Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Baffler]

Not really, but I'm kinda curious about it now. Oh well.

[Comrade P.]

Not really, but I'm kinda curious about it now. Oh well.

Gooshcha.
English lacks the sound we use in shch part, actually. Same goes for tovarishch.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Not really, but I'm kinda curious about it now. Oh well.

The word is гуща [gooscha] and apart from the solid part of the soup, it can also mean 'coffee grounds' or just generally 'the solid part of some suspension' in one meaning, or 'the thick of something' (like in "the thick of the fighting") in the other.

...That's like the least useful Russian word a foreign person could know.

Comrade P. has superior ninjutsu.

[Arx]

'the solid part of some suspension'

So, sort of like precipitate?

Because I am totally referring to the solid matter in soups as the precipitate from now on.

[Helgoland]

In German it's called 'Einlage', 'inlay'. Though that's mostly for stuff like dumplings and meat and well-defined chunks of vegetable and croutons and so on - Wikipedia informs me that an Einlage has to be edible even before being put in the soup, that is it has to be cooked/prepared separately and only (re-)heated with the soup.

[Avis-Mergulus]

'the solid part of some suspension'

So, sort of like precipitate?

Because I am totally referring to the solid matter in soups as the precipitate from now on.

Weeeell...Sort of, but it should generally be the amorphous part of an infusion - yeah, infusion is more apt than suspension - and usually it's for edible things.. For example, the tea leaves in tea can certainly be referred to as gooscha, the solid poisony bits in rat poison solution maybe, sand in motor oil - definitely not.

Hey, I was also wondering. So you speak English and Afrikaans, yes? Do you speak any of the Niger-Congo languages?

[Arx]

I can limp through a (slightly ritualistic) polite greeting in isiXhosa and isiZulu, and know most of the basic grammar for isiXhosa. I have very limited vocabulary, though, since I don't use it as much as Afrikaans in my area.

Edit: oh yeah and I horribly butcher the clicks.

[Avis-Mergulus]

I can limp through a (slightly ritualistic) polite greeting in isiXhosa and isiZulu, and know most of the basic grammar for isiXhosa. I have very limited vocabulary, though, since I don't use it as much as Afrikaans in my area.

Edit: oh yeah and I horribly butcher the clicks.

Do you have much trouble with the tones? We just had a lecture on tonal languages at Uni (one of our lecturers studies Kpelle) and what I got out of it is that in most of the tonal African languages tones denote grammatical categories as well as lexical ones, so you probably had to get the hang of them with isiXhosa.

Also (pardon me if that's a loaded question, I really don't know) does language distribution in South Africa correspond with skin color? Like, do a lot of black South Africans have Afrikaans as their first language, and do a lot of white South Africans speak Niger-Congo languages? Or is it more of a geographical thing?

Also also, how the heck does one set up a rotating text signature?

[i2amroy]

Also also, how the heck does one set up a rotating text signature?

I've seen two different ways to do it.
1) A batch file or something similar that automatically logs in as you and changes your signature every once in a while. (Which can be a pain).
2) The signature isn't actually text, it's a screenshot of the text that you then link to just like a rotating avatar. (Which only works if people allow images in their signatures).

[Arx]

To my knowledge, the Bantu languages are not tonal. Their particular brand of special (which they probably share with others) is that nearly everything is denoted by prefixes, which can get a bit confusing.

Language and skin colour are very closely correlated, with geographical distribution as well. If you walk into, say, Mitchell's Plein and grab a random person, it's incredibly likely that they're coloured and Afrikaans-speaking. Pick a person from Kwa-Zulu Natal and odds are very good they're black and Zulu speaking. It's left over from the segregation during apartheid, which it's sometimes easy to forget was only a generation ago. People haven't had a lot of time to move around and homogenize. It's very rare for a white person to speak a language other than English or Afrikaans, but many black people speak Afrikaans and almost all speak English. Again, a vestige of apartheid.

Some people might consider those loaded, but to be brutally honest I'm a white person who didn't have to live it so it doesn't bother me too much.

As for the rotating text, signavatar has two separate rotations, one for avatar and one for signature.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Wikipedia tells me Xhosa has a two-tone system, but Wikipedia has lied to me on the subject of less-documented languages before. You probably know better than me, and "tonal" is a tenuous classification anyway (I've seen it extended so far that Serbian and Lithuanian became tonal, which is sort of a "flat what" point for me - gotta read up on this).
Thanks for the rest of the answers, that was rather comprehensive.

[Arx]

You know, on consideration I'd believe it's tonal. I strongly suspect it's just not totally integral. It's also not written as tonal, which doesn't help.

[Frumple]

written as tonal

I am now picturing an entire book written as sheet music. What tense is ♫ again?

[Baffler]

Is that actually workable? I suppose you could use different combinations of notes to represent words, and use accidentals, time signatures, articulations, or even vary octaves to get something resembling grammar out of it. It'd probably end up being very simple (or pure cacophony) either way, but it would be fascinating to work as a code. It'd be like a needlessly complicated PA system that only certain people can understand.

[BlitzDungeoneer]

Say, what does being a 'fixed resident' mean?
I tried to search it up, but it keeps directing me towards Resident Evil videos -_-