That is the letter ت, pronounced same as t

Yalla, let's learn some Arabic

There are 2 other letters that look exactly the same except for the dots, here is how to tell the three apart:

The ‫(b sound) ب‬ has the dot below its shell

The word “below” starts with the sound b.

Transliterated as b

The ‫ (t sound) ت‬ has two dots above its shell

The word “two” starts with the sound t.

Transliterated as t

The ث (th sound) has three dots above its shell

The word “three” starts with the sound th.

Transliterated as th

:read-theory:

Remember: these three letters have the exact same shape, only the dots are different. The only reason dots exist in Arabic is so we can easily tell letters like these apart.

Since they have the same shape, they behave the same way when we write them in cursive, which is the only way to write in Arabic. You'll see what this means when we talk more about the script.

Pronunciation examples:

ب (b sound) :

باب   door       baab

ت (t sound) :

توت   mulberry       tuut

ث (th sound, as in three) :

In this example the ث is ثـ

ثَوب   garment       thawb

Check the comments.

Logographic scripts seems like a pain in the ass, but if I can remember all the 150 pokemons

I've heard a lot of praise for it here and elsewhere, and I looked into it myself before. The praise is actually why I had seriously considered the method, their subreddit is full of success stories and people who absolutely believe in the method. Anyway, I was telling a friend about DS the other day and she was shocked when I said DS recommends at least 600 hours of input before you even start to speak. So it made me think yeah maybe DS is not an efficient method, then I found this thread

Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

I am convinced that a mixed approach to language learning, one that incorporates Comprehensible Input early on, is probably better than pure Comprehensible Input. Of course DS is a great source for graded listening material, no doubt. I wish something even remotely similar to DS existed for Arabic.

Of course, there are some major caveats here, which is that, firstly, in order to use this web-app you first need to be fairly proficient at Sutton Signwriting, i.e. you might need to try around for a bit between different similar handshapes before you find the exact right handshape that a sign is listed under; secondly, there seems to be no way to exclude certain features from your search, which means that you might have a lot of irrelevant results for a given search; and thirdly, the dictionaries naturally don't contain every single sign in every single sign language, and this is probably extra pronounced for smaller sign languages. A particular thing to note with regard to the dictionaries is that since this web-app is from 2017, you won't be able to find signs like CORONAVIRUS or RIZZ using it. The glosses provided for the signs also naturally don't provide all the shades of nuance, for instance you'll find both two-handed and one-handed variants of letters in SignMaker's Norwegian Sign Language dictionary but no indication of which version is more common.

Nevertheless, even with all its faults, I still find this web-app useful from time to time. I don't think there's any other program or web-app in the world that lets one search SL signs by their parameters, despite how useful such a feature could be for learning signs. Every other sign language dictionary in existence it seems is basically just a list of glosses in alphabetical order, each gloss accompanied by a video or diagram. This means that other dictionaries can fairly conveniently answer the question "What is the sign for [word]?" but not "What does this sign mean?"

So for instance, say I saw the Norwegian Sign Language sign for bull or ox (NO: okse), but I didn't know that that's what that sign meant. In order to identify the sign, I'd go into the Norwegian Sign Language version of SignMaker; I'd click on "click search" and select "2 clicks"; then I'd find the icon for "index thumb" (note: hover your mouse over the icons to read descriptions of them), and click on that; then I'd finally find the icon for "Index Thumb Side, Thumb Diagonal", and click on that. The green window on the left-hand side of the screen would then display a series of results for Norwegian Sign Language signs containing the selected handshape, in this case six results including two variants of the sign for bull. So then I just hover my mouse over the relevant result, and the gloss should appear.

So that's how you use it, basically, and I think that's a pretty neat thing to be able to do.

Hey there, I was wondering what good ways are to learn the Spanish dialect that is most commonly spoken in the USA since America has a lot of Spanish speakers and it's the second most prevalent language after English (like English, America obviously has a different version of the language compared to for example UK or India).

