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RDCanecutter

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RDCanecutter

  1. They can always come back to the dock.
  2. Yes please, more boat parades.
  3. The Dutchman messed that up but it's still a better flag painting than most. We got correct number of stripes at least. Can't count how many times I've seen some hokey artsy-crafty flag with maybe half that many stripes.
  4. I watched about 12 seconds. It was like when you go to the zoo to see the gorilla fling shit, but instead he's just sorta rolled over asleep.
  5. Happy to say I never had to learn how to get through a minefield. When I joined we were still about defending against a massive Soviet tank army, so we played around with how to set up different mines of our own. Then we switched to colonial policing and bandit hunting. I do remember that if you lay out mines or other obstacles, doctrine is to cover them with fire or otherwise they won't stop anything. So maybe the key there is to suppress Russian firepower to the point where sappers can cut some lanes? Don't ask me I was too busy swapping MREs to get the hated Pork Patty so I could get them to kick in extra candy.
  6. Scot. Gaelic: Aggy bhochd (Ag-gy vohKH) means Pooor Aggy. Maybe stretch out that vooooohhhhKH. No wait. I told it wrong. The above is a female Aggy. For a male, go with Aggy bochd. B sound instead of V. In related news, Caora (kuhra) is a sheep.
  7. Those two are actually the same woman, ten years apart, going from selling perfume to drinking it.
  8. You also have to know lots of acronyms. Acronyms are essential.
  9. Can confirm, had Danish mother-in-law until she went to Valhalla. My wife says the secret to speaking Danish is to numb your mouth and then mumble with an air of darkness and depression.
  10. There is a Gaelic school in Scotland where in the past one professor was an American who'd learned it in Nova Scotia, or Alba Nuadh as we cool kids say. I found a Gaelic College there in NS but 3/4 of the classes were dancing and playing instruments with some language. Bizarrely there are Scottish Gaelic speakers, or at least learners, everywhere walking undetected amongst us. When I first started I slapped some common phrases like "100 thousand welcomes" and "I like Whisky" in shaky calligraphy on cardboard and tossed them in with my art at some shows. First show, in Birmingham, a guy starts reading them out loud with good pronunciation, which you'd never do without training. I jabbered him up with what little I knew, and we were both beginners but we were loud and it sounded Gaelic. Another time this dude who looked like a fuzzy clone of me was giving my booth the eyeball, and it turned out he competed in Highland Games for Clan [My Mom's Maiden Name.] He was more about throwing heavy objects than speaking foreign languages, but he pretty much understood some basics and said he knew guys on the circuit who were fluent. Not that it matters for a Boutique Language, the fun is doing it for yourself. But the Internet has exploded lots of old limits. I remember trying to learn a little bit years ago from a book. "Is toil leam" means "I like." I was going around saying "Is TOIL lee-am." I finally hear some native speakers online, that's "ISta lum." Dork-ass fuckin mispronunciation.
  11. Crypto Bro had a pic of him posing on the ranch with (prolly somebody else's) horse. That's worth more than 15 gold pesos ($700-800 USD) but I figure if I can get a couple of goats I just pen them in the backyard and sell the lawnmower.
  12. This made me jump up off the toilet and buck dance and it don't matter if I wasn't done shittin.
  13. Yeah that ain't right. You go to Northern France near the Somme where 10 times as bloody battles with sharpened shovels and poison gas were fought, and every graveyard is cared for, including the Germans'.
  14. They are the standard mix of Western Hunters, Middle-Eastern farmers, and Maniac Horsepeople who brought what turned into most of the languages. There is some sort of connection up and down the Atlantic coast. The Irish are a little heavier on Horsefolk, South Italians on Farmers, Scandinavians on Hunters, but most have some mix. Thing is grammar can do all kinds of stuff regardless of relations. Take any grammar point, like say how to form a plural. As time passes, that thing will either stay about the same, or change. You could have one big group in the middle where it changed, while little isolated groups around the periphery still use the old method just because it didn't change. They may not even be genetically related, or they may, who knows.
  15. I for one appreciated all the times he mentioned going into war zones WITH the Seals, as if he was there on the team with maybe a Rambo bandana, instead of sitting his lawyer Fobbit ass behind a desk somewhere.
