Foreign language talk

The Slovenian version

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Comedians originally.
What they did started out as a joke, then people expected them to perform music at shows.

The US national anthem, the music part is based on a very old British navy drinking song.
There is another drinking game with a Slovene connection.
Every time Slavoj Ziezek pull on his shirt collar in a speech or interview your supposed to take a drink if your a philosophy student HA HA…
Yes I know its a nervous tick but its still kind of funny.

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Wallace, you mentioned a while ago Swedes have a wierd sense of humour :smile:
This is one of our most famous comedians appering before some hot shots in London and Helsinki.

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I think he just proved the point about Swedish humor. TomC

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Dear God drinking to every tic of Slavoj Žižek is too tough even for us :smile:

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I think its funny thank you.

Poor bugger, that’s some awful tick.
Does not detract from his watch ability.

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Here are a couple of guys that kind of reflect that and the changing culture and demographic of who is Canada.
Some of it a little crude be warned.

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Give it bump.

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That was surreal, never heard that before.

Here’s a couple of classics:

As I understand it was a novelty song he came up with to mock people that would sing songs in English when they did not speak the language.
He does get the accent right, that talent!

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Something for @k_vanlooken
A Dutch guy meets an American guy in streets of Ljubljana and start communicating in 30+ languages. Amazing.

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Thats amazing. Culdnt understand much of his Slovene to be honest but it seems they were fluent in a lot of others.

Edit actualy l listened it again on wifes phone with better sound. His “Slovene” was perfectly understandable but was more Serbian than Slovenian. Amazing nevertheless, it is extremely rare to find a polyglot that speaks a language only 2 milion people speak.

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Right, I think they even mentioned there Slovene was crappy and Serbian and Croatian better. Still amazing to me :smile:

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I have had an inkling of that. English leads into French, and the Germanic / nordic languages, and I learned Spanish fluently. When I hear Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian, I can follow along. Because Spanish has many Arabic words, I hear them too. Here we have many Philippino people. Spain colonized there, so the words they used for numbers and advanced terms are Spanish, so I understand bits when people speak Tagalog. In Swampy Cree the word for baby is “bebé” Cree diverged from the European languages about 60,000 years ago, so I guess baby is amongst our oldest words.

Languages are so interesting.!

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How many people live in the Balkans in total, and of those how many of them can you make your self understood though?
Sometimes I get stuck on a word I can not make sense of ( actually a lot of the time ).
I find a slang word or a masculine or feminine version of a word that completely baffles me if I translate it to Slovak or Ukrainian, move version of the word back and forth and I can finally hear something or read back something familiar. ( or more wrong and get more confused )

Google gets better all the time.
A point will come when your phone can explain what you want to someone you can not speak too.
That might be a sad too.
Its the subtle differences in how we speak that sometimes make a story more interesting.
Basic translation makes things bland.

Maybe the worse thing of all is when you have a weak grasp of a language and try to speak to people that are very fluent.
They understand you and fill in the gaps.
But you never really make yourself understood with the beauty of your own mother tongue.

You can be very forgiving of how people speak and butcher words if you want to talk to them HA HA

Orwell warned us about a lot of things.
Machines translating and interrupting our language might lead to things we do not expect.

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Canadian English is full of words that come from other languages.
“Napoo” is a sort of older Canadian version of FUBAR, but without the swearing.
It come french Na Plus ( for give my inability to spell here if your a francophone ).
But I know Napoo to mean finished, kaput ( another borrow word ), done in a bad way. or nothing left in a bad way…

The Germans are great at taking a combination of words and bolting them together to make a really long new word with a more complex meaning.
To that end I recently heard a new English word from a young fellow I work with.
“GrinF**k”, it means to smile and nod and not say out loud and that you totally disagree with with a speaker is saying and your think they are full of it…

There are a lot of these weird words I notice, some I even use that are unique to where we live and in some cases even where we work.
It gets even more interesting when you mix different people together who speak different langauges.
I know an old man from Finland that swears in French because its easy to pick up and well understood even if he does not know the specific mean of the words he uses.
He knows they are swears relevant to what he is pissed off about.

“Pissed-off” angry with unhappy with…
The words mean nothing to do with their actions until put together and used with the right people.
I never heard and American say that.
I never heard a Brit say it…
I wonder if they would be confused by it even if its English…

Maybe its a borrow word.
Maybe it worked its way into Cree in much the same way as Napoo became English.

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Wallace, You just changed the link as i was about to watch. why? copyright?

Found a better version.
The earlier film goes into greater depth about how words and thought and meaning go together.
Here is a link to that previous clip.

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All southern slavs preety much can understand each other. But its interasting how much different Slovenian language is from any other. I think its because of the isolation. Sometimes l strugle to understand a different region, with one on the far north being not being understandable.

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Thats good!
Makes life a lot easier.

Up here there are lot of french speakers that have an accent so different from others that its hard to understand them. ( but it is still fFrench all written the same. Not like Serb or Croation )
I don’t really speak french but I can understand some words.
I have this one boss that is so hard to understand that most of the native french speakers in my area can not understand him.
SO he tries to give us directions in English but thats does not work out very well and most of what he says sounds very funny…

He says things like Ass krem instead of Ice cream and Speed-o-meter.
Everyone laughs, including himself.
Everyone likes him though because he rolls up his shirt sleeves and tries to work and help you even if we can’t understand him…

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