anyone past 50 on here?

[Cobie]

48 minutes ago, ryn2 said:

... I was super-sad this morning but have perked up as the day has worn on.

It’s natural to feel sad now, 😢 but I am glad to hear that you felt better as the day went on. 🙂

[Cobie]

7 minutes ago, ryn2 said:

It’s just my personal opinion, though.  Not trying to impose it on anyone.  

Ha, ha, I was just too lazy to type a lot. I do agree with you. 😊

[Cobie]

31 minutes ago, ryn2 said:

I’m told Chinese is the hardest language for adults to learn.

I believe it!

 

In 8 weeks I have only learned to count to 10, say 2 basic greetings, and write 5 characters. Ha, ha, good thing I am only doing it for fun.

[daveb]

Language is complicated. Because of humans.  

 

Linguistics is fascinating. Words get passed around, changed, etc. Languages evolve and change. Pretty much every living language changes over time, too. Sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly. 

 

Languages can be hard for many people to learn, especially once past the early childhood stage where language acquisition is built into our brain development. If you don't learn some things at that stage, like certain phoneme sounds, it gets very difficult to ever learn them. Most people do their best, and I think it's really cool for anyone to learn other languages. Mastering a language anywhere near as well as a native speaker is quite difficult. I applaud anyone who learns a language well enough to hold conversations in it, or to read it well enough to understand, or write well enough in it for others to understand. I wish I could!  (but I haven't put in the work)

[Cobie]

57 minutes ago, daveb said:

... Words get passed around, changed, etc. ...

Exactly

 

Quote

... once past the early childhood stage where language acquisition is built into our brain development. ... certain phoneme sounds, it gets very difficult to ever learn them. ...

True. I find it helps listening to children’s songs. I don’t know most of these words as yet, but I listen to it to get accustomed to the sound of the language https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xYV2Hyf6pgQ 😀

 

 

 

[pickles.]

14 hours ago, chandrakirti said:

The immigration authorities had been looking for him for over 15 years as he had a track record of extreme violence/fraud etc. and he took on the identity of a dead person to stay under the radar.

That all sounds so scary, @chandrakirti.  Glad you and the wee one got out safely. 😬  Do you know what became of him? 

[pickles.]

5 hours ago, Spotastic said:

My therapist is interested in doing some testing to see where I officially fall on the autism scale, and that will include some cognitive reasoning tests. There are certain things that my school can provide to help me with fully comprehending my assignments and test questions, but only with an official diagnosis. 

I will be so interested in the results, @Spotastic, and in what kinds of tests they give you.  It's been really fascinating to pick up a few of the things our district's autism specialist  looks for when she comes out to observe kids who might be on the spectrum.  She watches them in the classroom to see how they interact with the teacher, students, and the curriculum, and she does a lot of one-on-one testing (that are just fun games from the child's perspective).  

 

3 hours ago, Thea2 said:

All part of their rich history of mingling and “mangling”. 

It can be so adorable.  When I lived in Japan for a year with my husband and child, we were headed somewhere with our employer early on and he wanted to stop for a bite to eat.  He said we were going to Makudonarudo.  Blank looks from us.  He said it again and said it was a very famous American restaurant.  More blanks looks.  Then we pull up to the golden arches.  "Oh! McDonald's!"  He tried imitating us, "Mak-DAAAWN-alds. Well, here, it is Makudonarudo!"  Lesson learned!

 

I just found the most adorable video about it: 

 

 

[pickles.]

What seems less adorable is that growing up in California I didn't even know that all the Spanish place names I was butchering were Spanish.

 

I think some of the negative feelings would come from feeling displaced by white people.  Whites retained or named a bunch of stuff after Native American and Spanish people, but then just say Buh-dil-low instead of Baw-dee-oh, for example (for Badillo Street).  (And for indigenous people, it's just embarrassing that we tried to wipe them out and then name elementary schools "Chief Joseph," and the like.  It might have even been well-meaning, but it's odd when it's a mostly white school in a mostly white district.  What must that one native girl in my 5th grade class have thought of it?)  I don't know Spanish much at all, but it's fun to go home and do the best I can at pronouncing street names, etc. in Spanish.

[Cobie]

31 minutes ago, pickles mcgee said:

... McDonald's!" ... "Mak-DAAAWN-alds. ... Makudonarudo!" ..

Ha, ha, that video is hilarious. 😂 yes, I agree, it’s so important to have tolerance to people using foreign words.

[ryn2]

As a more lighthearted example, I was embarrassingly old before it dawned on me that cayenne pepper is called that because it is caliente.

 

And I even knew what caliente meant, and how to say it.

 

Duh!

[Cobie]

42 minutes ago, ryn2 said:

... cayenne pepper ... Duh!