I had Spanish in school but only know a few basic things. I wonder if there is some way to really get immersed in the language (other than oc moving there and speaking with native speaker in person) to naturally learn it to be able to have conversations with Spanish speakers in America that sound as local/authentic as possible (so I don't wanna focus on artificial learning that focuses too much on grammar and uncommon words that aren't that important for everyday conversations).

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3947641

Hii, idk why I'm writing this cuz there's probably 0 Lojban speakers here but... idk you may like my special interest writing lol and i just had this urge to start writing this. Also wanna preface this by saying this is mostly composed of my opinions (which I will try to justify ofc) and I'm just some unqualified nerd

Soo, for the last few weeks I've been learning this constructed language called "Lojban". The name Lojban is technically an exonym created by English speakers and some Lojban speakers will use it even while speaking Lojban but a better "native" name is probably "jbobau" or "banjubu'o", the latter for use if someone is pilled on algorithmically deriving Lojban words for countries, cultures, and languages from their ISO codes (I think I am lol, but I think it's also okay to have one of our own words for ourselves and use the algorithmically derived stuff for everything else).

Lojban is a in class of constructed languages called "logical languages" and the usual definition is that they are languages for people to communicate anything a natural language could but they are based on logic. Lojban itself comes out of a previous language project called "Loglan" (yes that's literally just the english words for logic and language mashed together, Lojban's name is similar but has a better justification you will see later lol) after its community became disillusioned with the slow progress of its development and that the specification did not even come close to reflecting its real use (not to mention being intended to just encode English with logical structures which many people were also dissatisfied with). Loglan's creator, James Cooke Brown, was actually threatening people with legal action for trying to improve the language by making dictionaries or specifying grammar that they were already using. So a lot of Loglan's community left the project and formed the "Logical Language Group" (the organization that actually defines what Lojban is) and created Lojban to try to improve on Loglan. For a while there was some kind of complicated legal battle over copyright between the LLG and James Cooke Brown, which the LLG won eventually but not before they had already created a new vocabulary for Lojban from scratch to avoid copyright restrictions.

It's weird but I remember hearing about Lojban as a kid cuz I think I was briefly interested in constructed languages (I even had a little one of my own I can barely remember) and cuz I was allowed unlimited access to the internet basically since I could work a computer on my own lol. I was talking with a friend from here and the topic of languages came up and we talked briefly about if a language that people speak could also be used for programming a computer or something and I vaguely remembered Lojban. So that night I looked into it again, for real this time, and discovered it's actually rly cool and I wanted to make a serious attempt at learning it.

Lojban has several "claims to fame", and not all of them are true sadly and I feel like this isn't made clear enough to newcomers. It's very cool and I love it ofc lol, but there are some things about it that I don't like and which I only learned of after I got a decent grasp on the language and the project.

Quick intro to Lojban

In Lojban, the basic structure of a text or any speech ("utterances") is a series of "bridi". A bridi is like a Lojban sentence but the word "bridi" literally means "predication". Like in classical first-order logics and like many English sentences ("I like you", I have the relationship of "liking" you), a bridi is a assertion of a relationship between some things. Bridi are composed are 2 things: a selbri, (a predicate word or basically like a verb) which has a series of "places" numbered x1 through x[however many places the selbri has], and sumti which are like arguments or parameters that fit in the numbered places of the selbri.

So "I like you" can be rendered in Lojban like this: mi [cu] nelci do

"nelci" is a word being used as a selbri which has the English definition of "x1 is fond of/likes/has a taste for x2 (object/state)". On its own it's not very useful ofc, unless you have sumti to pass to it. I used the words "mi" and "do", which are like pronouns for the speaker and the listener, respectively. Mi and do are considered to be in a category of word called "cmavo" [SCHMA vo], which literally means "structure word" and which are small, very commonly used words used for lots of things like filling in the sumti places of selbri. There are a few other pronoun-like words defined by Lojban but those aren't very useful unless we only want to make statements about ourselves! Btw, there is another cmavo called "cu", it means that the word after it is a selbri in a bridi, the reason it's in brackets is cuz you often don't need to specify it. In this case we don't cuz it's obvious where the selbri begins and ends.

