphabet signs, so one would still have a way to communicate that didn't require pen&paper or keyboard, etc.
But then again, I wonder how many medical professionals are able to recognize and understand it?

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And then again, if they had to strap down your hands to keep you from pulling out the tube like they did with Qiao after his car accident, that wouldn't help much. At least they keep you mostly in a daze so maybe you don't even feel things like being cold.

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missing nots

2019-08-29T14:18:01Z

Work emails from colleagues in India and Vietnam often seem to suffer the problem of missing the word "not" in key places. When taking the statements as written, they seem to indicate the opposite of what the colleagues are intending to say, based on other cues in the email.

I wonder if it is due to negation being handled differently in their native languages.

For example: ...but I did see any differences...
instead of : ...but I did not see any differences...

For example: I doubt build was performed. I checked and could see latest build having changes.
instead of: ...I checked and could see the latest build NOT having the changes.

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bites shoots and leaves

2019-08-21T05:17:15Z

Composing an email to a work colleague, I wrote, "I just wanted to make sure we're not biting ourselves in the foot".

Something didn't sound quite right about that, so I looked up the expression. Oh, it's usually "shooting", not "biting". That makes more sense. But then I didn't feel like mentioning shooting in the email, and I was copying an Indian colleague who might not be familiar with the expression anyway, so I changed it to a plainer sounding "not causing ourselves potential future problems".

Something else in a recent work email made me smile. The email mentioned "the Metallicize value", and I wondered what that meant, until I looked at the pasted code block and saw a "maxTableSize" variable highlighted.

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skeetas n hats n teas

2019-07-05T08:11:15Z

The heat and humidity and getting sweaty when working on the fence isn't the worst part; it's the mosquitos.

Yesterday when I started working on the fence at 5pm, the mosquitos were a nuisance already, long before evening. But I had my mosquito net hat with me. It worked very well at keeping the mosquitos from biting my face and neck. It couldn't however stop them from biting my hands through my gloves, nor my legs through my thin pants.

I have bruises on my forearm from having pushed my arms through the gaps in the chain link to tie wire ties from the other side.

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Back to that pronunciation thing. "Szcz". I know that "sz" is pronounced as "sh", and "cz" as "ch", but I can't pronounce them one after the other without a gap in between.

Yet I can pronounce SH + T (as is common in German words), and I can pronounce T + SH (as is common in English as CH). "Szch" is "SH + T + SH" So I should be able to pronounce them all together. And after trying it a few times, I can, but then I get tongue-tied trying to add anything else after it. I suppose it would only take practice.

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I dreamt this morning about someone who could do telekinesis. Not just moving things with their mind, but moving them so fast that they seemed to dematerialize from one place and materialize in another almost instantaneously. They had transported a mug of tea into my hand like that, and then asked if I wanted it sweeter. (Implying that they could add sugar to it in the same manner.) I asked them if they would be able to make the tea less sweet too (by transporting the dissolved sugar out of it)? They replied that doing so would be much more difficult. It would be simpler to replace the tea in my mug (transport it out of my mug and down the drain) with a new mugful of unsweetened tea from the teapot.

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mindless mutterings

2019-06-28T04:21:11Z

Wait a minute... is "house shoes" a common American/English synonym for slippers, or not?

Do I only think it is, because it's the common German term, and it's pronounced basically the same in German (Hausschuhe) and English, and because my German mom may have used the term with me when I was growing up?

(Similarly, I used to think "short-armed" and "long-armed" (shirts) was a normal thing to say, until I learned that the correct English term was "short-sleeved" and "long-sleeved".)

..

For some reason, today the German word "Schiess-stoff" came to mind. I thought it was the word for gunpowder, but there's another word, Schiesspulver for the latter. Stoff means material.

https://www.spektrum.de/lexikon/chemie/schiessstoffe/8229
That page says that Shiess-stoff is a general term for both gunpowder and rocket fuel.

Anyway, I was thinking about how hard that word would be for an American to pronounce.
Sh - ee - ss - sht - off

Sort of like the "She sells seashells" phrase, except the middle of the work is an S sound followed immediately by a SH sound, and then a T sound.

("St" at the beginning of a word is pronounced "sht" in German. And since Schiess-stoff is a compound word, it is pronounced that way in there too.)

