[OpenIndiana-discuss] Bash brace expansion in non-C locales??

[DormitionSkete@hotmail.com]

Even more off-topic!!!

You all don't know what you've been doing to me!  With all of the stupid computer problems I've had this week, all I've wanted to do all week is pack a bag and move to Moravia, where my (German) ancestors came from!  Live a nice, simple, quiet life, without from computers....

Would the little bit of Russian I learned in college 25 years ago help there?

LOL


On Mar 15, 2013, at 12:57 AM, Hans J. Albertsson wrote:

> A-M-A-Z-I-N-G
> 
> Computing is SOOO boring in comparison..
> 
> 
> On 2013-03-15 01:25, Jim Klimov wrote:
>> On 2013-03-13 10:17, Marcel Telka wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:56:07AM +0100, Hans J. Albertsson wrote:
>> 
>> Way off-topic ;)
>> 
>>>> A Q about the Slovak language: while you were in a union with the
>>>> Czechs, did the languages start to unify spontaneously? I mean like
>>>> vocabulary changes, minor grammatical drift, spelling oddities
>>>> changing and so on and so forth?
>>> 
>>> It is hard to say for sure. Both languages were changed in those ca 70 years we
>>> were together in Czechoslovakia, but I do not think they started to unify in
>>> any notable way. Most probably they even diverged. Both languages are so
>>> different that some young Czech people (< 25) have problems to understand
>>> Slovak language comfortably these days.
>> 
>> Having lived in Czech republic for a couple of years now, starting with
>> the language courses taught by the philological faculty members of the
>> country's major university, I might convey their notion that there are
>> about 10 million speakers in the country, and about 12 million overall
>> (including USA and other overseas fractions). For the basic level it
>> should suffice to know that there are about 6 frequently-used branches:
>> proper official language, literary language, "czech of 19. century",
>> modern slang, eastern-czech (Moravian) and western-czech (Bohemian).
>> On a deeper level several more cities and locations have their dialects
>> spoken by several hundred thousand people with distinctly different
>> active vocabularies, suffixes and rules. Apparently, areas closer to
>> Slovakia geographically have trends in the language that are closer
>> as well. The official language is a somewhat artificial amalgam of
>> some branches, rather static in its rules and vocabulary, and it is
>> taught much like a foreign language by people in (or preparing for)
>> higher education, because it is not native for any Czech sub-region.
>> 
>> I'd say that phonetically especially with its word-endings (due to
>> declinations) the Slovak language is closer to Russian, while much
>> of the structure is similar enough to Czech so that reading texts in
>> either language while having learned one is no problem. I'm not sure
>> about hearing/speaking it though, but they've had a Czech minister
>> natively from Slovakia, who spoke Slovak in the government sessions,
>> and it was not a barrier for Czech governmental work, either.
>> 
>> But yes, they are quite different - I was told it takes several weeks
>> of watching Slovak TV and reading Slovak websites for a Czech youth
>> to become capable (fluent? likely not) in Slovak. Just as well, the
>> Czech books and newspapers from some 50-70 years ago, or even more,
>> might be just as illegible to a random modern Czech youth ;)
>> 
>> As for inclinations into the language from its neighbors... I'd say
>> that Czech has a lot from Latin-German roots with Slavic suffixes
>> (verbs like "existovat" = "to exist", adjectives like "perfektní" =
>> "perfect" and so on), just like Russian has a lot of regurgitated
>> words now stemmed from the aristocracy's standard French language.
>> Among such noise it is much harder to discern additions from other
>> closely related languages - Slavic in this case.
>> 
>> I am not sure I can contrive an example word in Czech which would
>> have "ch" as separate letters; this would most likely also be a
>> combination of two word-roots, and I'm almost sure they would be
>> liasoned by an "e" (becoming "ceh"), at least in most cases.
>> 
>> BTW, beside vowels and consonants, the Czech language also has a
>> number of "semi-vowels" which are consonants with a weak sound.
>> In some words they take role of a vowel for phonetics, thus there
>> can be words and phrases without vowel characters at all. Possibly
>> the most popular example is "strč prst skrz krk" (put a finger
>> through the throat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strč_prst_skrz_krk
>> Ah, yes, and there are also diacritics and many wild rules about
>> them, sometimes with barely noticeable influence on pronunciation
>> and serious disdain from officials who must work with and respect
>> the official proper language (which the SMS-generation can't write
>> due to lots of practice with ASCII-only SMSes) :)
>> 
>> Hope this helps (to get you puzzled),
>> //Jim Klimov
>> 
>> PS: Sorry of the large offtopic, but I didn't start it this time ;)
>> 
>> 
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