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Meta
Category Archives: language
umbra Saturni
the view from Saturn’s shadow My latest finding of “dictionary translation”, at a pet store: ONE-STORY CAT CAVE UNE CAVERNE À CHATS D’HISTOIRE I’d make it caverne à chats à une étage. Funny that I missed this three years ago … Continue reading
divided by two common languages
Me: “Hamachi sashimi.” Cashier: “It depends on what kind of fish, sir.”
Posted in food, language
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one, um . . .
Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 … Continue reading
Posted in language
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how’s your German?
I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes … Continue reading
Posted in language, mathematics, neep-neep
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pun history
There are scholars of slang who hunt for earliest documentable uses. Does anyone do the same for puns? In 1971, Larry Niven and David Gerrold published a novel The Flying Sorcerors. Recently for the first time I found that pun … Continue reading
Posted in language
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I do not understand young women, film at eleven
I don’t know how many times this has happened. I’m on the phone with some chirpy Career Gal, she says something to which I say “Yes, fine,” and then she warbles “Okay??”, leaving me somewhat bewildered and impatient. It has … Continue reading