Here's one of the most wild features of Lojban that you get to learn about almost immediately when you start learning about it. There are no nouns :3

What you have to do if you want something with the function of a noun to use as a sumti to a selbri is to use a few different mechanisms that are provided for by the cmavo, most commonly the cmavo "le" and "lo" which are similar to the English word "the". They convert a selbri to a sumti like this:

le gerku cu nelci le panka (The dog likes the park, or extremely literally: all of the at-least-one described as a dog liked/likes/will like (tenses are optional :3) all of the at-least-one described as a park)

Notice in this case, the cu was necessary cuz otherwise it would be ambiguous where the first sumti to nelci ends. Lojban LOVES terminators to grammatical structures. Le has a corresponding terminator like a close parenthesis "ku". I could have also replaced the cu with a ku (the former is pronounced like shu btw, ku is pronounced like any English speaker would pronounce it hehe) and it would have also been valid. Most of these terminators can usually be dropped where dropping them wouldn't cause any ambiguity. It seems complicated at first but you do actually get a feel pretty quickly when you can leave out the terminators.

Also notice that "gerku" and "panka" look very similar to nelci. That's cuz they are the same type of word called a "gismu" :3 and you can tell easily where the gismu in a Lojban utterance are cuz they have a defined, regular form. They always have 5 letters, always start with a consonant and end with a single vowel, always contain exactly one consonant pair, and they are are always stressed on the first syllable (which is a consequence of the fact that ALL Lojban words are stressed on their second-to-last syllable).

Gerku and panku literally mean "is a dog" and "is a park" (they have more places for more info but yeh hehe)

Intro to xorlo and bear goo

Oh, you thought the above section was me explaining a language I love so that you could maybe understand it a little better? Actually, it was all a trick to give you the context to just barely grasp the biggest Lojban struggle session that ever happened enough to understand how fundamentally cooked this """"logical"""" language is from a logical perspective :3 (/j)

Actually, I lied in the last section. "le" and "lo" don't work like that anymore. Lojban underwent a period of rapid development within the LLG from its initial creation until the publication of the official specification of the entire language in a red book called "The Complete Lojban Language" in 1997. Then development was mandatorily frozen for 5 years to see how people used this "baseline" standard language. And since then, the development of the language was left to a different committee of LLG members and Lojban users called the BPFK which was dissolved by LLG in 2018 to form the very similar committee called the LFK (I will spare you their Lojban names :3). Technically, LLG has to approve whatever the BPFK and now the LFK do, but the vibe I get is that most of the LLG members who developed the language either left or mostly checked out of further development of the language. I think the LLG bylaws say they have to meet once a year but...... not a lot has happened since 1997 tbh lol

One of the BPFK's first language reforms (maybe the first actually) was a reform called "xorlo".

You know those meanings of le and lo I mentioned earlier? Something that was very important in baseline Lojban was this concept of those le and lo words (called "gadri") having implicit quantifiers.

Like when I say "le gerku" how do you know how many dogs I'm referring to? The answer, in baseline Lojban, is that le has 2 implicit qualifiers which, if not overridden, are this: "ro (all of) le (what is described as) su'o (at least one) gerku (dog)". So, to be exactly clear, what I said was that one or more dog(s) that I'm thinking of like/liked/will like one or more park(s) that I'm thinking of lol. It can't be zero cuz that affects the hypothetical truth value of the bridi (more on that later) cuz there has to be an actually existing liker and liked in order for that bridi to be true. Another important thing is, why did I use le instead of lo? The answer, also in baseline Lojban, is cuz lo refers to things that actually are something, as in: my use of the selbri after "lo" is not restricted by my intentions. That probably sounds like nonsense lol. Cuz it is unless you know the secret thing that no one told me initially and which a lot of other people never learned about le and lo which is that they also specify sets. Before I tell you more on that, I should tell you that lo also has implicit quantifiers like this: "su'o (at least one) lo (things that actually truly are) ro (all) gerku (dog)". So, on set specifying: "le gerku" is ALL MEMBERS of the set of dog(s) THAT I AM THINKING OF and "lo gerku" is at least ONE member of the set of ALL dog(s) IN THE UNIVERSE (of discourse, maybe, lol)

Here is a very good example of the semantics of that from the red book I mentioned:

Example 6.41.

