Category: Languages and Linguistics

All language and linguistics related matters, including the Huliganov Russian Course and the Gold List Methodology can be found in here.

Thule, if you think it over… (Friday AI-Day series #3)

Two distinct prehistoric Arctic groups—Dorset and Thule Inuit—cooperate around a wide ice hole on a frozen landscape. The Dorset figures wear simpler pale furs and use older tools, while the Thule group wears layered parkas and stands with sleds, dogs, and advanced harpoons. Both groups gesture toward a live beluga whale surfacing in the ice hole, which remains alert and able to dive. Multiple polar bears appear as tiny silhouettes on the far horizon, observing from a safe distance. The scene is set under low winter light with long shadows and distant ridges, evoking a rare moment of peaceful interaction.
Two distinct prehistoric Arctic groups—Dorset and Thule Inuit—cooperate around a wide ice hole on a frozen landscape. The Dorset figures wear simpler pale furs and use older tools, while the Thule group wears layered parkas and stands with sleds, dogs, and advanced harpoons. Both groups gesture toward a live beluga whale surfacing in the ice hole, which remains alert and able to dive. Multiple polar bears appear as tiny silhouettes on the far horizon, observing from a safe distance. The scene is set under low winter light with long shadows and distant ridges, evoking a rare moment of peaceful interaction.

This is the first post of this year 2026, and of the second quarter-century of the 21st Century, as I view it at any rate, although few people seem to be focusing on that, maybe they are not accountants.

I obviously intended more posting this year, but the year did kick off in a predictably busy way.

Thankfully there is always AI.  Thanks, or maybe rather “due” to which, whereas before we were all crying out for content, it now seems that the boot is on the other foot and content is crying out for us, like in the Russian reversal jokes. (“In Post-AI internet, content creates you”, etc.)

Clearly not all my exchanges with AI would necessarily interest my readers, so I do need to be selective but in this “Friday AI day” series, of which this is now the third, we at least have the chance to look together with AI (I mainly use Copilot) at some topics.

The topic for today is indeed topical as we are mainly focussing on Greenland, which dominates the news. The aim here is to try and understand better the country and its people but also a little bit a couple of aspects of its wildlife, we do meander off into that at one point, do keep scrolling if that is not your bag, we come back firmly into the linguistic topic and explore a little bit the mystery of Paleo-Eskimos such as the Dorset peoples and their possible intercations with the Thules who are the ancestors of modern Greenlanders.

The main aspect we are going to be exploring below is the area of language. We won’t be learning any Greenlandic, not today anyway, but we are going to be trying to understand what the linguistic landscape looks like and how it fits with other Northern countries.

I will be adopting the simple convention that my questions are in Italics and the AI’s answers the way it gives them, which has sparse use of Italics thankfully.

If you want to find out more, then you can always ask your own AI.  Sometimes minor variations on a question can produce different answers, or the same one, in defiance of Einstein’s maxim, rather different answers depending on the mood the AI is in on a given day, it would seem.

Please respond and let me know what you think.

Continue reading “Thule, if you think it over… (Friday AI-Day series #3)” →

The Ten Thousand Doors of January
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Woman Down: A Novel
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Jak mówić po polsku, żeby brzmieć jak z Doliny Krzemowej (ale nie być rozumianym ani tu, ani tam)

How to Speak Polish Like You’re from Silicon Valley (But Be Misunderstood Everywhere)

By David J. James |

Witajcie w świecie pseudoanglicyzmów—językowej krainie, gdzie „zrobić upload” brzmi jak operacja chirurgiczna, „być na callu” to stan egzystencjalny, a „deadlineować” to nowa forma cierpienia. W tym słowniczku pokazujemy, jak polski biznes i młodzieżowy slang tworzą hybrydy, które brzmią światowo, ale są zrozumiałe tylko dla wtajemniczonych.

📘 Słowniczek Pseudoanglicyzmów | Glossary of Pseudo-English Polishisms

🇵🇱 Wyrażenie Znaczenie w polskim kontekście 🇬🇧 Jak to brzmi po angielsku? 🧠 Komentarz
O co kaman? „O co chodzi?”, „Co tu się dzieje?” What’s going on? (but “come on” doesn’t fit) Brzmi jak angielski, ale nim nie jest
Zrobić research Poszukać informacji, przeanalizować Do research (not “make a research”) „Zrobić” wszystko to polska specjalność
Być na callu Uczestniczyć w rozmowie online Be on a call Korpo-slang w pełnej krasie
Zrobić feedback Dać informację zwrotną Give feedback Feedback jako rzeczownik, „zrobić” jako czasownik
Deadlineować Ustalać lub pilnować terminu Doesn’t exist in English Brzmi jak kara boska
Zrobić upload Wgrać plik Upload a file Technicznie brzmi, ale to kalka
Zrobić meeting Zorganizować spotkanie Set up a meeting / Have a meeting Brzmi jak „zrobić obiad”
Zrobić target Osiągnąć cel sprzedażowy Hit the target / Reach the goal Agresywna metafora łowiecka
Zrobić follow-up Wrócić do tematu, przypomnieć Follow up (verb, not noun) Często używane jako rzeczownik, co jest błędem
Zrobić deal Dogadać się, zawrzeć umowę Make a deal / Close a deal Brzmi jak Wall Street, ale to kalka

Continue reading “Jak mówić po polsku, żeby brzmieć jak z Doliny Krzemowej (ale nie być rozumianym ani tu, ani tam)” →

Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with St...
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Dying to Meet You: A Domestic Thriller
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What do the British call a television?

