Humor Random Comments Thread

[Codz]

So, I'd never really followed hockey before, but early this year during the playoffs, I decided to pick a team and start following them. I ended up choosing the New York Rangers, and rooted for them all the way through their first trip to the Stanley Cup Finals in twenty years. They ended up losing the series, but I've actually become a pretty big fan of them, and hockey in general. Definitely a fun sport to watch. Any other hockey fans here?

 

[Athena]

 

[Urwumpe]

Interesting, that there are as many low german speakers as swiss german speakers... I always thought there are much more of the swiss.

 

[mojoey]

You might be right, it looks like the data has some holes in it.

 

[MattBaker]

I was surprised about Bavarian and Swabian. But I guess they count Austrian as Bavarian. I don't really agree with that but all those dialects are dependent on your definition. If you make a difference between Bavarian and German you have to make a difference between Cockney and Southern US at one point, too.

 

[Athena]

swiss german speakers

...there's a swiss-german language that exists? :blink:

 

[Urwumpe]

...there's a swiss-german language that exists? :blink:

Yes. Sounds like a friendly form of Klingon.

Example:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-UfPCubsE"]Wetter Schweizerdeutsch - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Mojave]

It sounds like an endless stream of clicking sounds.

 

[jedidia]

Interesting, that there are as many low german speakers as swiss german speakers... I always thought there are much more of the swiss.

I don't even know what exactly "low german" is... :shifty:

As for swiss german, there's about 8 million inhabitants in Switzerland, but a good deal of them speak french and a few italian. Then there's lots of people with imigrant backgrounds which might have learned to speak swiss german, but would statistically probably not be considered speakers of the language until at least second generation.

It sounds like an endless stream of clicking sounds.

Swiss german is most distinctive for the throaty "ch" (which sounds like someone trying really hard to disloge some spitel from his throat) and the rather explosive "K", which sounds like a "ch" got scared and yelps out in surprise. But while "ch" is a vowel, and can therefore form a continuous sound, the K is a consonant that can only be punctuated, so it doesn't scare the foreigners quite as much.
It is also notable that these distinctive sounds are almost the only feature of swiss german language that is consistant over most dialects.

 

[Artlav]

Hm, local scholars disagree about slavic languages being descendants of european origin, but indian instead.

 

[n122vu]

It sounds like an endless stream of clicking sounds.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

puzzle !!!
What is in the picture ?
View attachment 13239
View attachment 13240
View attachment 13241
View attachment 13242

Fusing unit from either an artillery shell or a low-drag bomb.
Either way, NOT a good thing to find laying about randomly.

 

[Matias Saibene]

What fun it is to collect iron filings with a magnet!

I'm doing a small collection of iron filings, and I will take the area where I live, there is a lot of sand, and this sand has a lot of iron.

Then I'll look for other places, like in the center of the Earth, I think it's a little warm in the center of the earth but I'll take refreshments. Also I have a map of Arne Saknussemm...

 

[Linguofreak]

Hm, local scholars disagree about slavic languages being descendants of european origin, but indian instead.

The term "Indo-European" refers not to the origin of the Indo-European family, but to the locations of the homelands of the modern Indo-European languages when they were discovered to be related to each other. Proto-Indo-European is thought, according to the two most widely believed hypotheses, to have originated either in the Dnieper/Volga region, or in Turkey, and to have spread out from there to Europe, India, and everywhere in between.

---------- Post added at 02:47 ---------- Previous post was at 02:10 ----------

I don't even know what exactly "low german" is... :shifty:

Linguistically speaking, it's the set of local non-standard dialects of Northern Germany that are more closely related to Frisian, English, and Dutch than they are to Hochdeutsch. Like English, Frisian, and Dutch, the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift"]second Germanic consonant shift[/ame] did not occur, whereas it did in Hochdeutsch, and happened even more thoroughly in Schweizerdeutsch.

Swiss german is most distinctive for the throaty "ch" (which sounds like someone trying really hard to disloge some spitel from his throat) and the rather explosive "K", which sounds like a "ch" got scared and yelps out in surprise. But while "ch" is a vowel, and can therefore form a continuous sound, the K is a consonant that can only be punctuated, so it doesn't scare the foreigners quite as much.

"ch" is not a vowel. It is a continuant, but it's still a consonant.

It is also notable that these distinctive sounds are almost the only feature of swiss german language that is consistant over most dialects.

I don't know how consistent it is, but a feature that stands out to me as an English speaker is the presence of /æ/, as in "Chuchichäschtli". English distinguishes between /æ/ and /ɛ/ (short e), so my brain is trained to pick up the difference, and Hochdeutsch doesn't have /æ/, so it's presence in Schweizerdeutsch is noticeable to me.

 

[Izack]

Then I'll look for other places, like in the center of the Earth, I think it's a little warm in the center of the earth but I'll take refreshments. Also I have a map of Arne Saknussemm...

Just make sure to take enough refreshments to share... with some rather large organisms.

 

[steph]

Ordered some car parts on Thursday on the web. Since I needed them ASAP, I opted for the express delivery option (in 13 hours max, according to their site :lol: ). Since I made the order around midday on Thursday, I obviously wasn't expecting for a courier to come calling in the night hours of Friday, but I did expect to have them by Friday afternoon at most.
Alas, friday came and went, and by friday evening I gave them a call to see what happened, as the parts hadn't arrived yet. Apparently, they forgot to place the order, so I'd get the delivery by Monday or Tuesday.
I asked if a refund of the "express delivery" fee was possible, to which the answer was no, apparently because the payment was made by credit card. So I asked if they could include some extra product in the package (nothing fancy, just something to show they recognized their mistake), to which the answer was again no, because the "order was already placed", and they can't change the contents of the package anymore. Sooo I told them I was cancelling my purchase and I want at least a partial refund, aaaand they hung up on me.:facepalm:

 

[Urwumpe]

Sooo I told them I was cancelling my purchase and I want at least a partial refund, aaaand they hung up on me.:facepalm:

Would be a very quick affair in Germany. Companies try that and when a consumer rights lawyer notices it, they are getting badly flamed and feel the full power of the German BGB.... which can get pretty expensive, if companies are THAT visibly violating the laws regarding legal contracts.

 

[jedidia]

I don't know how consistent it is, but a feature that stands out to me as an English speaker is the presence of /æ/, as in "Chuchichäschtli".

That's just the thing... the pronounciation of that sound varies extremely from dialect to dialect, while the "ch" and "K" sound pretty much the same everywhere. Since you already picked the immediate cult-word we teach to every foreigner we meet: If a guy from skt. Gallen says it the ä sounds completely different (almost indistinguishable from an e) than when someone from Bern says it (very close to an actual a), while the rest of the word sounds very much the same in both dialects (and yes, very much like klingon...).

 

[mojoey]

Meanwhile in Sweden...

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

So, I'd never really followed hockey before, but early this year during the playoffs, I decided to pick a team and start following them. I ended up choosing the New York Rangers, and rooted for them all the way through their first trip to the Stanley Cup Finals in twenty years. They ended up losing the series, but I've actually become a pretty big fan of them, and hockey in general. Definitely a fun sport to watch. Any other hockey fans here?

Canadiens fan looks on with a bit of malice

:lol:

Canadiens fan here, but also waiting for the Vancouver Canucks to finally win a Stanley Cup, one post-finals riot at a time :facepalm: