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Mother Tongues

slavenorth.com

79 pointsprismatic11 comments

I'm fascinated by these words that describe pieces of our lived experience in a way that makes us say, "I knew there was a word for this!" They seem similar to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, but in a semantic sense.

A few from English that I like:

curglaff - the shock felt in bathing when one first plunges into the cold water

groak - to silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them

I'm not sure of the spelling, and I'm sure I'd butcher it, but Thai has a word for "the overwhelming urge to pinch a baby because it's so damn cute". My wife uses it on a regular basis when we're out and about and she sees babies.

The Philippines (Tagalog) has a word with basically the same meaning--gigil. It's pretty interesting to learn another language has a word for the same feeling because there isn't really a fit in English.

Thailand isn't so far away from the Philippines.

Get the spelling and come back and post it!

The phrase I use for this is "cute aggression"

I'm a little puzzled at his complaint that he can't transliterate Devanagari; although I've only learned some of the basics as I attempt to learn Hindi, it's not particularly challenging--it's just an alphabet (alphasyllabary if you want to be pedantic)

It's tricky when the origin language has sounds that the target language doesn't.

The 'ы' in Russian is tough for English speakers even to say (at least, it has seemed so when I've seen people try to say it for the first time!), and we just don't have a letter that represents that sound.

Similarly, Arabic has several sounds that have no equivalent in English, so you see words with 3s in them (like 'na3m')--the 3 stands in for a ع (aiyn), which we just have no sound for.

But impossible? Nah. People can understand what you mean.

Devnagri script, which is used for a bunch of Indian languages including Hindi, is probably the simplest to transliterate. Each letter has a pretty well defined pronunciation with very rare exceptions. Vowels are completely regular and always have the same sound in all words with no exceptions (that I can think of). It should be pretty easy to write some simple logic in a few hundred lines of code to do this automatically... with the main difficulty being the target language rather than the source language.

One of my friends once told me, "We don't have spelling bees in India... it wouldn't make sense, when you hear the word there's really only one way to spell it."

I on the other hand can't hear the difference between Hindi "b", "v", "g", and "k" half the time :)

Well the Hindi alphabet has 52 letters with 28 "pure" consonants (which multiply with some modifiers). See here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm Some other Indian languages have additional consonants that are not familiar to predominantly Hindi speakers. The key thing is that the written alphabet seems to have been designed to accurately represent all of those sounds. It's hard (actually impossible) to map all these to Roman alphabet.

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