I generally say that I speak English, Norwegian, Russian, and Japanese, but I could get into a lot more detail about how and why I speak those languages, because there's a lot of discrete skills that go into a language, and if you grow up bilingual you aren't necessarily equally proficient in both languages. I've also dabbled in a number of other languages like Toki Pona and Esperanto, I've picked up a bit of other languages through exposure, I've invented a number of my own conlangs, too, and I've learned a number of writing systems without actually speaking those languages.
So for the title of this song, I pretty easily managed to find the original title of the song by searching in English, and I had already learned the Korean letters without actually trying to learn Korean itself. So I could sound out the title, and I saw the 마 and the 녀 and I already knew from exposure to Korean, from the stilted English translation, and from knowing the sound correspondences of Sino-Xenic vocabulary, that these two syllables corresponded to the on'yomi of 馬 and 女 in Japanese. And so I reasoned that the original Korean title was probably a compound of two two-character loanwords from Middle Chinese, and using Wiktionary I quickly managed to identify these:
駿馬 | Korean junma = Japanese shunba or shunme.
處女 | Korean cheonyeo = Japanese shojo (not to be confused with 少女 shôjo whence EN shojo)
Oh, an incidental fact I was going to mention was that the "ma" in junma might be a distant relative of the English word mare. There's a lot of unrelated languages that happen to have words for horses starting with a sound like "ma" or "mo", and this has led a lot of people to speculate that as basically the domestication of horses spread, the word for horses used by the original domesticators spread with it.
I was also going to say that I've been in a sense developing my main conlang for about 9 years already depending on how you count it. I'd hoped to finish the first draft of its dictionary this year, and I guess I still have a few months left, but I feel like I've been so busy with other things that I'll probably end up spending another year (or two) on that project... And obviously, after I finish that dictionary, however many drafts it takes, I will then write a second edition, because there is truly no escape.
If you have any ideas for highly-specific things to coin words for, I'm always open to suggestions; if you have any funny sentences or paragraphs to translate, then I'm open to that, too.
![A lady with excellent horse-like features? Or an excellent horse with affection for a lady? Was something lost in translation of this song title? 🤔 [🇰🇵 Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble 🎵]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/6cb61b7b-00d5-45b8-b16c-987b1a32a542.webp){kind=link}
Thanks!
Do you know many languages?
I generally say that I speak English, Norwegian, Russian, and Japanese, but I could get into a lot more detail about how and why I speak those languages, because there's a lot of discrete skills that go into a language, and if you grow up bilingual you aren't necessarily equally proficient in both languages. I've also dabbled in a number of other languages like Toki Pona and Esperanto, I've picked up a bit of other languages through exposure, I've invented a number of my own conlangs, too, and I've learned a number of writing systems without actually speaking those languages.
So for the title of this song, I pretty easily managed to find the original title of the song by searching in English, and I had already learned the Korean letters without actually trying to learn Korean itself. So I could sound out the title, and I saw the 마 and the 녀 and I already knew from exposure to Korean, from the stilted English translation, and from knowing the sound correspondences of Sino-Xenic vocabulary, that these two syllables corresponded to the on'yomi of 馬 and 女 in Japanese. And so I reasoned that the original Korean title was probably a compound of two two-character loanwords from Middle Chinese, and using Wiktionary I quickly managed to identify these:
駿馬 | Korean junma = Japanese shunba or shunme.
處女 | Korean cheonyeo = Japanese shojo (not to be confused with 少女 shôjo whence EN shojo)
Wow, based. A whole conlang? That's another level of nerd. Nice.
I was including dabbling, yes.
Oh, an incidental fact I was going to mention was that the "ma" in junma might be a distant relative of the English word mare. There's a lot of unrelated languages that happen to have words for horses starting with a sound like "ma" or "mo", and this has led a lot of people to speculate that as basically the domestication of horses spread, the word for horses used by the original domesticators spread with it.
Etymology kicks ass.
I was also going to say that I've been in a sense developing my main conlang for about 9 years already depending on how you count it. I'd hoped to finish the first draft of its dictionary this year, and I guess I still have a few months left, but I feel like I've been so busy with other things that I'll probably end up spending another year (or two) on that project... And obviously, after I finish that dictionary, however many drafts it takes, I will then write a second edition, because there is truly no escape.
If you have any ideas for highly-specific things to coin words for, I'm always open to suggestions; if you have any funny sentences or paragraphs to translate, then I'm open to that, too.