What do the British call a television?

The British native languages – especially Celtic.

Among the British languages we have Teledu in Welsh and in Breton the endearing term Skinwel, although despite Britannic it isn’t spoken in the UK. I couldn’t find the Cornish term, but another commentator has it. Nor Manx, although presumably they have them. Irish Gaelic is Teilifís, Scots Gaelic is telebhisean, and the Lowland Scots article in Wikipedia says “Televeesion” although I am not such if that’s official usage, and as far as the Old English word they use, I think we can be pretty sure that’s an anachronism.  As Abe Lincoln famously said, “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. In that vein the Pictish term for TV is VOD as this enables you to “pict” what you like, when you like.

An early form of television from Chaucer’s time, needing a huge machine underneath to get it working and even then the screen was only in blue.  Legend has it that in the UK, in order to get that effect in “The Wizard of Oz”, they had to carry out your old black and white minstrel television and bring in a Sony Trinitron actually during the film.

British dialects of English

If you are thinking about British versions of English and the regional or slang terms, I can’t think of any regionalisms. “Telly” is an informal way of talking about television as a service or the actual set, and further slang words for the set exist such as “the box” or “the gogglebox”. The term “tube”, hwever, was not widely used in British English slang and is more of an Americanism which I am not sure many of us would have understood prior to YouTube popularising it.

Community languages

Immigrant communities in the UK exist and the Poles have telewizja, while the words in Indian languages are mainly recognisable as something sounding like the original Standard English word (ie Greek roots put together in such a way that Oedipus could have forgiven his father) but written in their own alphabets and there are quite a few of them.

You can probably get by in the British Isles just using “television”, this weird partly Greek partly Latin word which was put together in the UK by an inventor whose command of physics was clearly many metres per second better than his command of philology.

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Dying to Meet You: A Domestic Thriller
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The Correspondent: A Novel
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Thomas P. Jameson III does a “Laoshu” on Japanese…

Here we see Thomas P. Jameson III doing a Laoshu on Japanese.

Original YT playout date: 14 August 2010
Duration: 21:11

In the style of the late great Moses McCormick, the Texan cowboy reviews a stack of Japanese learning

Laoshu
The Wikipedia image of Laoshu (Moses McCormick) in his prime, with signature baseball cap.

materials.

Moses died while still young but he was a beloved member of the expat community who helped many of us out. He helped me personally on multiple occasions. Laoshu also supported my channel giving me mentions from time to time in his own videos. Moses will be greatly missed. Of course, he was still going strong at the time I made the above.

May he “level up” in peace.

Don’t miss the Texan Scots.

This is also one of my personal favorite videos from my collection.
Continue reading “Thomas P. Jameson III does a “Laoshu” on Japanese…” →

Idiot: Essays
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Just Breaking the Rules: Hockey Ever After, Book 1
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Normally, it takes about 2 years to become fluent in a language. How can a polyglot speak 15-20 languages? That’s 40 years of learning.

Gluttons for punishment, or for self-realisation?

You talk about 40 years of learning as if it were some huge punishment, but the thing about a polyglot is that he or she has that as a hobby. Not many folk get paid for it. It relaxes them and fascinates them to learn languages and so they do it. The fact that some spend 40 years indulging this love is really no more remarkable than someone who spent 40 years over a lovely big garden.

More of less or less of more?

Yes, some people do have bookshelves a bit like this…

Whether it really is forty years or more or less depends on intensity of learning, committed time in an average week, choice of methods, choice of materials, how efficient the learner is at getting a lot of mileage from a vocabulary of only, say 2,000 words, and if the learner has chosen a lot of similar languages and all of them are similar to his native tongue, or if a person has chosen languages with little common grammar and few common lexemes, and even a very different phonology and alphabet to his or her own.

By the numbers

The minimum time to get to 20 lots of 2000 words (40,000 words) with a reasonable cover of 20 not totally dissimilar grammars is something like 4,000 hours, although it could be with more efficiency done in closer to 3,200 hours. Let’s go with the 4,000 and allow the learner a thousand hours of learning time a year. What’s the result? Just four years. You’re not getting massive fluency but a solid base in 20 similar languages. On the other hand another person might work leisurely and start at about the age of 14 when the bug often hits and suddenly at age 90 die of natural causes on a tricky piece of Javanese polite form. That’s 76 years of learning. Let’s take the average of 76 years and 4 years and we get your 40 years, so it’s a perfectly reasonable estimate, but you see how the mileage can vary.

Continue reading “Normally, it takes about 2 years to become fluent in a language. How can a polyglot speak 15-20 languages? That’s 40 years of learning.” →

Rainbow Six
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Full-Cast Edition)
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