Steve the vagabond

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 10

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 10

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 8

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 8

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 7

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 7

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 6

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 6

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 5

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 5

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 4

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 4

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 3

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 3

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 2

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 2

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 1

Steve's Advent Calendar Day 1

I was looking at Advent Calendars and thought, "I should make some of those for my page". So you are getting one language fact (or little story) about language every day, right here, start on the 1st of December right up until the 24th of December. Can't wait to see what you guys think :)

What a wonderful trainwreck of a translation this is. I think what went wrong is "моста" (transliterated into Latin characters as "mosta") means "bridge" but it got translated as "most" and related words in other languages

Liaison in French is an interesting thing

At one point in the history of the French language, all consonants were pronounced. Then final consonants started being left off

But you can still hear the original consonants sometimes. When the original consonant is heard, it's called liaison

Yes, I am obsessed 😀

Oops! Thanks for picking up the mistake! Yes, I did intend that :D

English spelling used to make sure (no really). But then a massive change happened where the vowels in English went through a change linguists called a chain shift. A vowel would change pronunciation, which would cause others to change and so on and so one. The "a" in "name" used to be like "ah"

#lotr

Sounds like good advice

Happy Halloween everyone 😁

Through the middle ages and modern time, people have been fascinated by the Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire, and their languages Ancient Greek and Latin. So they decided to start spelling English like Latin, even though words like debt and doubt were borrowed from French, not directly from Latin

I wonder how good these fish estimates are 🤔

No good thing in life comes without effort. You often make quick progress when first learning a language but people always reach a plateau at some point. But you just need to keep going! Proficiency in another language is very possible, it just takes time

One of the sounds French is famous for is the R sound in words like frère. Interestingly, as late as the French revolution French didn't have this sound and only developed it later in the 1800s. Some say it spread from French to German, Danish and some dialects of Swedish

One interesting feature of Norman French is that it retained the hard C sound (found in words like cat). Over time in other parts of France this sound would evolve into more of a soft sound and be written as ch, which you can see in modern French "chateau"

Language learning apps are great! But sometimes you just want the reckless abandon of watching a video in your target language that is made by a fluent speaker of the language and just facing the challenge 😀

It's the only writing system that I think is more difficult to learn than English (which hasn't properly been updated since the 1300s). Tibetan spelling hasn't been updated since the the 700s. You write Bka'-rgyud but say Kagyu