Cayenne etymology: from Tupi kyynha, quiynham (hot pepper).

Caliente etymology: from Latin calēntem. 

 

Ha, ha, unrelated, no need to say “Duh!”, you’re o.k.

[Spotastic]

@Thea2 I understand that people have legitimate issues pronouncing words from other countries, but my cringing is more on a level of "man, that's some serious mangling" and not "they shouldn't even be saying that word." I don't make fun of people for genuine effort.

[Gentle Giant]

@pickles mcgee I would like to see the Bohemian Rapsody movie when it comes out on DVD.

 

We’re getting snow tonight. Hopefully won’t be too much to shovel in the morning.

[pickles.]

5 hours ago, Spotastic said:

my cringing is more on a level of "man, that's some serious mangling"

Hahaha!  This sure made me laugh!  It reminds me of trying to pronounce my nephew's name, Květoslav, for the past 24 years. (My family has no Czech roots, nor any connections to the Czech Republic other than that my brother moved there.)  I lived near my brother and his family for six months when my nephew was ten, and when people would ask me what brought me to the Czech Republic I would answer, "I'm here to learn how to pronounce my nephew's name!"  I still fell miserably short, but felt pretty good about my progress when I returned stateside and heard the rest of my family. 😄

[pickles.]

PS. My brother and nephew lived near me in Portland for five months in 2011-2012, and my nephew was able to attend one semester of high school while here.  He made the cutest film before he went home of people trying to pronounce his name!

[daveb]

I thought I was going to have my house to myself for a week or more - my sister was planning a road trip to visit friends of hers. But at the last minute she canceled that and said she would just go for the weekend (this weekend). So I was thinking at least I will have the house to myself for the weekend. Except now she has decided she's not going at all. bah humbug.  Last month she also told me my nieces were talking about taking me for a birthday breakfast, but that never panned out either. I really dislike it when people talk about doing things and don't follow through. Of course sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, but when it's more a matter of just not following through for no real reason I feel let down.

[Skycaptain]

@daveb, congratulations on 20K posts 🎂 🎂 🎉 🎉 

[pickles.]

1 minute ago, Skycaptain said:

@daveb, congratulations on 20K posts 🎂 🎂 🎉 🎉 

Oh, wow, I second that!

 

But hell's bells, Sky, look at your post total!  I never notice unless someone brings it up--yours is crazy!

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Hi all,

 

@daveb, I always smile to myself when I see 'Grimm' on TV...set in Portland, then the polyamory documentary with Louis Theroux....I have a notion that it is a very forward thinking/unusual  place.

 

Makes me laugh when I see how one language had supplanted another. I wonder what the original native languages of these areas were? I can only surmise Aztec, Maya and their local variants @ryn2 & @pickles mcgee. 

 

@pickles mcgee, he was deported from the UK on 20/11/90 , back to his home town of Bombay (seriously, I didn't mention the colonialisation without basis- he told the immigration authorities that as an Anglo-Indian the UK owed him!) He spent time in India taking more money from other unsuspecting women (he already had taken more than 1.5 million pounds sterling out of the UK in the 15 years he had lived there).

Of course money talks where morals fear to tread. My daughter tracked him down without letting me know , but when she did find him, she was instantly repulsed. Not only did he have a string of 'ex-wives' (one in Amsterdam, one in Pondicherry, India , me in UK, he was also married the whole time he scammed his way around the world. He had a long term goal- to get to Australia, who let him in as a citizen because he waved money. He lives in Queensland, runs a financial services company (his own) and deals stocks and shares as well as owning a string of properties. The more recent photos show him with his new son (who is 18 now- his daughter in Holland and mine here not being good enough because they were 'only girls'-those were his own words). 

The interesting person in the photo (taken in 2012) was his wife, who he married as a teenager then left, so he could get all this money from various schemes. She is the picture of a battered wife, carefully posing as if she has a good life with this guy. My daughter spotted it too, then never gave him another thought. She says 'he's just some guy you knew a long time ago'....but nobody will ever know him, he's the purest form of psychopath- very good at pulling the wool over anyone's eyes! So , now you know, bet you wish you didn't!

I know his exact position in Queensland, but of course I'd not put it up here, nor his company name (which is basically his surname, which is a UK name). You never know.....I can't go into detail about how both I and my daugher were treated, but it would cause upset, even in a spoiler box.

 

 

Evidently, Skye, Lewis , Harris and some other parts of the highlands have had no electricity for days because of a landslide at the hydroelectric station on the mainland - the same landslides have claimed  my favourite 'scenic route drive' from Skye to Inverness....ah , reminiscing!😄

 

Well, this is an overly long post, so I'll leave you in peace now.

 

[ryn2]

5 hours ago, daveb said:

when it's more a matter of just not following through for no real reason I feel let down.

