Kevin Fei Sun 孙愷文
@kebuhcah
"Language Engineer" | Slavic/Turkic/Semitic enthusiast by choice, Sin(oxen)ic/Romance/Germanic enjoyer by chance | now dabbling: kiswahili ไทย български dansk
thinking about how Polish created this brand new word just using French parts, which doesn't exist in French
got Claude Code to write me a browser extension that adds IPA annotations to Danish websites, let's see if it really helps (this specific website also has built-in text-to-speech which improves the experience too)
things I learned thanks to my socialist Swahili textbook: 1. the Swahili word for "capitalist" comes from Hindustani 2. the Swahili word for "imperialist" might be Hindustani too, and in any case also means "billy goat" 🐐
didn't realize until Lesson 12 that my German Swahili textbook was from East Germany ☭
Swahili is full of Arabic words of course, but this would be the only case I know of where the vulgar Arabic word for "shit" got borrowed into another language
language learning tip: "if you want to speak English well, you have to smoke a pipe"
quite obvious in retrospect but I never considered that Swahili asante ("thank you") could be an Arabic borrowing 👀
in Polish you use the word "temu" to talk about the past, because recollections of the past are merely cheap knockoffs of our experience in the moment
𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 do you 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 the Swahili word for "silence, quiet" comes from "chemistry"??? ⚗️
always found it kind of amusing how this Thai word for "center", as in "city center", "shopping center" etc. just comes from the Sanskrit word for "zero" or "nothingness" I guess a shopping center is sort of a ground zero of shopping ⭕️
Hungarian verb prefix meaning "to death" literally means "on the brain" 🧠💀
spotted today at Seattle's Museum of History & Industry - a land acknowledgement 𝐢𝐧 𝐋𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐝
formal Hungarian word for "to wish, to desire" is just derived from the interjection "oh"??? 😭
learned a useful new Gulf Arabic word today - and its etymology is related to camels, of course 🐪
Hungarian Georgian 🤝 using one preposition for spring/autumn 🌺🍂 and a different one for summer/winter 🌞❄️
first Elliot Bay Book Company book haul of many: Arabic poetry and Lushootseed folktales 📚
"since he has reached the age of twelve, it would be good if he started Ge'ez" — gotta start 'em young!
bałwan in Old Polish: an idol, an object of idolatry🗿 bałwan in modern Polish: a snowman ☃️
funny thing in the DeepSeek paper - the initial version of the model, DeepSeek-R1-Zero, had a tendency to *mix languages* in its thought process. to improve readability, the researchers forced the model to only think in one language... and this made it (slightly) dumber 😭💀
languages overheard in Death Valley this weekend: English, Mandarin, Spanish, Norwegian, Cantonese, Korean, Hindi, German, Telugu, Shanghainese, Russian, French, Japanese...
big fan of how the Finnish word for "poem" is related to English "rune" and also Irish rún ("mystery, secret")