Languages Are So Yesterday.

Languages are stupid.  This needs to be fixed. 

If you do not believe me, read on.

I sure would like to have a babel fish right now.  If I did have one, I would not be practicing falling down and trying to miss the ground right now.  Which as hard as that sounds, is actually easier than trying to kiss your elbow, or to change a date code on a recording.    Of course, if I did have a Babel Fish right now, I would not actually be writing this blog entry.  The unanticipated side benefit of me not writing this blog entry right now would be that you would not be wasting your time wondering what randomness was going to come out of my computer next. 

Wait, don’t hang up yet.  I will try to bring it around. 

I have written that Airlines are less than an intelligent business.  I am not going to pick on them again, now.  But, I have a beef to pick with languages (I can pick on vegetables if you would prefer.  Equal opportunity heckler.)  Today, I am going to unequivically show you that languages are stupid. 

Consider this.  A Dutch person does not really look any different than an American.  In fact, many of us Americans are Dutch by heritage – even if we do not really know what a dyke is.  (That is not a wire cutter, btw.)  I have seen a windmill though, and I do like those waffle cookie things.  I mean, have you tried those?  Geez, I think I could eat about a dozen in one sitting.  In fact, that is why I enjoy my boxes of Honey Stinger waffles.  They make me feel like I am wearing wooden shoes.  Not the kind that you would use to try to walk on water with either. 

But I digress.  People look like each other.  Head perched on shoulders, hair mostly growing on top of their heads (not me, but other people do have hair).  Most people wear some sort of shoes on their feet, most like sushi, only a few are left handed…  you know, basically the same.  Yet, somehow we all do not speak the same language.  Arthur Dent is not the only one with that problem. 

Presumably language developed differently because people did not travel.  No holidays on the beach, no mountain climbing trips to the peaks etc.…  They kind of lived in one spot, and only interacted with people around them.  They mostly did that because there were Saber Tooth Tigers that would eat them if they ventured too far from their village, or their spouse would assume they were running out on them.  They developed a way of communicating that was unique to their little village.  You know, someone called a rock a rock and others in the next valley over called it a zaug.  (I made that up.) 

Well we stuck with that.  Kind of like we stuck with the stupid Fahrenheit system.   The Europeans laughed when they gave it to us, then promptly ran off and created a new system.  Now, we cannot tell if it is really hot or cold when we go for a business trip or a holiday outside of our village.  But even beyond all of that silliness, we still stick with some things that just do not make sense.

I feel that spelling the name of a place different than the locals in that place spell the name of the place is well just stupid.  Think about it, people in Munich call their city Munchen.  (Actually, they put some dots over the e that I cannot figure out how to make my computer do.)  Well I frankly like the word Munich better than Munchen, but that is not the point.  The people there choose to spell it that way, who am I to just randomly decide that I am going to spell it differently.  There are countless examples of this in the English language. 

But, do not assume that we Americans are the only ones who do not get it.  ALL languages seem to do this.  In Dutch, the name for the city of Paris is spelled Parijs.  In French, the name for the country we call Germany and Germans call Deutschland is refered to as Allemagne.  What kind of sense does any of this make?  As I have looked into this for at least 3.6 minutes, I have decided that this is really one of the silliest things I can look up via google today.  (This is even sillier than Camelot is, and the decision we all witnessed with that was to not even go there.) 

See, that is the official map of Deutschland.  Doesn't say Germany or Allemagne anywhere on it.  Done.

So you see, it is really quite a universal problem.  We should all just be using the words for a place that the natives of that place call it.  It is fine to pronounce it according to the language you speak, but changing the spelling for who knows why, just does not make sense. (The only exception to this would be if you are spelling in a language that uses a different alphabet than the original language does.)  But, same alphabet should equal same spelling.  Same and same.

What is a zaug anyway?

So this is my rant for today.  Maybe tomorrow also.  Of course, we will never know, as I will be enjoying dehydrated breakfast cereal hour tomorrow about this same time. 

I do not actually know how I got on this.  I meant to write about how languages do not really matter anymore.  Everyone speaks english.  I was going to go on to talking about the future product development meeting that I was in this week in Holland.  I was going to talk about electric bikes and european city bikes and bike paths and... Oh well, I will save that one for another day.  In the mean time, just remember flip flops are better than almost all other types of shoes (Converse would be about the only exception.)

Adios Amigos - Baby.  I'm just waiting for the worms.

I’ll be back!

 

Out.

Comments

[PunkassCG]

Wild.

One problem with a universal naming convention is that we use the Latin alphabet, as do all other countries with languages derived from Latin (Romance languages, etc.). This is dominant in the world, and in those places it would be easy to use the same, local name.

But there are at least 10 alphabets in the world, and using local nomenclature would still require us to learn those alphabets and pronunciations.

Just sayin'.

And what the heck was in those waffles? You were in Amsterdam, weren't you.

[warhead]

Yeah flip flops are fine if you own all ten toes..... Just sayin.

[Joe V]

You are right. My rant is only against the practice when people are modifying other languages when they use the same alphabet. I will modify.

[TB]

Ha! Vans, and in Deutsch is that is Vans or VÄNS?

[How to start a painting business]

This is great. I love it. Thanks for sharing.