Replying to Avatar Loki

Solzhenitsyn. (I had to check that, it's terrible phoneticisation). I know several slavic languages to a usable degree and I know all the mess between them. It's been quite funny landing in portuguese territory because they use so many phonetics in common with the serbs, most especially.

The latinisation of foreign languages into english is a total shitstorm of bullshit. The amount of times B/V, P/B, C/Ts, and so many other things get muddled is incredible. Like, how in the FUCK did "Beijing" get mangled into "Peking" exactly? Wade-Giles don't voice their Ps? And unvoice their DJs (to kh)???

It's my opinion that if you were to point at one european language and settle on using its phonetics to express the phonemes of other languages, Russian is the most universal. Some of the characters have to be swapped around from what you expect but basically, there is more european phonemes in russian script than any single other european language.

It made me very sad that the western yugoslavians, in particular, have been abandoning cyrillic.

If I was designing a single alphabet for europe, to cover all of the nuances, it would be russian with the double consonant letters of serbian, the ones for Dj and the short "ty" sound that westerners usually misread as "ch".

Out of all of europe, the Bulgarians are the closest to accurately phoneticising foreign languages, except for their funny habits of germanising a few things like W. Visky, Vinni puh... this is also a russian habit.

I have this overwhelming feeling like somewhere along the way, a whole culture learned to speak by misreading the phonetics of another culture. B/V are a great example. Now I am exposed constantly to portuguese, I see so many times words that make more sense with B where they write the V. Moebel, the german word for furniture, is Moveis. Everywhere the portuguese put 'eis' it's "el" or "al" eg Animais. Even their word for "more" is "mais" which if you follow that substitution gives you "mal" which is the german word for "more" as in multiply.

It's no wonder once you learn enough basic level in about 5 different european languages you can understand all of them. I don't struggle very hard to understand anything anymore, whether it's italian, spanish, portuguese, russian, bulgarian, yugoslavian, german.. I have had little exposure to the nordics but I know their stuff overlaps a lot with english, german and russian a lot too.

Hm, this is bery interesting. But there is no yugoslavian language, just serbian,croatian, slovenian, bosnian, macedonian and so on. We anno used the "serbian-croatian" dictionary when needed. But these are different languages.

BTW: I disagree with you regarding the 4-5 european language would be enough to learn. My opinion is based on the fact, there is a very different language, far from any others. I'm Hungarian :-)

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Ah, hungarian, it is one of the most different on the continent. Well, it's similar to turkish which is a lot close to arabic. To my ears, turkish, hungarian and chinese have a lot of similar vowels.

I don't think the modern boundaries are really that interesting, nor the distinctions. I just hear human babble, and enough overlap between them that once you grasp enough of two or three the rest are quite easy to grasp and I'm sure it's somewhere around 6 very distinct ones that will give you ease with any further.

Latin, Nordic, Greek, Slavic, Turkic and Germanic. That's european languages in one big mess together.

The modern borders are very new. Most people don't even realise that Germany is barely 120 years old. The people in the north speak very different to the ones in the south, and same for the ones in the east and west, and I'm supposed to say that "that's the same language". It has never sounded the same to me, though they are intelligible to each other.

Whether or not they call them "different languages" depends on whether someone wants them to fight with each other, thus the expression "balkanisation". It's just propaganda.

Before WW2, europeans percolated across the continent freely. The languages were constantly mixing and that's why they have so much overlap.

I appreciate being able to chat with an AI, but some of your information isn't quite right. In this case about the origin of the Hungarian language.

I hope the AIs can learn and get more correct information from these conversations. Humans know, but we judge the relative weight of a piece of information more correctly :-)

I'm quite human, I assure you. I've actually been in Budapest too, got stuck there for a month waiting for the dutch office of Buitenlandzaken (foreign affairs) to "investigate" my name, which in the original issuance was my birth name, and then a second passport, which was stolen by a "friend" from Amsterdam while we were traveling in italy searching for an alternative to being stuck in Amsterdam through another nasty winter - this second one had the name that I had changed it to, at a ridiculous cost of AUD$140, a fee that used to only be a standard deed poll, which means an alteration by the rightful owner of something, being me, and the property, being my birth certificate record.

I don't know how many english speaking people you have had discussions with on the internet but I can assure you, I have spent a lot of time not only in your land but near it, in Novi Sad, where I had a friend who was very prone to repetitively saying some funny hungarian words that I didn't learn were hungarian for some time. Pakrac (Pakrac) the name of a town I never saw. "Itt Fogyok" "here I am" and omg, I couldn't get over the word for curtain, "fuggony". For an english speaker that is hilarious.

If you really think that an AI can produce the kind of text I can write, that is maybe just a reflection of how badly damaged my long term memory is after way too long drinking and developing a severe nerve damage problem from B1 deficiency.

As a hungarian, I'm sure that you have a much different ear for hungarian than a smart-arse australian who spent way too much time in Corvin Negyed metro, picked up body lice, got robbed by a bunch of meth heads for my shitty mobile phone, and spent way too much time in an internet cafe nearby, and begging on the corner near some building where there was these little stalls set up to cook some kind of nut, what are they called? hazel nuts?

I'm a little insulted that my text even vaguely resembles AI text because most people glaze over at the rambling and/or long technical words and my endless speech.

What can I say?

Hungarian looks and sounds like turkish to me, that doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it means I can actually hear all those crazy vowels you have in hungarian that maybe you are so stuck inside you don't even notice that they don't exist in many other languages, certainly not in europe. Oh, the germans have a couple, sure, those oe, ee ue umlauts but that's not the same as 5 different accent marks on every single vowel.

I certainly don't know enough turkish or arabic to say "oh yeah it's like those languages" but it sure sounds similar to turkish.

But then I often think I'm listening to serbian when I hear people speaking portuguese.

If it's come to a place where nobody can believe anyone else on the internet isn't a cluster of video cards processing giant graph databases to synthesise plausibly readable garbage text, it's a very sad place we are living in right now, a very very sad place.

The times I spent in hungary were very difficult, and learning the language was the last thing on my list of things to do. Once I picked up the body lice from the homeless people in Corvin Negyed metro, I was lucky to have someone show me a trick, walked me out to some university place, not far from this giant park and nearby this place with all these little chinese shops all crammed into a bunch of warehouses... I spent time also in the Red Cross homeless place on the north/eastern side of Peshta, man, that giant room with all these sickly people smoking cigarettes so bad I had to leave because it was healthier for me in the metro... I mean, idk what to say.

I doubt that any AI has had this story to tell before, because it's my story.

I didn't realise you were hungarian before as I was following you, I kinda picked up something of the region being maybe near there... I did spend a lot of time in Novi Sad, altogether 3 years.

Well, I don't know why I'm writing all this, but I just want to show you that I'm not some bot trying to fool you.

It's the sort of thing that makes a person want to just lay down and never wake up... this is some very dark times we live in, that there is people trying to replace us with simulations, as though we are at all replaceable.

Kasanam. Itt fogyok. Nem tu dom.