dynamic elf

Ha!

It only took a few seconds for me to shift to hearing "Milkshake" in my head with camel back-up singers.

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cinnabarine.livejournal.com

A camel with "5!" humps would be so freaking sweet.

Also...

My hump, my hump. My hump, my hump, my hump. My hump, my hump. My lovely lady lumps.

*smacks ass*

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oneagain.livejournal.com

For the record, I don't actually hate you.

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. . . and the "Huh?!" just keeps going.

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sometimes, cultural literacy isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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I find it leads to hating me.

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hating you is like loving anyone else.

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dpolicar

I'm reminded of the line "When I'm with you I feel like I could die and that would be all right."

You're left with the sense that it was meant as a compliment, but really, not so much.

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you see, I rely on Molly's capacity to evaluate my remarks contextually.

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weegoddess.livejournal.com

I'm reminded of the line "When I'm with you I feel like I could die and that would be all right."

Great, now *that* song is in my head.

::grumblegrumbleculturalliteracy::

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nitouche.livejournal.com

I would ride on the hump of the wump of Gump, if Gump were to offer.

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dpolicar

No, but I am thinking of Ogden Nash.

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chanaleh.livejournal.com

The one-l lama, he's a priest?

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dpolicar

A camel has but one hump, and a dromedary two.
Or else the other way around --
I'm never sure. Are you?

Edit: ah; I got it wrong, but close. Original here.

Edited Date: 2009-05-14 05:06 pm (UTC)

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I think something's seriously wrong with the internet. The "Ask Dr. Stupid" discussion of this subject is not available in video form anywhere!

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Also: Hey all you people who were wrong: The way to remember it is the letter D has one hump but B has two.

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Well, in English, sure.

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Those letters have the same number of humps in all languages!

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Don't mind me, I'm just your local pedant.

Edited Date: 2009-05-14 04:25 pm (UTC)

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I submit that Б and B are not the same letter.

B and b are the same letter, and Б and б are the same letter.

Τ, Т, and T are all different letters, though they look the same (sometimes! lowercase they're: τ, т, t)

Don't ask me for any rules though. I would call the Norwegian B and the English B the same letter, even though the Norwegian alphabet has a few more letters, and I'd even call the German V and English V the same letter even though they're pronounced differently. And don't even get me started on Vietnamese (seriously: don't)

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So tell me about Vietnamese!

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Me too! I'm still trying to figure out why the korean 'm' sounds like a 'b' to me.

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That's interesting! I was reading recently that the difference between "Burma" and "Myanmar" is much more a difference in spelling than in pronunciation. And I think I read it in an article about the political-cultural issues surrounding the difference between "Bombay" and "Mumbai".

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Oh wow, I didn't even connect it to that. That's a really good point!

Check out this amazingly cool explanation of their (designed) alphabet. Which does not explain my confusion, but still.

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*waits patiently for the link*

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http://www.wright-house.com/korean/korean-linguistics-origins.html

sorry about that!

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Niffariffic!

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http://www.wright-house.com/korean/korean-linguistics-origins.html

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Okay so now I'm not trying to get anything done here we go:

Their orthography is terrible. It was invented by French missionaries, and is based on the Roman alphabet. But it's got lots of sounds that aren't in French or other roman-alphabet-using languages. So they have nine different diacritics you can put on a vowel, about half of which are tone and half are sound, and you can mix them to make 72 different vowel glyphs. And of course the vowels don't really have the same vowel quality once you've started messing with the tones so it's all kind of approximations anyway. The consonants aren't much better - with the struck-through Ds (almost typeable!) and a bunch of pure consonants are represented by digraphs which don't correlate at all to what those digraphs sound like in other languages (TR -> some retroflex t). Plus the last letter of a syllable is often silent.

And then between the vowels and consonants they even get their spaces wrong! There's spaces between every syllable and as a result they'll claim that each one is its on word and they don't have polysyllabic words at all, but there's compound words (still with spaces between the parts) and sometimes one part of the "compound word" doesn't mean anything on its own and can't occur with any other words.

So anyway: Thanks a fucking lot, French missionaries!

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Not if you're reading in a mirror.

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Good easy helpful mnemonic:
Bactrian camel is bihumpal.

Totally unhelpful mean antimnemonic:
dromedary camel has deux humps.

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Mine: if you turn them sideways, a B has two humps, while a D only has one. This leads to easy bathtub-crayon drawings if you want to explain it to your three-year-old.

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bluepapercup

This is how I was taught to remember it!

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You see, YOU are truly a terrible person.

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dpolicar

My favorite mnemonic for this is Ogden Nash's.

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The camel lives 'twixt bumpy humps Which practically confuse us chumps. I think it clever of the camel In such a fix to do so damn'well.

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roy-batty.livejournal.com

You should have put this poll out yesterday. :-P

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