[ro] le ci gerku cu blabi
[All-of] those-described-as three dogs are-white
The three dogs are white.

Example 6.42.

ci lo [ro] gerku cu blabi
Three-of those-which-are [all] dogs are-white
Three dogs are white.

Okay, cool, cool, seems easy right? Just have to remember those implicit quantifiers

Wait...... Lojban is a logical language. Speaking extremely literally, "lo gerku" is those things which dog, as in things that are dogging. Wtf is a thing that dogs and also.... wtf is a set?

Okay okay, what about the gismu "cribe" which means "is a bear". Imagine: you're in a forest with a friend. You and your friend are trying to find lo cribe (a bear, one or more members of the set of things that are bearing). You're walking along and you come across a pile of bear goo (a bear that is a pile of goo, maybe it's a bear in a late stage of decomposition or something). Did you and your friend just find lo cribe??????????????????A???A?A???A/fd/ffd/fdflfmf.f.c? If the goo bears, doesn't that mean it is part of lo cribe?

The problem is, that from a classical first-order formal logical perspective............. human intentions are worthless. But more than that LOJBAN HAS NO COMPLETE, FORMAL DEFINITION OF ANYTHING EXCEPT ITS GRAMMAR AND IT ISN'T EVEN CLEAR ON WHAT A SET IS WHILE USING THEM

So the BPFK nerds argued about this endlessly in one of their sessions and could not come to any kind of conclusion on whether bear goo is lo cribe or not so they decided to drop almost all the semantics described above of le and lo despite the fact that no human speaker could come across bear goo and describe it as lo cribe rather than le cribe (as in goo that is bearing in speaker's idea of the goo) unless they were trying to make a point about it being lo cribe to a committee and we got the "xorlo" reform. Now you use lo for everything unless you have some specific things in mind and then you use le. And these have no qualifiers unless you add them so "lo gerku" could mean a dog, all dogs, or some dogs and "le gerku" means some unspecified amount of things I'm thinking of, each of which I describe to you as a dog.

Btw, I didn't even get into the plural quantification thing, as in there are predicates that can only be satisfied by groups of things and not by the things themselves and vice versa. Like one person cannot "gather" and a group of people cannot eat, the people in the group each eat

If you wanna melt your brain some more with that, here you go: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gadri:_an_unofficial_commentary_from_a_logical_point_of_view :3

Also, Lojban has set and "mass" gadri like le and lo that do explicitly specify masses (a group of "individual" (that has its own bad definition) things that has the same properties of the individual things which compose it and may have other properties as well) and sets (a group of things that has entirely different properties from the individual things that compose it). Like one way to interpret that is that sets of bears have cardinality but they don't have "bearness" and vice versa for sets) which, as a result, can be used to specify the stuff about plural quantification of variables in predicates (see the above link for info about "collectivity" and "distributivity")

If this all sounds really confusing, that's because it is and I'm still trying to figure out what Lojban means to me. Initially I was using xorloified Lojban cuz it's an official reform (but technically not a "finished" official reform or something that is permanently binding lol, idek, it's been 20 years lmao) and I hadn't yet realized Lojban is in the process of splitting into multiple dialects cuz, to me it seems like, people who cared about the logical aspects of Lojban are now dissatisfied with the lack of progress on better formalism and the whole language actually and xorlo and similar BPFK reforms that make the language easier to speak while reducing its semantic richness and the people who don't really care about logic in Lojban hate that stuff anyway and are cool with dropping most of it. I read some of the arguments for and against xorlo and I am using non-xorlo Lojban for now cuz I wasn't convinced by the bear goo arguments. It doesn't matter that much for communication most of the time, I feel like, usually, xorlo people will just miss out on some of the meaning of what a xorlo non-user will be saying but otherwise it's okay. Although, sometimes I legit cannot understand wtf IRC users are saying at all lol cuz their dialect is so far from the baseline Lojban I've been learning and also I cannot make their utterances parse sometimes in the computer parsers cuz its so far away from baseline lol

Lojban myths and truths

1. Lojban is a logical language

This is true, as long as you can agree on what lo logical language ku means :3 Tbh, when I went in I rly was expecting SOME kind of real formal system behind it before I found out that Lojban is a language to speak some logic but not rly a language to do logic, I guess. Most of the parts are there but not much has materialized (yet?)

