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RDCanecutter

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RDCanecutter

  1. 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.
  2. 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:
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?)
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. Do you know how to cuss in Nahuatl? Do you refuse to use Mandarin because it's too main-stream so you learn Cantonese from kung-fu movies instead? Have you ever used Catalan just to piss off a Spanish cop? If you have done these, done similar, or just cry out in silent shame-rage wishing you had, then you have a home. This thread is for you. About two months ago @956 Worldwide mentioned that learning the boutique language of Slovak would give us the magic key to unlock all the Slavic languages. Being one to accomplish odd goals with minimum effort, I thought "well maybe Duolingo has Slovak." I checked. They didn't. But hey down at the end of the bar sat Scottish Gaelic, drinkin whisky shots and battin her big green eyes at me. Me and Scottish Gaelic have been havin a flang now for more than a month. I'll go into nerd detail in a later post. But for now I want to hear from other doomed souls who have also poured time into something like Danish Rap or Mayan slang. Go.
  11. That drink reminds me of when I was a Cub Scout and they let us loose in an Air Force base cafeteria, including letting us play with the machines. Prolly has more alcohol though.
  12. It took until Friday but I finally got some paint on the brush this week. Commissions for a guy's lake house. Once the abstract backgrounds dry I'll goof em up with some cartoon Apes. Halfway through the vertical one I ran out of blue, and tried to eke it out with some other colors that produced a pond scum look. Got more blue at the store, then savagely attacked it again.
  13. Mrs. Canecutter gets asthma laughing at your excellent witticism.
  14. STOP THE STEAL. Shut this contest down until Georgia has a chance to send us Alternate Weights.
  15. I am 6'3" and 213 as of last week. For me to look like Trump I'd have to fill a dufflebag full of horse shit and strap it on in front in "GET PREGNANT" mode. IYKYK. Half-right FACE.
  16. Update: After two days of bullshit blathering, I sent out a new email to club officers saying that this witch, excuse me, this girl convicted in The 2023 Alabama Witch Trial, had in fact passed all our artist requirements and as President I declared her IN and give her a space at the show. Allied officer agreed with me, Queen Bee meddler who started all the witch shit did not. Then wishy-washy officer sounded in and wishy-washed. My plan was to force them to outvote me so I could quit the fucking club. I waited for the final show chair officer to weigh in against the witch, and I'd be free. Meanwhile Queen Bee messaged me about how I was so Wrong! Because I wanted to tell witch she was out personally instead of letting some bitch like Queen Bee gloat-pity her. I told Queen Bee if our witch got shot down I was gonna tell her exactly how it happened. This was on purpose because Queen Bee is so looped-out gullible she probably does fear the witches coming after her. Then Show Chair (played by Kate McKinnon in the movie) roars in and dresses ME down for getting out of her lane, that it's not up to me if witch gets in the show, it's up to her, and SHE says witch is IN THE SHOW. I apologize online while cackling maniacally IRL. ----- But it's not over. Queen Bee was put in a box, cut off from her followers, but she did not rest. Instead she has attempted to talk smack to me via personal messages. This is like bullfighting vs your grammama. I don't want to hurt her, but it's like she doesn't even have 1994 smack-talking skills. It's the e-communication equivalent of holding a 5-year old's head and letting them swing at you. After several exchanges, she has calmed down to where I asked her if she'd just rather talk on the phone. If she does, I'll just let her scream herself to sleep.
  17. The time she spent making that was 15 minutes the waiter didn't get harassed about the lemon on the water glass.
  18. I welcome all Hindu Jewish Catholics so long as they check the Fascism at the door.
  19. Y'all prolly did this already but I am too lazy to read the thread so whatev. Pence: We saw his balls drop. But still SuperPreacher. Hutchinson: Mincing Deacon. Christie: Disappointing as alleged attack dog. DeSantis: Alfred E. Neuman is back, and he's not smiling. Vivek: Jibbering cokehead not named Don Jr. Burgum: Boring Scott: Also Boring Haley: G.H.W. Bush with better hair.
  20. Plus it might encourage Russians to redeploy 10,000 men to guard various Crimean beaches that the Ukrainians don't plan on attacking again.
  21. A jibbering coke-head with a funny name.
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