Thursday, June 21, 2012

English is a narcissistic language?

I read somewhere that English could be considered a narcissistic language since we tend to capitalize the "I" in sentences whereas in German, the "You" is capitalized. Also, in the Dutch language it seems it is rather impolite to begin a letter with "I".  Other interesting tid-bits:


  • There's no such thing as a run-on sentence in Chinese.
  • In most American stories, an owl is considered as a wise animal. In Pakistani culture, owl's are considered very foolish. If you called someone an owl in Urdu (the Pakistani language), you would be basically calling them a fool.
  • The english language allows us to turn anything into a verb: "I'll Chuck Norris that asshat".
  • Alphabet is literally the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta crammed together. Remember to learn your AB's!
  • Urdu, the main language spoken in Pakistan, sounds like Hindi, but is written in the Persian/Arabic script. This leads to the weird situation where an Urdu-speaker is able to understand everything a hindi-speaker says, but can't understand anything written in Hindi, and can read passages in arabic (without understanding it), but can't understand spoken Arabic.
  • Sanskrit, the prototypical language of south Asia shares more words with Greek and Arabic than you would think. For instance, Alpha in Arabic is Aliph, and the sankskrit alphabet also starts with an A sound. Moreover, complete words which weren't just grafted into one another at the turn of the century when civilizations collided are shared among these languages.
  • In english it's "gold-digger" while in french it's "diamond-biter".
  • Spell the word "socks" in English, and you're speaking a sentence in Spanish. Ess oh see kay ess Eso sí que es That means "it is what it is".

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