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Anyone who has tried learning a second language has no doubt come to the independent realization that the way humans communicate can be pretty chaotic and absurd at times. Why do some languages insist that chairs have genders, while others have no qualms about stringing together multiple nouns into one long monstrosity?
“The Lingwist” is a Facebook page dedicated to interesting and downright hilarious linguistics memes. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to add your own language-based memes and ideas in the comments section below.
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While English doesn’t assign random genders to nouns, many languages across the globe do. If you have ever attempted to learn French or Spanish as a native English speaker, you will quickly ask questions like “why do I need to know if a table is a girl?” This is a very reasonable question and you often won’t hear a reasonable answer.
Often, there is no logic behind it, besides the form the word happens to take. Most languages differentiate a noun’s gender with a suffix, and often have some other rules about pronunciation as well. Native speakers tend to not even notice how unintuitive this can be until it’s pointed out, these days, often in a meme.
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Lost Panda 10 months ago
As my drill instructor would say if someone said "I'm sorry" *ahem* "I know you are! I didn't ask for a character reference!"
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Lousha 10 months ago
In Hungarian you just "attent" , it's a verb. If you wanna be a bit more flowery about it, you can "turn your attention to" .
Gémeaux jumeaux 10 months ago
You're both right - we use "pay" in the command sense, and "give" can be used when "attention" is the object of the verb
Mónica Elisabeth Sacco 10 months ago
In Italian, you "put" attention because Italians love to meddle!
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Kelly Scott 10 months ago
In the US, we still tend to hang on to the "en" on a word, like eaten, gotten, bitten, etc. But I'm noticing more and more people are cutting off the "en". "I was bit by the dog" instead of "I was bitten by the dog" or "He hasn't got it yet" instead of "He hasn't gotten it yet" (and we're seeing "got" used in place of "have", that is, "Does he got it?" instead, of "Does he have it?") What this means is we're pretty much in the middle of a subtle language change and no one seems to realize it. Think about this today, because in 40 or 50 years from now, I doubt anyone will hear the words "bitten, gotten, eaten," etc. It's sort of spooky, like being back in time when people quit saying words like "Zounds!" and "flivver".
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Rick Seiden 10 months ago
I used to say "data" until Star Trek The Next Generation came out. Now I say "data".
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karen snyder 10 months ago
Technically, it is not an acronym, it is just initialism. A true acronym has a pronunciation, like NASA, JAMA or LOL. Abbreviations like USA, FBI and WTF are just initials or alphabetism.
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Frank 10 months ago
Something that was actually clever and funny. More of this would be great.
Nosirrow 10 months ago
The funniest language game I heard in college was saying a sentence in Polish and adding a correct English question tag. Very fun.
Jane Alexander 10 months ago
Years ago a language translation machine was given 'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' to translate into Russian and back. The result was 'the wine is agreable but the meat has gone bad'
Load More Replies... Lorraine R 10 months ago
You sometimes get interesting results when you enter an English sentence into Google translate, then take the translated sentence and retranslate it into English again.
Pittsburgh rare 10 months ago (edited)
In a Spanish radio programme they had this game. They picked a sentence in Spanish, Google translate it into English, then into Russian, then into German, a couple more other languages and back into Spanish. Results were often hilarious
Huddo's sister 10 months ago (edited)
An Australian tv music quiz show did this too, but with song lyrics translated from English to Japanese and back again.
Frank 10 months ago
Something that was actually clever and funny. More of this would be great.
Nosirrow 10 months ago
The funniest language game I heard in college was saying a sentence in Polish and adding a correct English question tag. Very fun.
Jane Alexander 10 months ago
Years ago a language translation machine was given 'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' to translate into Russian and back. The result was 'the wine is agreable but the meat has gone bad'
Load More Replies... Lorraine R 10 months ago
You sometimes get interesting results when you enter an English sentence into Google translate, then take the translated sentence and retranslate it into English again.
Pittsburgh rare 10 months ago (edited)
In a Spanish radio programme they had this game. They picked a sentence in Spanish, Google translate it into English, then into Russian, then into German, a couple more other languages and back into Spanish. Results were often hilarious
Huddo's sister 10 months ago (edited)
An Australian tv music quiz show did this too, but with song lyrics translated from English to Japanese and back again.
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