You can click the "listen" icon on the Google translate page to hear it:
https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=schiessstoff

Hum. "Strumpf" and "Strumpfhosen" must also be hard for Americans to pronounce.
Sh-t-r and m-p-f-h
https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=strumpfhosen
But the English word triumph is similar.

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ambiguous phrase. vaccines & veganism

2019-06-15T23:07:31Z

Many people don't X solely because they are against Y.

I think that could mean either:
For many people who don't X, the only reason they don't is because they are against Y.
or:
For many people who don't X, there are reasons for it other than them being against Y.

Actually, depending on X and Y, it could even mean:
Many people X, but not only because they are against Y.

..

from https://vaxopedia.org/2017/05/19/which-vaccines-are-vegan/
"...many vegans don't vaccinate solely because they are against vaccines."

..

I had read it is recommended for adults get tetanus & diphtheria booster shots every 10 years, and wondered if I should get one.

I am in favor of vaccines; they prevent a lot of disease and deaths.

But as a vegan, I don't like it that vaccines are made using animal ingredients and animal testing. It was long ago, in my teens, when I first read that some vaccines are made using eggs. So I checked if that is still the case today. It is.

Most flu vaccines, and a few others, are still made with eggs. Flublok is one which isn't. It is made using insect cells instead. Based on this page, it is made with "insect cell lines", so maybe it doesn't even require insects to be killed anymore to get those cells.

This web page lists vaccine ingredients, including "process ingredients (substances used to create the vaccine that may or may not appear in the final vaccine product), and growth mediums (the substances vaccines are grown in)"
https://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005206

Based on that data, the current tetanus & diphtheria vaccines all are made using bovine extracts. So I'm still ambivalent about going out of my way to get those kind of vaccinations, when they are only suggested or recommended but not required. I don't work with children or sick people, so as an adult, I haven't been required to get any vaccinations. I wish there were vegan alternatives available, so that I wouldn't feel conflicted about it.

I find these kind of ideas helpful to combat the mental conflict:

Comment by user PacNW: Thank goodness for vaccines. I get them all. They are one of the best things about living in the modern era and not during the dark ages.

I know they aren’t vegan, so I compensate for that by making an extra donation to an animal rights/protection/welfare organization whenever I get one. We won’t be able to help animals if we die from some horrid, preventable disease.

Comment by user Sandra: if you have to go to the hospital for a serious illness, you will likely use more animal tested products than if you stayed healthy. In some cases doctors many even request having specimens taken from you and tested on animals. Stay healthy as possible for the animals too!

In other words, it's regrettable that most vaccines currently aren't vegan, but it would be much worse if those vaccines weren't available, or weren't widely used. So until vegan vaccines are more widely available, it is still the more ethical choice, for both humans and animals, to get vaccinated than not.

Vegan Flu Shots: A Guide

[ 2019/11/03 - that link isn't working today, but this one is:
https://edvfood.com/2015/01/08/vegan-flu-shots-a-guide/
]

..

That reminds me, I was reading about rabies a few weeks ago. I'll make that a separate post.

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vlog, the word, the sound

2019-03-15T04:40:28Z

It occurred to me that "vlog" may be the first word (non-person-name, non-place-name) in the English language to start with the "vl" sound. I checked my paper dictionary, and indeed there were no other such VL words. Now I checked online, and there is one other:

vlei: a grassy or marshy wetland.
The etymology of this word is from Afrikaans and Dutch, and its most common pronunciation is actually with "FL" rather than "VL", which makes sense as German, which is related to Dutch, also pronounces V as F.

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German words (updated with more)

2016-09-23T03:49:27Z

I'm reading Terra Aluvis, volume 2 (pre-release), in German.

In a couple of places, it uses "seine" to refer to "das Mädchen". For example, "Das Mädchen blickte auf seine Hände". (And she's looking at her own hand, not someone else's). That sounds totally wrong to me. "Seine" is what you use for males. But "ihre" is what you use for females. Even if Mädchen is a neuter word as indicated by the "Das", "seine" still sounds totally wrong for it.

So I looked it up.
heisst es "das Mädchen und sein Bruder" oder "das Mädchen und ihr Bruder"

Based on the answers, "seine" is grammatically correct. But several of the replies (and they sound like native German speakers) reflect my own gut feeling, that it should be "ihr", ganz klar, NATÜRLICH.

