September 19, 2020 @ 6:39 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics, Prosody
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September 19, 2020 @ 6:39 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics, Prosody
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Viseguy said,
September 19, 2020 @ 6:58 pm
I'd have to be. Drunk to make that punctuation mistake.
astrange said,
September 19, 2020 @ 10:48 pm
This is probably convergent evolution, but it's a lot like the popular "Works on contingency? No, money down!" joke from the Simpsons.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/5fqnjp/no_money_down/
Frank Y. Gladney said,
September 19, 2020 @ 11:26 pm
A famous telegram from the tsar:
ПОВЕСИТЪ НЕЛЪЗЯ ПОМИЛОВАТЪ
Can be read either "Hang him. Pardon impossible" or "Don't hang him. Pardon him".
Philip Taylor said,
September 20, 2020 @ 3:26 am
Frank, when I copy-and-paste that phrase into Google Translate, the latter asks "Did you mean: ПОВЕСИТЬ НЕЛЬЗЯ ПОМИЛОВАТЬ". Try as I might, I can see no difference between what I copied-and-pasted and what Google Translate suggests. Can you assist ?
V said,
September 20, 2020 @ 6:10 am
Frank wrote it with big ers; I suspect in Russian it's written with small ers.
[(myl) Not exactly — it's apparently the difference between
|Ъ| 0x042A "CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER HARD SIGN"
in Frank's comment, and
|Ь| 0x042C "CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SOFT SIGN"
in Google Translate's suggestion. Depending on the font, these may be hard to distinguish.]
V said,
September 20, 2020 @ 2:02 pm
I was trying to be sarcastic.
V said,
September 20, 2020 @ 2:05 pm
I'm sorry about that.
V said,
September 20, 2020 @ 2:17 pm
That was the joke, a lot of people are only familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet through the Russian language. Even Unicode reflects that with the names of the code points. I think it's funny?
V said,
September 20, 2020 @ 2:21 pm
I thought it hilarious that Frank did not see the difference between a big er and a small er. This is the first thing I noticed in that phrase.