Bonsai trees cannot be minted in specie.

“potted plaything” - Penzhi

(just to delude and “skew”)

;)
 
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Ohhh I finally understand the french word for cash, never really made the connection before. Only they do the opposite: Espèces refers to money and is always plural. Species can be Espèce or Espèces for singular or plural.

Also Maths is the abbreviation of Mathematics, at least where I grew up. One of the few differences to american english that still makes me cringe :p. Still uncountable.
 
jhohin said:
Ohhh I finally understand the french word for cash, never really made the connection before. Only they do the opposite: Espèces refers to money and is always plural. Species can be Espèce or Espèces for singular or plural.

Also Maths is the abbreviation of Mathematics, at least where I grew up. One of the few differences to american english that still makes me cringe :p. Still uncountable.
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Maths is not HOW i say it... but I COMPLETELY understand WHY some one would say it like that.

🤓
 
Because this is an international forum, I have usually been able to ignore grammar errors. Actually, spell check - autocorrect errors irritate me more than grammar errors. A surprising number of languages handle plural and singular completely different than English does. Most Asian languages use an article or particle word to indicate plural or singular. Also, a fair number of languages do not build past, present or future into verb forms, the way English does. I'm just happy I get to talk about bonsai in English. My Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and German are horrible. The only language I can converse in is English. I admire anyone who can hold a dialog in more than one language.

English grammar seems to be evolving. The dropping the us of "an" in favor of "a" even when words begin with a vowel. Even in newspapers the use of "too" seems to be fading in favor of "to".

I picked up my old, yellowing cody of J.R.R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings". I was surprised at how old fashioned and "out of another time" the language seemed. It caused me to have to read some sentences multiple times, because it no longer made sense as easily as it did the last time I read it some 50 or more years ago. Language changes and evolves. We sometimes don't notice the shifts, until we read something written in the past. Granted, the changes between modern English and the English of the 1930's is not that great. It is not like the shifts between Shakespearian english and modern english.
 
leatherback said:
That would be bonsais then?
🤪

Maybe in line with this discussion, good to keep in mind: Not all are native speakers and/or use English in their day-to-day lives. As such I try to read with understanding, instead of getting annoyed with frequent errors (Do I need to mention repotting / reporting?)
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My device will auto correct repotting to reporting unless I manually catch it and fix it. Could be the same for many others.
 
Mapleminx said:
My device will auto correct repotting to reporting unless I manually catch it and fix it. Could be the same for many others.
Click to expand...
I am so happy I tend to not spot spelling mistakes. So I do not get annoyed by them, as I just do not notice untill people point it out to me!
 
penumbra said:
I know species is from a Latin root, but I was referring to the word bonsai which is a Japanese word that can be traced back to a loose translation of the Chinese word penzai which has the same meaning as penjing.
Click to expand...
Yes, and cookie can be traced to the Dutch koek. Yankee used to be Jan Kees.
So Yankees should be Yankezen and Cookies should be cookjes or cooken, if you Americans would respect heritage!
Turning Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. Pfffff. 🤣

Or.. we accept bastardization and just be honored that words spread across the world. I'm named Teun, which is impossible to pronounce the right way for English speakers. When I was a kid I used to be offended when someone pronounced it wrong, but as I got older I started to love what people tried to make out of it. My personal favorite was a Texan nervously saying "The uh Jim" or my French teacher saying Tuin, which means garden.

I like this language stuff.

In my own language we have respectloos (lacking respect) and respectvol (respectful). But thanks to the US news and social media, we now also have disrespectvol, a bastard word that shouldn't exist because it's a contradictio in terminis. The 'vol' addition quite literally means that it's full of something, yet the 'dis' means it's devoid of something. In a sense the word disrespectvol says "something is devoid and full of respect". That bothers me way more than bonsai/bonsais or specie/species.

At some point we'll have to accept that these words have embedded themselves in a national language, or that a language has 'adopted' a word. Bonsai is in our national dictionary and the plural of it is bonsais. To make it worse, we allow bonsai's to be correct depending on pronunciation and depending on which grammatical rule one applies in which order. In highschool you're allowed to debate your teacher on those rules, since they're more fluid than you'd expect. Since Europe had the silk route and traded with Asia way before the US was even properly discovered, I think we have the right of way. The million dollar question is who got it from who? Did the Americans and English adopt it from the Portuguese or the Dutch (porcelain trade goes hand in hand with potted tree culture) or was it introduced to the English language by the Japanese themselves?
And if the Chinese were late to the party during the Han dynasty and it was actually the Egyptians who first grew plants in containers four thousand years prior, shouldn't we be looking for that word instead?

I just found out that there's also dværgtræer (dwarf trees) in some Nordic languages, which sounds way more metal.

