Four Things Do Not A Post Make, But I Post Anyway

[bloodyrosemccoy]

• So after years of fans in the crowd I hang with complaining that the American Girl Dolls of the Year seem to be Mostly White, American Girl has heeded our warnings and given us … a platinum-blonde doll of the year. Dudes, this isn’t them ignoring us. This is them inviting us to kiss their cynical asses.
• The Princess and the Frog had a decent enough story, a worthy heroine, JENIFER FUCKING LEWIS, and terrific animation. Still doesn’t top Beauty and the Beast for me (fluffiness wins over “you’re secreting mucus”), but man I could watch hours of footage of the shadows interacting with the real world.
• You know what's totally a swell thing to get in the mail? COOKIES, IS WHAT. Especially cookies from somebody who has made a career out of baking. westrider , I thank you heartily!
• Today's Rredŕa translation exercise: Ñagh she tikulya pe tes, dhre ka nuryi trugovish vyugadra!—colloquially, “Call the ambulance quick, cuz I’ve been hit by a brick!” A line from an Atomic Fireballs song. For some reason “I’ve been hit by a brick” is always the first passive-voice perfect-aspect example I can think of, so I decided to use it. I must say, case markers make for some really easy passive voice—all you need to do is rearrange the word order. It doesn’t actually change the meaning at all, just what you’re focusing on. So ka nuryi trugovish vyugadra, “I’ve been hit by a brick,” has all the same inflections as vyugadra nuryi trugovish ka, “a brick has hit me,” except for the word order. This wouldn’t work in English, where rearranging the same words would produce nonsense (*“a brick have been hit by I”). (And looking at the amount of inflection coded into that English version—man, English is redundant.) You don’t care, I know, but I had fun.

Comments

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, inflected languages are awesome. Latin is a great example. My personal creation, Charkartayou, is one. It's so flexible you can put the words in absolutely any order you want without screwing up the meaning, as long as you use the right particles. I use word order in that language to denote emphasis, with the most important words coming first. Fun-fun.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

See, this is what I love about the internet--people out there will commiserate with you about how great inflected languages are.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Really? You can even mix words from embedded clauses in with the matrix clause?