I know I could never learn Arabic.
From a computer perspective the right-to-left aspect and especially the combination of right-to-left and left-to-right in the same text is especially tricky.
i don't think arabic is THAT hard.. i mean, at least the spellings are phonetic, and i think conjugating verbs is easier than even french.
but that's just me.
yah. "heritage speaker", though, per the article's nomenclature; i'm half egyptian.
but i can't read or write (in arabic), so, i kinda suck.
Then I don't think you're allowed to say it's not hard. (Yes, I say that to all the girls....) But you *can* work for the NSA. You could be The Man!
well, i mean, i did have to take lessons. spending some of my formative years in the US meant that until sometime in my teens, i didn't really know jack shit. but i suppose spending all that time around people speaking it does help.
The article reminded me in a roundabout way of John Lawler's excellent observation (at page bottom):
"Verbing Weirds Language" only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
Verily, at the Mineshaft medieval, excellence was often to be found at page bottom.
At least John Lawler can't make fun of Heidegger.
While it's probably true, your comment qua speech act is perplexing.
That was an equal opportunist rejoinder. I would have made an analogous joke if the reading group's subject did real philosophy.
Now that's not fair. Why, some of my best friends are Continentals.
Some of my best friends are Town Cars!
Those are Pintos, Matt. You're living a lie.
I hate timestamps. People can totally tell when your comeback has that not-so-fresh feeling.
I also hate timestamps. You have your aggregator set to check every 15 minutes, eh? Or is that too personal?
I was thinking of signing up for a class this fall myself. Maybe I should take a finance class instead.
every 15 minutes
No, just a weird coincidence.
What if the timestamps showed the date, but not the time? That would give the illusion of flowing discourse without being too susceptible to mischief.
But Joe O's killer timestamps comment was the best April Fool's joke that year, if not the best comment ever.
What if the timestamps showed the date, but not the time?
SB: And what if they showed random times, which will provide commenters with an ineluctable temporal dissonance similar to a really good acid trip? We could then pretend we've found a way to stuff little notes into tachyons for posting in a previous year...
And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems/It would be easier sometimes to change the past.
I spoke Arabic as a kid [my father's an archaeologist, so we lived in the Middle East when I was young]. I think Finnish is more complicated when it comes to conjugations and declensions.
Then there's classic Javanese...
But what if we were not commenting at all, but rather, milking cows; and what if they were not timestamps, but rather, different echos of the same desultory moo?
different echos of the same desultory moo?
SB: As rendered by a Moo Synthesiser?
And on the subject of cows:
From a Philadelphia Daily News article by one H. Gensler:
As moms used to tell their daughters, you don't marry the cow when you can get the milk for free.
Pat Roberston had it wrong - it's bestiality that leads to gay marriage, not the other way around...
As rendered by a Moo Synthesiser?
Immortalized on Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Livestock.
One must, of course, eschew boviation in this cow-related discourse...
A lot of tripe, these ruminations. I can't stomach them.
Batter my heart, four-stomach'd God!
Gotta be cruel to be kine.
I won't even mention the milk of mooin' kineness.
I won't even mention the milk of mooin' kineness.
That would indeed be a missteak.
Hey, you know what's funny? All the things you guys have been writing have kinda been about cows!
Huh. I hadn't noticed that beefore.