And now I realize that German doesn't have a separate pronoun for "its". The same word "sein" is used for both "his" and "its". Yet I generally translate it as "his". So "Das Mädchen blickte auf seine Hände" sounds to me not like "The girl looked at its hands" (which is bad enough), but rather "The girl looked at his hands" which makes no sense, unless I imagine her as a gender-bending girl.

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Another thing that has confused me is the use of Ihr/Euch/Eurer for 2nd person singular pronouns. Normally you use "Du" for friends/family, or "Sie" for strangers/politeness/formal situations. Ihr/Euch is the informal 2nd person plural, not singular. But in the book some of the characters are royalty or nobility, so this usage seems to correspond to the English royal we/majestic plural. Looking at the book again, now I see that it is always capitalized in the royal sense, but lower case in the 2nd person plural sense.
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erbarmen - to arouse someone's pity; to take pity on; to have mercy on.

Erbarmen - mercy/pity

erbarmenswert - pitiable, wretched, pitiful

erbarmungslos - pitiless, merciless

erbarmungsvoll - compassionate, full of pity

erbärmlich - pitiful, wretched, terrible

Erbärmlichkeit - wretchedness, misery, awfulness, terribleness

barmherzig - compassionate

Barmherzigkeit - compassion, mercy

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leiden - to suffer

Leiden - suffering, tribulation

Leidenschaft - passion

leidenschaftlich - passionate

leidenschaftslos - dispassionate

Leid - sorrow, grief; misfortune, harm.

leid tun - to be sorry

leidlich - reasonable, fair; more or less, so-so.

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hervorragend, herausragend - outstanding

sagenhaft - incredible

zaghaft - timid

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Umgehung (accent on 2nd syllable) - avoidance, circumvention, bypass

umgehen (transitive verb)(accent on 2nd syllable) - to avoid.

umgehen (intransitive verb)(accent on 1st syllable) - to walk around; to treat/handle something; ...

umgehend (accent on 1st syllable) - immediate; immediately. Etymology explained here

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German words

2016-08-20T18:26:49Z

Zweifel = doubt
bezweifelt = doubtful
verzweifelt = despairing, desperate, frantic

bedrückt = depressed (drucken = to press!)

schlummernd = slumbering
dösen = to doze (dösten = dozed)

Zwielicht = twilight
zwielichtig = shady (as in character)

innehalten (hielt inne) = to pause

gering = low, small, slight
geringer = less, lesser, smaller
geringerer = (komparativ. See: declensions)

schlicht = simple
schlichtweg = simply

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Deutsch

2016-05-09T04:36:55Z

Every once in a while, Firefox shows me error messages (like Page Not Found) in German. I don't know why. I happen to be able to read and understand German, but what could that have to do with it? This time, Google is doing it to me:

The only reason Google shows me as signed in, is because I signed into YouTube. Yet my YouTube pages are still in English.

I bet it is related to one of my plug-ins. But why would it happen so intermittently?

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ginnickity kinnickinny

2015-07-17T04:20:52Z

While thinking about the pronunciation of words starting with 'kn', I realized that in English the 'k' is always or nearly always silent. Whereas in German, both the 'k' and 'n' are spoken.

Then I thought about words starting with 'gn'. Again, in English the 'g' is nearly always silent (the GNU software term being an exception). Whereas in German, both the 'g' and 'n' are spoken.

And I was thinking, maybe that is why I always want to pronounce the 'g' in the English word 'gnome'.

Tonight I found a website that provides both British and American pronunciations of words.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnome

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnu

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnocchi

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnomic

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnawing

British, like German, seems to generally be spoken with a higher pitch than American English (or maybe it seems that way due to its vowels being spoken higher in the throat?).

I started mimicking the online pronunciations. You know, how when you say the same word over and over again, it gets funny?

Gnome. Gn^oem. Gnoume. Gneoum. Gnome. Nu. N^u Nu N^u... Nocky! Nokey. Nocky! No Key. No Key.
Nong. Noing. Nong. Noing!

Zorro didn't like it. She left the room.

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A few days ago while walking to my car, I realized that people's names and faces were coming very easily to my mind. I tested myself, thinking of more and more coworkers, even from long ago. There were only a few I couldn't easily name. It seemed quite surprising to me, as usually there's a significant pause between me thinking of someone and remembering their name (if I'm able to come up with a name at all).

