cricketcat9:

mrozna-janina:

super-mam-te-moc:

poetryinmotionlfc:

They say Switzerland and Sweden can be confused but in polish it’s Szwajcaria and Szwecja and trust me that’s even worse

Also Słowacja and Słowenia

Austria and Australia

Irlandia and Nowa Zelandia

#about the last one ask our president

And yet… apparently a letter addressed to “Atomic Bomb, Venice, Australia” was correctly delivered to “Atomic Energy Commission, Vienna, Austria”. 

…now I need to know how Ireland and New Zealand were confused.

candygarnet:

shamwowxl:

wine-dark-sea:

ilyasaurus:

randomfandomteacher:

indigopersei:

broitsablog:

wildeisms:

@indigopersei is the french language just always on the verge of getting someone accused of assault or..?

my friend,
if only you knew

It’s a very dangerous language to learn

Here’s an interesting thing about French! Everything needs to have an article in front of it. That’s why it’s “la chat” as opposed to just “chat”. So, for instance, you could say la fille for the girl, or jeune fille for young girl, but you can’t just say fille, because that means you are calling her a sex worker in a derogatory way.

The moral of the story is, if you want to make something rude in French, just take out the article in front of it. Yes, this works for nearly. every. word.

#now I’m wondering how often my high school french teacher was silently screaming because of this little fact

Every year. Every year there’s that kid who forgets that you can’t translate “I am excited” to “Je suis excitée”. And every year Monsieur Jordan has to slam the brakes before that kid can finish his sentence and then tactfully ask him not to announce to the class that he is horny.

“is the french language always on the verge” oh buddy, oh pal, i am so happy to break this news to you: 

truly the language of love

elevenses-on-trenzalore:

zemedelphos:

vagabondaesthetics:

thefemaletyrant:

generalbriefing:

So….I totally never thought about this. I’m sure very few of you have. I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit disturbed…

Wow. Food for thought. I’m sure there’s an answer though.

Their names were translated/Anglicized after going from Greek to English.

The names of the Apostles are of Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew origins. The Hebrew, Aramaic and “Greek” named Apostles were:

Shim’on = Simon (Hebrew origin).

Y’hochanan = John (Hebrew origin).

Mattithyahu = Matthew (Hebrew origin).

Ya’aqov = James (Hebrew origin meaning Jacob).

Bar-Tôlmay = Bartholomew (Aramaic, which is related to Hebrew).

Judah = Jude / Saint Jude (not to be confused with Judas Iscariot, Hebrew origin).

Yehuda = Judas Iscariot (Hebrew origin, Betrayed Yeshua/Yehosua the Messiah).

Cephas / Kephas = Peter (Hebrew / Aramaic origin meaning “Rock”).

Tau’ma = Thomas (Aramaic origin).

Andrew = Andrew (Greek origin. Is the brother of Cephas / Kephas).

Phillip = Phillip (Greek origin).

You will note that there are only 11 names, that is because there were 2 Apostles named Ya’aqov (James), which brings the total to 12 apostles.

Link 

To expand on this, Jesus’s name is Anglicized in this way as well. We get Jesus from the Latin form of the Greek “Ἰησοῦς”(Iēsous), which is derived from the Herbrew “ישוע”(Yeshu’a, which meant “YHWH is Salvaion”, YHWH, or Yahweh being the name of God). When another form of that name, ” יְהוֹשֻׁעַ”(Yeoshu’a) was allowed to Anglicize through a different set of corruptions, it entered the English Language through Reformist Protestants as the name “Joshua”.

Yes. Jesus’s actual name is Joshua.

joshua christ this is fascinating

whateverthepoodle:

randomslasher:

thelogicalloganipus:

academicnerdlord:

prismatic-bell:

wynx-hates-pedos:

toorational:

thelogicalloganipus:

randomslasher:

thelogicalloganipus:

“the Bible says homosexuality is a sin” well the Bible also has a lot of sexism, rape, incest, violence and a lot of contradictory messages in general because it was written by people and people have agendas

I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway

And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person

You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it

The god I believe in loves queer people because that’s how he made us

the bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway. It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations. 

Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes: 

In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”

The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me. 

You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. Seriously. 

I needed that. Thank you.

The Bible wasn’t faxed down from the sky, people, it’s been compiled and formulated for hundreds of years until it became what it is today. And yes, misinterpreted by whoever with whatever agenda-of-the-day.

And hypocrites always stick to the word and not the spirit of any religion: to love, to help, to respect, to protect, and to strive to make the world a better place.

Yup, Jesus never said ANYTHING against LGBT people. All he said was don’t be greedy, don’t be lustful and don’t be wrathful. The fact that LGBTphobes took those instructions out of context to justify their LGBTphobia is pretty telling!

Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here!

You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:

They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.


And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:

We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.


Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”

Here’s the issue.

The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.


The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:

Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.

And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)

You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”

Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).

If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?

It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.

Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.

You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl. Since we consider that everything in the Tanakh is intended for learning and study, what might we take from this story, but that a queer person can be virtuous and beloved of G-d?

Slow clap for Jews spitting truth.

Yesssssss

phenomenal

@zombizombi for the lovely Jewish addition

einarshadow:

thequantumwritings:

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower fantasy linguistics!