Attempt to win an award

Looking at Wikipedia, Burma is a westernisation of 'Bamar' which is a dialectal variation of Myanmar.

BS48, I never considered you to be 'most people'. You really are very unique. But still:When he joined a band, I gave my son a new set of dra.The railroads have always had a problem with ba sneaking rides in boxcars.In arithmetic class, we learned how to do sa.When I get an acid stomach, I take a couple of ta. And finally:If one motorcycle goes vrummm-vrummm, do several motorcycles go vruaaa-vruaaa?

Well considering drum, bum, tum & vrum are not latin words the plurals would simply add an S. of course it is not only Latin & Greek plurals, ie:Child Children
Ox Oxen
Goose Geese
Mouse Mice
Moose Moose
Fish Fishes or FishThere is no end to the stupidity of the English Language

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

Hi, Parasomnium. Actually, the city's name never was "Peking": this was just the result of a very bad romanization system. The Mandarin Chinese "b" is slightly aspirated, so it sounds a little like an English "p" (the more aspirated "p" sound of Mandarin was represented with a "p" followed by an apostrophe).And, the "j" sound from "Beijing" was, for some unknown reason, romanized as a "k." I think it derives from the Chinese Postal Map Romanization system, which is notoriously unsystematic and unintuitive. It was a modification of the old Wade-Giles system that was apparently based on the fundamental premise of switching random letters around for no particular reason.But, what really bugs me about it is that English speakers read Chinese romanization (pinyin) as if it were English, except when they hit the letter "j" (which is one time when the English pronunciation actually approximates the correct pronunciation), they flip to French mode.It's the one letter they would have said right if they had used their normal heuristic system! And they have to switch heuristics when they get to it! It's completely bizarre!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Mr Jack. Agreed. I was just extrapolating the principle to show how silly it is...I happen to like Latin plurals, but I usually avoid them in colloquial conversations ("genera" confuses the crap out of people, but I usually say it, then explain it, anyway).

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

It makes sense to me, sort of. When I read something I know is in a different language, my mind tells me something has to be pronounced differently in here. This comes to the fore when I read fantasy novels with fictional languages in them. I'm always changing how vowels sound and trying to make it sound "foreign."I'm not sure oif this is where the j-zh thing came from, but now that I know how to pronounce it correctly, I'll try to remember to do so.

It is my understanding that dialects in China very all over the place, far exceeding, for example, the difference between someone from Brooklyn and someone from the deep South both (attempting) speaking english, and that it is not all that rare for two Chinese from different parts of the country to have difficulty understanding each other. This is due not just to differences in vocabulary (as in the difference between common English and Ebonics), but in significant differences in pronunciation, inflection, and tonality (as in the difference between American English, English English, and Scotch and Irish English). There are very few English movies I can understand without the subtitles. In the case of Chinese, I understand that these strong dialectic differences are enforced, or at least facilitated by the pictographic nature of written Chinese which gives no hint as to pronunciation.As far as the forming of plurals, there are many instances of two languages having the same word in the singular, such as 'television' in English and Spanish, but differently spelt and pronounct words in the plural, e. g., 'televisions' in English and 'televisiones' in Spanish. Both versions are correct in their own language even if one is derived from the other as in this case. (And I notice that my spell checker rejects the Spanish version.) So, I shall always write 'forums' rather than 'fora' which strikes me as a typo of something that should go with 'flauna'.There is an overarching rule that applies: Language is a tool to be used for most clarity, not a doctrine to be followed with greatest piety.

And while we're bitchin' about language......Here in the USofA we have pedometers, to measure how far you walk. The first E is short. The word is derived from pes, Latin for foot.We have pedophiles, that hit on little kids. Short E. Not derived from foot, but from Greek for child, .We have pediatricians, that heal little kids. Long E. Derived from the same root as pedophile is.Why do we do that crap? Why don't we at least do like you Brits and spell it paedo....? And surely you Brits say pee - dough - phile, don't you?Edited by Coragyps, : Didn't like Greek copy and paste much, did it?

It's Pedophiles, pronounced Puh-doh-fe-lees, he was a controversial ancient Greek philosopher.

Hi, AiG. Actually, it's not just dialects: there are many languages that are collectively referred to as "Chinese." My comments all refer to Mandarin, which is the most commonly spoken "Chinese" and the language indigenous to the Beijing region.----- With all your clever wordplay, I keep forgetting that English isn't your first language.That post was sarcastic: I felt this thread needed something over the top.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

You may not be aware of this, but English has two /k/ sounds. Try saying the initial letters of the words "kid" and "cod" and you'll see what I mean. The second sound is darker, hollower, more breathy, and is produced with the tongue further back in the mouth.The reason the you don't notice this normally is that in English the distinction is never semantic --- the two sounds are said to be allophones of /k/, and which one you use is determined only by the vowel that follows it. However, in Arabic they are not allophones, but different phonemes; for example, "kalb" means "dog" but "qalb" means "heart".

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the two different Arabic phonemes "k" and "q". Could you tell me something about the difference in pronunciation?

Well, "k" is the sound at the start of the English word "kid" and "q" is the sound at the start of "cod". If you make the two sounds alternately the difference is actually rather obvious.

But you said that the k in "kid" and "cod" sound different because of the following vowel, and I had concluded that myself also. But "kalb" and "qalb" have the same vowel. If you want to pronounce each of them with their "k" to sound like their respective phonemes in "kid" and "cod", you have to force yourself. Of course, this could be due to growing up with a different phoneme system than the one native speakers of Arabic grow up with. It would be a reason to use different transcriptions...You have convinced me. Thank you.

Hi Bluejay,I sure could have used your help in editing/coaching my Chinese video-travelogue recently.If you recall a brief, earlier discussion we had, I visited China this past Spring. I visited Beijing, Guizhou Province and Xinjiang Province. Of course they all spoke different languages. But mostly regarding Mandarin Chinese language . . .For my video, when re-creating Chinese dialog over-dubs, although I try my best to imitate the names of the cities and sounds of the language, I surely fall flat. A simple example is "hello". Is it NEE-ha or NEE-how? Hearing Chinese pronounce this word, I am simply unable to discern. To my ears it is a blend of two vowels. (don't even mention the difficulty of learning rising and falling pitch variations) I believe the French language also has vowels that are near impossible for my ears to ascertain and then voice. I thought for a long time, this inability of mine to hear properly was some hearing impairment on my account. However, awhile back, I read a research paper that said because a young child isn't exposed to certain language sounds, when the child gets older its brain doesn't have the necessary pre-requisite information to hear the sound correctly and then imitate. This might explain why Chinese people have a near impossible time to pronounce "L"s?Anyways, I find different cultures and languages pretty damn interesting. Since you can speak Chinese, I was wondering if you can expand/confirm any of my thoughts above.I know this is off-topic so I won't ask a lot of return questions.drone