Just to be clear: I'm not arguing, I'm both for as well as against fluid languages depending on the context.. Just throwing around some stuff for fun or to maybe spark some more discussion. I care about my native nonsensical* language but I'm not really bothered by the bonsai issue. I stopped counting the specie/species thing.. When you work in a Dutch university that made the commitment to go fully English within a year time, it gets tiring real fast. Old dogs, new tricks, that kind of stuff.

* When we have googled something we have gegoogeled..
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
When you work in a Dutch university that made the commitment to go fully English within a year time, it gets tiring real fast.
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lol, guess what it feels like if you were in charge of getting 5 MSc and 3 BSc programmes switched from NL to UK taught :)

Sinterklaas - Santa Claus ring a bell?
Harlem - Haarlem
Brooklyn - Breukelen

Less favorite, but .. Apartheid ..

Who was first, often language is fluid.
 
leatherback said:
lol, guess what it feels like if you were in charge of getting 5 MSc and 3 BSc programmes switched from NL to UK taught :)

Sinterklaas - Santa Claus ring a bell?
Harlem - Haarlem
Brooklyn - Breukelen

Less favorite, but .. Apartheid ..

Who was first, often language is fluid.
Click to expand...
I've seen the professor I worked for cry in the corner of our lab. He had to tell some 55+ year old technicians who struggled with advanced Dutch that they would lose their jobs if they wouldn't learn English within 6 months. Most of them had a background in chemistry because they sucked at languages. They're at Louis van Gaal level nowadays. Which is pretty hilarious. Unless they're conversing with Chinese students who learned English from fellow Chinese students who themselves learned English from Chinese people in China who never went to English speaking countries. Then it's just.. Hard to not intervene.

@HorseloverFat Try the French bleu. The "eu" is the same. Now say Temperature without the 'emperature' (hard T) and add the "eu" and "n". As long as you're not making a D or a TH sound, you're good. But I'll allow John too. Since you already know a large part of my last name from that juniper thread, you can practice both. And yes, I'm fully aware it sounds very similar to what sound a metal spring would make when you throw it down a staircase. Don't contact me if your furniture starts hovering in the air. It's not an occult speech or anything. I think..
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
I've seen the professor I worked for cry in the corner of our lab. He had to tell some 55+ year old technicians who struggled with advanced Dutch that they would lose their jobs if they wouldn't learn English within 6 months. Most of them had a background in chemistry because they sucked at languages. They're at Louis van Gaal level nowadays. Which is pretty hilarious. Unless they're conversing with Chinese students who learned English from fellow Chinese students who themselves learned English from Chinese people in China who never went to English speaking countries. Then it's just.. Hard to not intervene.

@HorseloverFat Try the French bleu. The "eu" is the same. Now say Temperature without the 'emperature' (hard T) and add the "eu" and "n". As long as you're not making a D or a TH sound, you're good. But I'll allow John too. Since you already know a large part of my last name from that juniper thread, you can practice both. And yes, I'm fully aware it sounds very similar to what sound a metal spring would make when you throw it down a staircase. Don't contact me if your furniture starts hovering in the air. It's not an occult speech or anything. I think..
Click to expand...
My ottoman just humped my leg!
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
He had to tell some 55+ year old technicians who struggled with advanced Dutch that they would lose their jobs if they wouldn't learn English within 6 months.
Click to expand...
We increased language courses with a focus on job-specific terms, during worktime of course, created a refernce manual dutch/english en reverse, and gave the technicians the option to spend some time in the UK at a partner university. Several did. At no time did we consider the idea of staff not staying. Many of them have been with us for decades. There is no way they will be fired over language skills. Different for new hires, of course!
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
@HorseloverFat Try the French bleu. The "eu" is the same. Now say Temperature without the 'emperature' (hard T) and add the "eu" and "n". As long as you're not making a D or a TH sound, you're good. But I'll allow John too. Since you already know a large part of my last name from that juniper thread, you can practice both. And yes, I'm fully aware it sounds very similar to what sound a metal spring would make when you throw it down a staircase. Don't contact me if your furniture starts hovering in the air. It's not an occult speech or anything. I think..
Click to expand...
Wow.. You have a whole explanation. When people cannot figure out Jelle, at some point I just start using Jay!
 
Brian Van Fleet said:
*devolving...
😉
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😉 You want the USA to do like the French? Create a "Ministry of Pure Language"? A department of Homeland Security that corrects people's grammar and vocabulary. That is awful "liberal" for a ''Bamma Boy" like yourself.

Just teasing. It is true that there is or was an "official" breaucracy attempting to limit foreign words from creeping into French language, like "internet", "google", "non-smoking", and other english abominations.

Just teasing @AlainK
 
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