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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 92
Message ID: 20
#20, RE: Standard language?
Posted by Laudre on Sep-01-01 at 04:37 PM
In response to message #18
>As far as I have seen, no, it's not. Not unless you are going to
>include ebonics as well. It's a language spoken (exclusivly) mostly
>by the lower class, in larger cities, or some farmers, mostly close to
>the borders of mexico. According to the factfinder thing, most people
>speak some other form of spanish, (hell, 7% are from Spain).

I was talking about Spanish in general, not the Mexican dialect.

>ok, I speak no japanese, and it's untranslatable...but you learned it,
>so it must have some explainable meaning in english. (Please explain?)

The closest English word I can think of is "mentor", but it also has connotations of role-model, parental figure, and master (as in apprentice). It lacks a direct analogue in English, as most Japanese words do; if I were going to replace the word "sempai" in a dub with an English word, it'd be "mentor", but that's not really accurate; in a lot of situations where one would use the word "mentor" in English, "sensei" would be more appropriate. I'm trying to think of a good illustration of the sempai relationship, but I'm blanking on it.

>Yeah, I see line noise. ;-) No offense (and we've gone *way* off
>topic) so, why don't we just agree that esperanto, (while a good idea)
>will probably never be a true international language.
>Que sera, sera, and all that.

Probably not. But the success it does have -- it's a living language, in some sense (as I've said, 14 million speakers is more than a large number of natural languages) -- and its simplicity and expressiveness appeal to me. I like speaking it, and I'm planning on writing a novella in the language once my vocabulary in is equal to the task. And artificial languages can become surprisingly common; Tagalog is a constructed language.

-- Sean --

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