Illuminati-R-Us

European IrU in a nutshell: High culture from Arneb, a dead royal and a disgraced royal from Lianachan and trivia about a man in very tight trousers from me.

All it needs is HDFCD to swoop out of the shadows with something apt or pithy and then disappear again.

Heid the Ba' wrote:European IrU in a nutshell:

I was counting you as our sole Asian representative, although obviously one of us really.

Heid the Ba' wrote:I was counting you as our sole Asian representative, although obviously one of us really.

Yes, well, my connection to Europe is largely by citizenship, and I don't speak the language of that country, and have probably been there less than two months in my life

275 years ago today, days after ascending to the throne, Frederick II of Prussia, later known as Frederick the great, was the first monarch to partly abolish torture as a means of gathering criminal evidence. There were exceptions for attacks on the King, high treason and murders with multiple victims. So broadly speaking, 275 years Prussia was where the U.S. is today.

1,390 years before then on June 3rd (350 CE), Nepotianus entered Rome, proclaiming himself as Emperor. His head was stuck on a lance and paraded around the city on the 30th of June, so it didn't really pan out very well for him.

Not the longest reigning emperor then, but probably not the worst.

I didn't know that about Alt Fritz, he doesn't have a reputation as a liberal.

I don't really know much about Alt Fritz, but liberals were pretty rare in those days. Almost as rare as they are now.

Arse, on looking the chap up to find a link to his deeds I found that I had missed an "e" off the end. So Alte Fritz. No doubt another grammar lesson from Arneb or Mactep will follow.

Heid the Ba' wrote:Arse, on looking the chap up to find a link to his deeds I found that I had missed an "e" off the end. So Alte Fritz. No doubt another grammar lesson from Arneb or Mactep will follow.

[Pssst!]Say it was a joke about him being high and mighty or something![/Pssst!]

Yes, that is it, that is exactly what I meant.

Heid the Ba' wrote:Arse, on looking the chap up to find a link to his deeds I found that I had missed an "e" off the end. So Alte Fritz. No doubt another grammar lesson from Arneb or Mactep will follow.

If you insist!

I think you want to go with "Der Alte Fritz". Adjective endings are different, depending on whether they are preceded by the definite article, the indefinite article, or no article. (Nice, eh?). If you don't want to include the "Der" (and I think you should include it), then you need "Alter Fritz". If there are several and this is one of them, then it would be "Ein alter Fritz". These are all nominative masculine endings.

I consider the grammar lesson complete . Anyhow, taking a German word into English is so full of pitfalls that people doing it should be cut a lot of slack. If you insist on the correct endings for the nominative
depending on the type of article, the next question would be if declension should be correctly transferred. "Der Alte Fritz abolished...", "torture was abolished by dem Alten Fritz", "we should applaud den Alten Fritz" for what he did, etc. However, "Alt Fritz" is always wrong, so

And I thought this was easier than trying to spell "Grosse" or using the big "s" thing.

If only it had an ümläüt! Fucking fuck, spellcheck auto-correct the umlauts off that, I had to redo it.

A bheil duine sam bith ann an-seo a bruidhinidh Gàidhlig? Or have I got a free rein, there?

Arneb wrote:I consider the grammar lesson complete . Anyhow, taking a German word into English is so full of pitfalls that people doing it should be cut a lot of slack. If you insist on the correct endings for the nominative
depending on the type of article, the next question would be if declension should be correctly transferred. "Der Alte Fritz abolished...", "torture was abolished by dem Alten Fritz", "we should applaud den Alten Fritz" for what he did, etc. However, "Alt Fritz" is always wrong, so

I think I've mentioned this before, but . . . for non-native speakers, getting the gender of the noun right is often an issue. Most of the time, I can guess the feminine ones correctly, but masculine/neuter is more difficult. One way to deal with this is to try to structure the sentence so the noun of unknown gender is in the Dativ case - that way, it is dem/dem, instead of der/das or den/das

Heid the Ba' wrote:And I thought this was easier than trying to spell "Grosse" or using the big "s" thing.

On an Apple computer, US-english keyboard, try option-s. (Not sure if it is the same on a UK-english keyboard.)

On the UK-english soft keyboard on my iPad, I do not see an easy way to do it. But, it is easy to install a German soft keyboard, and switch languages using the big globe thingy.

Lianachan wrote:A bheil duine sam bith ann an-seo a bruidhinidh Gàidhlig? Or have I got a free rein, there?

I don't notice any errors

Мастер wrote:

Lianachan wrote:A bheil duine sam bith ann an-seo a bruidhinidh Gàidhlig? Or have I got a free rein, there?

I don't notice any errors

It looks fine to me as well.

Same here. And I don't even have clue how this is pronounced.

I once read an interview with the Irish Prime Minister in Der Spiegel magazine. The interviewers adressed him as Taoiseach. I thought, uuh how is this pronounced, probably something tah-oh-EE-see-ach (ch as in Loch). I was shocked to read on and have them explain to me that it pronounces ti-SHOCK. I knew these Gaelic langugages would be more than I could chew...

Alt 0223 would appear to generate ß.

Of course in other circumstances it should be "Der Alte 0223", "dem Alten 0223", or even "den Alten 0223".

Arneb wrote:I once read an interview with the Irish Prime Minister in Der Spiegel magazine. The interviewers adressed him as Taoiseach. I thought, uuh how is this pronounced, probably something tah-oh-EE-see-ach (ch as in Loch). I was shocked to read on and have them explain to me that it pronounces ti-SHOCK. I knew these Gaelic langugages would be more than I could chew...

That one I actually know. And the parliament seems to be a "doll". Why they use these terms when speaking English is not so clear to me.

For the same reason signs in Catalan are phrased differently from Castillian: to accentuate the difference.

Irish is a bit different from Gaelic, but I'm 99% sure Taoiseach should be pronounced tee-shach (tiːʃəx for the cunning linguists among us), most definitely with the ch from "loch" at the end. Again, I don't do Irish, but an "ack" or "ock" sound at the end of a word would tend to suggest the diminutive ~(e)ag, although that's feminine (masculine is an) so not sure if it would apply in that case. It's more likely that the guy who advised on pronunciation is wrong, or indeed that Irish is more different from Gaelic than I think. They don't, after all, call it Erse for nothing.

[old joke] I went on a refresher course on the language, it was called "Brush up your Erse". [/old joke]