This bothers me as well!

[ryn2]

1 hour ago, chandrakirti said:

I wonder what the original native languages of these areas were? I can only surmise Aztec, Maya and their local variants @ryn2 & @pickles mcgee. 

I live on the east side of the US.  The First Nations people in my area were mostly Senecas.  The first Europeans in the state were Dutch; the first up by me were English and Scottish.

[ryn2]

1 hour ago, chandrakirti said:

he's the purest form of psychopath

That plus as much ambition as he clearly has make a really dangerous combo.  Glad you and your daughter were able to rid yourselves of him.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Ambition is what drives a psychopath. Having no real emotions, they have a need to control and manipulate others for their own ends. It's a type of personality, not a mental illness. Most people like this are walking about on the street, not locked up in high security, as the media would have you think. that's the scary bit!

They gravitate towards empaths because they can use /practise emotion/manipulate these types more easily. his previous 'wife' was also a nurse.

There's one at my workplace right now, but I have the tools to deal with them now so it's all good.

[Tja]

11 hours ago, Spotastic said:

@Thea2 I understand that people have legitimate issues pronouncing words from other countries, but my cringing is more on a level of "man, that's some serious mangling" and not "they shouldn't even be saying that word." I don't make fun of people for genuine effort.

I think if people are going to use words from  another language, they should make the effort to pronounce them correctly. For years I listened to mangled Italian words from family members. "Gabbagool", instead of Capicola. "Pasta Fasool", in place of Pasta E Fagioli. My favorite: "Fongoo", for Bah Fanculo. Set my teeth on edge.

[Tja]

4 minutes ago, chandrakirti said:

Ambition is what drives a psychopath. Having no real emotions, they have a need to control and manipulate others for their own ends. It's a type of personality, not a mental illness. Most people like this are walking about on the street, not locked up in high security, as the media would have you think. that's the scary bit!

They gravitate towards empaths because they can use /practise emotion/manipulate these types more easily. his previous 'wife' was also a nurse.

There's one at my workplace right now, but I have the tools to deal with them now so it's all good.

I've worked for sorry sonofabitch, like this, for almost 17 years.

[Muledeer]

7 hours ago, Skycaptain said:

@daveb, congratulations on 20K posts 🎂 🎂 🎉 🎉 

 

7 hours ago, pickles mcgee said:

Oh, wow, I second that!

 

But hell's bells, Sky, look at your post total!  I never notice unless someone brings it up--yours is crazy!

How does one accumulate so many posts?  Playing games in the arcade? I have been on AVEN for three years with barely over a thousand posts, and I come here every day.  20,000 or 50,000 posts just blows my mind.  I also check in (actually moderate) on another website forum from time to time and I have been doing so for seven years, with a similar post total as I currently have on AVEN.   Anyway, congrats to all of you prolific posters!

 

Yesterday, I took the afternoon off and wandered to all the corners of my mountain property.  It was a spectacular Fall afternoon.  I took lots of photos that I have yet to review.    I also did a little late season cleaning in the greenhouse.  I left the dog in town and really enjoyed the freedom of not supervising a pet.  The dog would rather not go on long hikes anymore because she suffers from arthritis.  I may post a photo or two later on today.  Hope everyone enjoys their weekend.   

[Tunhope]

Just adding my hugs re the sadly serious things posted   lately - fires, good neighbour dying, partners leaving and acting so badly... I hope that folk are able to reach Daveb's posting milestone with happy things, but life isn't always easy, and it's good to know that folk feel that all sorts of things can be posted here, assured of a caring response. 

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

2 hours ago, Tja said:

I've worked for sorry sonofabitch, like this, for almost 17 years.

Geez @Tja, hope you have developed strategies.

 

Sorry @ryn2 and @pickles mcgee, I'd no intention of hijacking @ryn2's grief like that , it was only a fuller explanation for the question asked. It's awful that someone can do that to you @ryn2, I hope you get the strength and energy back to combat this fast and then move on to a better situation. 

 

@Muledeer - seconded! I'm at a kinda loose end today so I'm back and forward here, but ordinarily it's one post morning and one in the evening! 20K ? Hope your old pal doesn't have discomfort from this arthritis. They're just like us- not that I'm implying we all have arthritis here because we're over 50....😄

@Tunhope yes , this is the civilised thread!

[BobRossRules]

6 hours ago, chandrakirti said:

@daveb, I always smile to myself when I see 'Grimm' on TV...set in Portland, then the polyamory documentary with Louis Theroux....I have a notion that it is a very forward thinking/unusual  place.

I loved that show!!

[BobRossRules]

@daveb & @Skycaptain are busy AVENites.  Congrats on being very active members of the AVEN community!!