  16. Dig this. Remember Spanish 101 and kids making cheat-sheets to remember when to use Ser and Estar? Gaelic has the same idea with two similar verbs "Is" and "Tha." Pronounced "Ta" in Ireland and coincidentally sounding and meaning the same at the colloquial Spanish "'ta bien." Or maybe not so coincidentally-- these words have roots older than Latin.
  17. Slapped those pics on my Instagram and immediately drew the attention of an NFT connoisseur and Crypto wizard. I used to avoid these accounts because they're scambots, but I just have a good feeling so I replied:
  18. If you want to have fun with Spanish in a way that a native speaker can read, but will break an auto-translator, here's a trick I saw in a Mexican comic strip: qu turns to>k. u>w. i>y and vice versa. Switch all z's and s's. Ch > X. Drop silent H. LL>y. Swap out b's and v's. io ze vyen keztoi afwera pero el dya ke io me mwera ze ke tendraz ke yorar
  19. I have a friend who has done that off and on. Bought a guitar from her that has some Basque sticker on it from the French side. Always pick T's and K's when you play Basque Wheel of Fortune.
  20. There was one year where I had a night job teaching English to non-native speakers. It'd be half Afghanis and Somalis at a basic level, and various Eastern European au-pairs who were 95% English fluent, I'd try to get them the last 5% and they'd argue because that's not how they said it in that hit song on the radio. During lulls in the class I'd take some bizarre English sentence and have them translate it into their own language that the others would try to say. When it was the Czechs' and Poles' turn it'd sound like two accents of the same language. Obviously if we'd gone deeper that would've fallen apart, but I enjoyed getting all those 20-year-old women to fight.
  21. Oh, almost forgot: The first week of studying it, I would practice my pronunciation by speaking it to my little black dog, who would stop what she was doing and listen. Then, my scary-fast language-learner wife who had been listening to me, just freakin *figured it out*, and started speaking Gaelic back to me. This is life at our house. Now we speak this pseudo-Gaelic where we sub in the massive amounts of English for not-yet-known Gaelic vocabulary into basic sentence structures. "Hey a chaileag, tha mi a-takin a whiz agus tha mi a-gettin muga cofaidh. Tha thu ag-iarraigh another cup too?" (Dear girl, I plan to relieve my bladder then get more coffee. Do you desire another cup as well?)
  22. A'ight Imo get my nerd on. Scottish Gaelic split off from NE Ireland way back and brought that whole culture to the NW of what is now Scotland. The rest of Scotland had other languages; the accent Scotty speaks is an imitation of "Scots" which isn't Gaelic, it's a Germanic language from the Angles of Anglo-Saxon Inc. Anyway, Scottish Gaelic is close to Irish roughly how Portuguese is to Spanish, or maybe how Cuban is to Spain-Spanish. It's obviously an Indo-European language so if you speak English or a Latin or Slavic language, familiar things will jump out at you. It's got all the Wh-question words (mostly showing up as C-) and a Tu/Vous distinction like French where the you plural can be a polite singular. Irish doesn't do this anymore. On verbs Scottish Gaelic has mostly stopped conjugating them (Irish still does) instead, verb phrases look like this: "Is me a-eating, Is you a-eating" etc Tha mi ag ithe where the pronoun does the work. In Scottish there is no longer the sense that this is in progress, it's just how you talk. As you will notice, sentence order is kinda backwards from most languages. Spelling is a beast, utterly alien to English. But like French, once you know how a couple dozen words sound, you've cracked the code. Scottish Gaelic phonetically sounds like a Brazilian speaking Klingon. Almost Slavic chopping up of final -t's and -d's into ch sounds.
  23. I found Italian easy to pick up but easy to forget. Same with Portuguese. Some of the Sicilian dialects seem closer to Spanish than to "proper" Italian.
  24. Yeah the go-to when traveling is to just yell very loudly in American, just to let them know who's in charge. Spanish is still too practical to be boutique, unless you learn some medieval version of it so you can hang out with El Cid: https://miocid.wlu.edu/folios/01r.html
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