A couple days later I tried again, but my memory seemed back to normal, ie. not easily remembering many names.

So I wonder, what could cause memory changes like that?

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Something else I've wondered: Where do slugs go in the daytime?
Google? Ah, ok. So I'm not the only one who has wondered that.

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what American English sounds like

2015-03-07T07:55:15Z

How English sounds to non-English speakers
Posted by: Brian and Karl
Description: 'Skwerl'. A short film in fake English

And that reminded me of this fab video my dad linked me to a while back:

Video title: Adriano Celentano Raffaella Carrà Prisencolinensinainciusol
Posted by: MrXXXDIDOXXX
URL: https://www.youtube.com/embed/xfSJEWNTvo4
Description: Italian music video / song in fake English

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nifty chart with audio examples of consonants from different languages

2013-12-02T05:11:24Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio

and a lot more info on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

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How many languages can you recognize?

2013-09-04T03:35:48Z

Great Language Game - I got 550 points on my first try. I missed out on Somali, Estonian, and Macedonian.

The Somali sample sounds sort of like Arabic and Hebrew to me.
The Estonian sample has a slight Russian sound to it, but not much. A lot of "sh"s.
The Macedonian sounds very Russian/Slavic to me.

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peace be upon you

2012-09-20T04:13:35Z

I've been too busy to feel like posting anything.

This evening, I made Chi-Chi's Sweet Corn Cake. It was simple to make using the mix and a can of creamed corn, and tasted quite good.

I heard the song Cry Me a River (unbeknownst to me, by Justin Timberlake) on the radio, and near the very end, the hauntingly sweet voice sounded so much like Michael Jackson, I thought he must have contributed to the song. But apparently not; that must have been Justin's voice.

While browsing related music on Amazon, I came across a song "Sister Suki" (the one from the "Listen Vision III" album). Then I did a little digging and found the other original version. For some reason that song, especially the title, is sticking in my mind.* I read the liner notes of the original 1959 recording, which also includes a transcription of all the song lyrics.
Intro:
The sounds on this record were made by six 11 to 12 year old Negro boys from the streets, tenements, and housing projects of New York City. Most are members of street gangs and all have passed through social agencies and the juvenile court to the residential training school. ..."

The liner notes, along with some of the transcribed lyrics, were vaguely disturbing to me. 11 and 12 year old gang members. 1959.

*Another strange phrase "...laikum" has been popping up in my head during the last few days, and I couldn't remember where it came from or what it meant. Yesterday, I thought maybe it was the Lyekka character in Lexx. But no, I thought, the phrase in my head was Lai*KUM*, not Lai*KA*. Just now I realized it is from the phrase Salaam Alaikum.

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hearing words, not just sounds

2012-04-07T06:05:36Z

Comparing YouTube's automatic captioning/transcriptions to what I hear spoken in the videos impresses upon me how intelligent our brains are - to be able to decipher spoken words and phrases, even when the speech is not clear.

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moon big
moon round

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Still reading the 2nd book in the dragon tattoo girl series. It is engrossing.

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EarthFare had black garlic for sale. This particular brand is a product of the U.S.A; $5 for a packet of 2 bulbs. I tossed a packet into my shopping cart, thinking, "I've been wanting to try that!" (remembering being intrigued by what I had read about it). I haven't yet opened the packet.

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Why people eat tofu when they get out of prison in Korea.

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google translate Fail - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-02-02T02:44:13Z

I used Google Translate to check what the Swedish title (Män som hatar kvinnor) of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" means. As I typed the words, I seemed to recall that kvinnor means "women". But the translation displayed as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". In fact, even "hatar kvinnor" by itself was translated as "Dragon Tattoo". Not-Very-Helpful, oh ye translating tool! I quite doubt that is how one says Dragon Tattoo in Swedish. Only by entering each word separately did it give me the presumably correct translation "Men who hate women".

The title of the 2nd book "Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden", does literally translate to "The Girl Who Played with Fire".

The title of the 3rd book "Luftslottet Som Sprängdes" (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) seems to mean "The Air Castle that was Blown (Up?)". No weirdness with that translation.

I finished reading the first book today. I'm not planning to watch any of the movies until I finish the books.

( Spoilers... )

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