Dunno if this is exactly the same thing, but I’ve noticed I become more animated, making a lot more and more obvious gestures, when speaking in English, than in my native Finnish.
The changes I make not only depend on language, but also who else is participating in the conversation. I don’t speak the same way in English with friends, family, elders, professional colleagues, or strangers. 
French is different depending on which gatherings I’m attending (more precise and complex with native speakers than with newbies). Spanish is more relaxed, though, and I have yet to really discover how differently my German and Italian will be presented. Right now, they’re mostly focused on food. 
I might use varying levels of AAVE depending on the degree of acquaintance, too.
Le voisin d’Alice…
est l’Emperor!
That’s the difference between closed captions and SDH. Closed captions are just printing text, while SDH has descriptive elements to add additional context like [ＥＬＤＲＩＴＣＨ ＧＲＯＡＮＳ ＩＮＴＥＮＳＩＦＹ] and such.
It was SDH, and I hear, so redundant. I dream of a day when I can pick and choose.
“This, film, by Wim Wembers, includes dialogue snippets in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese, as well as descriptive cues for the hearing impaired . Please indicate which languages you wish to read.”
That GIF just shows that the writers didn’t know how multilinguism works. As we all know, you don’t translate in your head once you’re fluent in another language (which she obviously is), you think in that language in the first place. Otherwise you could never really hold up your end of a conversation.
I make less obvious gestures when I speak English, but then my starting point is German. And according to my Finnmark relatives we live “far, far in the South”, and are basically Mediterranean, almost.
I used to be fluent in AAVE as a teenager. (And not as a joke or just to sound hip; I was deep into hip-hop music and culture and most of my friends were Black.) My friend and I were creating rap songs using the group name “Parental Advisory” (clever, right?*) and when I listen to those recordings of me as a teenager it’s hard to believe it’s the same person.
Now that I’m older and know better, I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable using AAVE anymore. While I was coming from a place of deep reverence and respect I’d be really wary of being taken the wrong way these days. I obviously didn’t have this awareness of any of this as a teenager in the ‘90s - it was just what I was fully immersed in at the time.
* this was just as those parental advisory labels started appearing on music. I had the idea that we would release a mix tape with just a giant version of that label filling the entire sleeve. Sadly (or not so sadly) this never came to fruition but I always liked that idea.
I just saw this article in that thread and something in the Guardian one box caught my eye. (You’ll have to click through, the one box doesn’t make it into the quote)
I wondered, does “campi flegrei” not have an exonym in English? In German it does: die Phlegräischen Felder. I have since looked it up and in English it’s the Phlegraean Fields.
This got me thinking about exonyms for places in the classical Mediterranean world. They’re a way that we in more northerly Europe have incorporated the classical world into our own origin stories. If a small area outside Naples/Neapel (not Napoli!) has a German/English name, it’s a part of our heritage as much as it is for the people who live there!
It’s also interesting that the Guardian doesn’t use the English exonym. Do their journalists not know it, is it a conscious decision (maybe based on their style guide; I haven’t checked) to use local names over the imposed ones, or do they position themselves as outside the Oxbridge educated elite that would be conversant in these geographic designations of the Grand Tour?
But her colleague, 51-year-old Danielle North King, from the Chemehuevi, or Nuwuvi nation, fears that such projects impose a “Western way of writing” onto “an Indigenous way of speaking” – the vast majority of human languages are solely oral, with no writing systems. Indeed, Lakota Indigenous leaders denounced TLC last year, after the organization tried to copywrite teaching material that included recordings from the nation’s elders.
The copyright system is based on the idea that authors who do the work should be rewarded with a limited monopoly as recompense for making it available to withe wider world. And actually collecting this material and distilling it to an accurate picture of the language is more than mere sweat of the brow, more than writing a phone book.
However…
There might be at least three concepts drawn from imperialist/western cultural norms rather than the norms of native american speakers.
- disclosure of ideas, even secret ones, or ones granted to only certain members, of society in book form is a universal good.
- The discloser should be rewarded
- A monopoly, granted to the author, is appropriate compensation.
Those basic assumptions should probably be deconstructed by each indigenous culture.
Yeah, this.
And even if a quasi-progressive (or self-identifying as “progressive”) news outlet like The Guardian were to focus on the pros and cons of exonyms and maybe make some changes in house style, the clumsy Anglicization of a language not ideally suited to doing so is further complicated by internal disagreements about, for instance, how to identify the nation of Japan as the Japanese would do so, in-country:
… or do they (at The Guardian) attempt to use terminology their readership would be most familiar with?
… or do they rely on an editor’s discretion and judgement, case by case? because I’ve seen that in journalism too, especially re place names for obscure or small, poorly known villages or locales.
Wow. I just wanna go there. I don’t even care what’s there. It sounds amazing.
Unless the field are this! (TW: gross stuff from the movie The Matrix):
> The human generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields…endless fields, we’re human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For longest time, I wouldn’t believe it…and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead, so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is The Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
(TW: gross stuff from the movie The Matrix but in a film clip:)
( he’ll definitely never be president now. )
The man who taught Germans to speak
Until the end of the 19th century, there was no official way to speak German. This was a problem that Theodor Siebs felt needed a solution: a modern society needed an agreed common dialect that anyone could use. And so Siebs, with a few colleages and some friends from the world of theatre, developed a new standard for the spoken German language.
But for it to be accepted, a new technology had to be invented. Fortunately for Siebs, that invention was just around the corner.
After 140 years, historic Swedish dictionary finally reaches the letter ‘Ö’