There are some attempts to formalize Lojban more, this new one is particularly impressive tbh, even though I think the approach is kinda wrong: https://brismu.systems/ (brismu: a relational interpretation of Lojban)

2. Lojban is an unambiguous language

This is true syntactically. There are real formal definitions of Lojban grammar out there based on BNF grammars and parsing expression grammers which is VERY VERY VERY NICE lol. It really helps to learn the language cuz if you're doing something grammatically wrong a parser will reject it. Semantically, I think you can be even more vague and ambiguous in Lojban (like with tanru, which are metaphors based on combining multiple gismu) than probably most natural languages but you can also be painfully, beautifully non-ambiguous with your meaning :3

So.... it's mixed

3. Lojban is somewhat culturally neutral

It's hard/impossible for me to say exactly cuz I was a monolingual English speaker before learning Lojban and I live in which I think is where most of Lojban's creators are from. It does have some very nice features though. Like there is no set word order, I didn't mention it before but you can move around the sumti places and selbri in pretty much any configuration you want so likee if you don't speak a SVO language like I'm speaking now you can totally just do whatever you want and still be understood. Also, the parts which make up the gismu which form the root words of the language are algorithmically sourced from the world's biggest languages weighted by how many speakers they have. So Mandarin is the most important source for the gismu

But at the same time Lojban's phonology (how it sounds) and especially orthography (how it's written, like with the Latin script) is quite European, although there are much less used writing systems for Lojban floating around. I should mention though that the language, while it has a very European phonology, was carefully designed so that speakers who might have trouble making some of the more difficult or culturally specific sounds can still be understood. Tbh that would be worth a post of its own but you can find details in the first few chapters of the Red Book if you're interested

On perfection

Am getting tired now so I'm gonna finish this up before I get too tired to post it and then forget it but...

I don't want anyone to put off of trying Lojban out cuz of the bear goo stuff or anything else I mentioned. It's genuinely a very cool language project, it's just unfinished imo even if most of its original creators are done with it

There are a lot of things in Lojban I wish we had in English, like spoken tone indicators, evidential indicators (cmavo that attach to things to specify how you came to know or believe something), actually working grammar checkers, etc etc etc

Would encourage you to look into Lojban if any of this stuff interests you. You'll just have to figure out some/a lot of it on your own but if you figure out a good interpretation maybe we should all start speaking it hehe :3

I hope you liked reading, sorry if it's messy I kinda just threw this together, little energy for more elaborating rn

Specifically Suret. Not an Assyrian, just interested in the language

I don't intend on learning ASL until I've already learned Norwegian Sign Language, but I know that a very large share of this site's userbase are from regions where ASL is the predominant sign language, so I hope this will be helpful for them.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3809136

mi kelci fi'o se datro li re so lo bridi logji bo cmavo ku .e lo ma'a so'i mimta pixra ku noi nenri le ma'a catni ke bralai namcu spuda ke'e pinka .i mi pu tavla le cribe kibystu pendo ku lo nu go'i ku tu'i na'ebo le cribe kibystu ja'e lo du'u mi morji lo du'u la .lojban. cu zasti .i mi ca troci cilre la .lojban. noi ke'a ka'e remoi le'i mi slabu bangu ku'o .i la .lojban. goi ko'a cinri zdile mi le ka na ambigu gerna kei ku noi za'i lo skami ka'e genturfa'i ko'a zo'e ri'a ke'a ku'o .e to'anai le ka logji stura poi pu'u lo so'i prenu ku da'asnu za'a ke'a ku'o .e le ka zu'o lu'a le'i so'u bangu sidbo pu'i se gunma ja'e le nu ma'a tavla zu'i .i ui ko'a sabji lo cinmo cmavo .e lo djuno krinu cmavo .i i'o ko'a melbi mi .i fe ko'a pu dajne platu le du'u piro ko'a pu'i bacru

