Ask Lemmy

“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”

Interesting idiom in English: To cook the books

This means to do dishonest accounting and make it look good for auditing. Might be two sets of books or similar fuckery.

I assume that "Koke boker" means to cook books physically on a stove or in an oven. But the way you stated it I might mis-interpret it to be dishonest accounting.

Amazon has a fantastic course on languages that I've almost completed and it blew my mind. Just seeing it laid out, how languages evolved over time.

Chief chivalry chameleon

All borrowed ( swiped? ) from French, as French changed. So we snagged the terms in mid-evolution :)

Did you know Hyrogliphs are sounds, to be read aloud just like the Roman Alphabet?!

I love that English has a way of marking nouns/verbs in a sentence but I hate that when written it's completely erased (although sometimes a comma can help) "The old man the ship" threw me for like 5 minutes before I realised that man can be a verb.

English is not my native but I hate how they just assemble bunch of words together to make a single adjective out of it, and you can't know that until the very end. It gets obvious how stupid this is if I replace all whitespace with commas.

A desktop, computer, environment.

Air, missile.

Air, plane.

Pocket, record, player.

Water, beer, pong, table, thong. Okey I made this one up

Why the fuck are the weekdays called "Second", "Third" and so on? Pretty stupid honestly.

English.

When we use a new loan word that we already have a word for.

When companies refuse to regionalize products for American English despite our having far more native English speakers than the next three countries, two of which gave English as a secondary language. None of them is England - they're in 6th place.

The absurd number of accents and dialects. Fortunately the Internet is helping grind away at this part. Standardization helps prevent misunderstandings.

Honestly English has a lot of little things that I don't like about English but I can only imagine how you make the distinction between "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" and "prinsessepult i vinkel" when speaking and does that phenomenon effect other speaking situations at least with my home state our accent involves giving up on pronunciation halfway through the word so you can just listen for when centince has definition and transitions to mumbling to hear when one word ends and the other starts

English's acceptance of old world spellings and superfluous letters. Everything should be spelled phonetically and consistently, and we should change the alphabet to get rid of confusion. Here's my suggestions:

1. Everything is spelled phonetically. No exceptional letter rules, and names are included.
2. Vowels change sound with an accent, not a silent e or modifier. So Kate is now Kāt. Vote is Vōt.
3. C can always be replaced with an S or K, so now it makes the CH sound. So cat is kat, chase is cās.
4. X is bullshit and doesn't mean anything, so we'll use the Mayan version and now it makes the SH sound.
5. Y can always be replaced with an i or e, so we'll go old English and now it makes the TH sound.
6. The -ed and -er sounds don't need the E. It doesn't do anything.
7. Double letters are unnecessary , so now the vowel sound of U,(ū) makes the oo sound. The original sound is now ēū, as in kēūkumbr.
8. G is now a vowel. Put a line on top for the J sound.
9. Since j is now unnecessary, it makes the French J sound, or DZh. We don't us it much but it's nice to have.
10. Since ū has changed, it can now replace W, ūic kan bē asīnd ā nū soūnd låtr az nēd bē.
11. Z is on thin fucking ice, but for now it'll replace soft s' where it's used. Or ēūzd, if ū ūil. It will be the difference between prōnoūns and prōnoūnz.

So naū anē budē kan prōnoūns anē ūrd imēdēetlē, and nō ūun ūil sā unuyr nām rong. Yis haz Ben mī Ted Tok.

Hmm, could probably use a long a letter. Tok doesn't feel right. Maybe the French ê?

I'm not sure about the NG sound. Maybe J is also a vowel, and G accented is NG? I'm open to suggestions. Sugjestxunz.

Edit: also dates. It should be YYYY/MM/DD. Categories should always go from least to most specific.

On that subject, even though it's not language specific, we should have thirteen four week months with names that make sense. Every date of every year is the same day, planning ahead and due dates are simple. It makes 364 days, so new years day and leap year are extra special holiday days, nobody works or buys anything. If you have an emergency on one of those days, and can't make it til Sunday the first, yo either call an acquaintance who can help, or lose and die. Sorry mate. Buy three days worth of food on Saturday the 28th of Thirtember. Hope the power doesn't go out. Or move the free day to July, which is now called September.

I kind of wish we didn't have gendered pronouns in English. So much fuss when we could just be using the same words for everyone like some other languages.