Odd weather...

[thistlechaser]

Last thing I do before bed is check the weather. So tonight I went to weather.com, clicked the 10 day forecast for my area, then blinked.



Showers with a 100% chance of Vietnamese?

I feel bad not knowing what language that is! Based on Googling, it doesn't look to be Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. It doesn't look Vietnamese to my eye, but I'm far from an expert on languages. The whole page was an odd mix of languages:

[My town], [state] (ZIP) Weather
Updated: 三月 12, 2012, 9:45下午

Comments

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of the Chinese dialects all right. [/me forcibly restrains herself from going into the Linguistics Lecture about how they aren't really dialects AHEM SORRY]

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Silly me, googling and thinking there was just one Chinese language. I knew better!

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Oh, heh, didn't mean to imply I was pointing the potential Linguistics Lecture at you - I tend to just rant it into midair, whether or not anyone actually needs to hear it. XD

(And I have no idea how to tell the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese, etc etc... I'm actually pretty sure that there is little or no difference in the written language, though immense differences in the spoken, and here I go again SORRY ARGH *hugs and flees*)

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Oh no! I understood, no worries. :) And no need to apologize, it's interesting!

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're interested... ;D

One of my Linguistics professors used to say that the difference between a dialect and a language was that the language was backed up by a government, borders, and an army. Thus you get, for example, several Scandinavian languages that are mutually comprehensible - say you have countries lined up like A-B-C-D-E. People in one country can easily understand people from a country that's right next to them, and kind of understand people from the next country along, which means that linguistically speaking, they are not separate languages; they are dialects of one language, or on a gradient from language A to language E. However, the people speaking those languages have national pride (and borders, and armies) and insist that no, they have their OWN language thank you, so culturally they are considered separate.

Chinese is the opposite situation. :) Speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other; they share a lot of vocabulary, but then so do an ancient form of Chinese and Japanese and nobody tries to call those dialects of the same language. ;) They have different pronunciation, different grammatical structure, verbs go in a different place in the sentence and so on. To a linguist, therefore, they are completely separate languages, and each has numerous regional dialects just to complicate matters. Written down, however, they're essentially identical, and they share the government/border/army, so are often - culturally speaking - regarded as two dialects of the same language, which makes linguists wince and mutter things like "Well, not really..."

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Huh, wow, that's interesting. I can see now why that would make you mutter!

Thanks for the info! :D

[mel-redcap.livejournal.com]

I'm always happy to burble on endlessly on any number of subjects I know interesting trivia about. The problem is getting me to stop. ("Oi, shush" usually works, just so you know. XD)

Linguistics is fascinating. Phonetics is like doing logic puzzles with sounds, morphology is the same with bigger clumps of sounds, and don't get me started on how much fun Japanese can be what with three different writing systems and infinite capacity for puns and double- or triple-meanings. (No, seriously, don't get me started or we'll be here all night... 8D)