.i ni'o iiru'e u'inai mi ca pacna lo nu mi ba te pinka dei tu'i ti mu'i lo nu mi ba pagbu au lei to'e glico zdile bo nelci renma ku vau vau poi ka xamgu .e lo nu do'o jimpe fi dei seja'enai lo mi so'i srera ku ba'a u'u

mostly literal translation

I playing, on the 29th, with the predicate logic-"structure words" and our many meme pictures, inside our official (large-number reply) post. I was talking with a bear-website friend about the event in the previous sentence, in a place other than the bear-site, with the result being that I remembered that Lojban exists. I am now attempt-learn Lojban, which could become second-in-the-set of the set "my known languages". (I guess I could have just said something like "my second language"..... fuck it, we're being logical ) Lojban, also known as it-1, interesting-fun, to me it is, because of the property of a not ambiguous grammar, which, incidentally, is related to the continuous state that (a computer could parse it-1(referring to: "Lojban") according to a formal grammar because of rel-it(referring to: "the property of a not ambiguous grammar")) being true, and, returning to the main point, the property of the logic-structure, which is related to a process of (many people debating, which I have observed, about rel-it("the property of the logic-structure) (I am trying to say this property is debated a lot, I maybe am misusing relative clauses idk, also hard to translate), and the property of the activity of elements of the small set "language concepts" can [and have] combine with the result that the event of we talk how we usually do (I am trying to say we can "do a lot with a little", this sounds as a literal translation, I probably am overcomplicating lol). [happy] it-1(Lojban) provides "emotion-"structure words" (tone indicators) and "knowledge-reason "structure words"" (markers to indicate why you came to believe something). [appreciative] it-1(Lojban) is beautiful to me. (4th argument to verb) it-1(Lojban) was carefully-designed so that all of it-1(Lojban) could be and has been spoken.

[new topic marker] [fear, weak] [tiredness] I [currently] hope the event of me [future] posting this here, because of my motive that the event of me becoming [desired] part of the mass "opposite-of-English fun-enjoyer people", has the property of "acceptable", and that the event of you and others comprehending this results despite "my many mistakes"[anticipated, apologetic].

Does anybody know a good site for Hawaiian slang?

The test word is "kumu". In an episode of the original Hawaii Five-O Kono says "This girl I met from Cleveland... Kumu." He means something like she's very sexy.

I asked about it in r/hawaii but they removed my post. I scuttled my ships. I was rude to the mods so I assume they'll ban me. Real aloha spirit they have over there.

Google was worse than useless. For example - google makes it hard if not impossible to search blogs.

Rant

It's very old news I know but google has really turned to shit. It's pathetic.

Edit 1

I made an edit. Google only has the "teacher" meaning.

Edit 2

See SoJB's comment and my reply. I think it was a prank.

More specifically it's spaced as "kor e a" and it can also mean "where is it" when pointing to a feminine noun, or "where is that (woman or thing)" when followed by the name of the referent. In Nynorsk the equivalent would be "kor er ho?" or "kvar er ho?", interchangeably; and in Bokmål it would be "hvor er hun?" (about a woman) or "hvor er den?" (about a thing).

So in writing you'll mainly see "kor e a" in wordplay, or in "Who's on first?" type routines involving the name "Korea", or in folk etymology, such as this article from Norwegian People's Aid, where there's this section involving a neighborhood called Korea, in a small town called Malm in Trøndelag:

※ Verran was absorbed into Steinkjer municipality on January 1st, 2020. Also, Malm's population has declined by ~100 people since the article was published.

I have to wonder if the folk etymology of this neighborhood's name coming from a dialectal phrase, with this very vivid image of an angry abusive husband, was invented because it is considerably more cringe to be Yet Another Western Locality nicknamed after a war-torn country in Asia, in reference to a perceived high rate of crime or general discord. In the USA there's "Fayettenam" in North Carolina and more famously "Chiraq" in Illinois — the latter was interestingly originally coined by drill rappers before it was co-opted by right-wing conservatives.