if you’re american and coming to australia, I’m gonna go ahead and say that you should be 100 percent way more worried about being king hit by a dude named “dane” in a bintang singlet than any fucking spiders that exist here
what does this say in english
“Good sir, if you are a resident of the United States of America and coming to visit the sunny land of Australia, allow me to inform you that you should be rather more concerned about being sucker punched by a gentleman named ‘Dane’ who is likely to be seen wearing a wifebeater with a beer company logo on it than by any of the dangerous spiders that exist on this lovely continent”.
ok so what does it say in american
“You’re more likely to get sucker punched/cold-cocked by an asshole than you are to be bitten by a spider”.
thank you
Well rattle my spoons, that don’t make a lick of sense. Wot in tarnation does this hootenanny say?
“If ya mosey on by Australia, you best be fixin’ to get to some fisticuffs more’n checkin fer spiders.”
Just heard an American pronounce the word Lilac and I’m crying. And how some Americans pronounce coffee!!! I fucking love accents
Wait how do you say it
How do you say it
Like Lie-luck? Ish. It’s hard to spell it phonetically. The American said it more like Lie-lac with more emphasis on the Lac I guess? Either way I could listen to them say it for hours
I’ll record me talking for you 😂
Guys. You’re talking about accents… But you’re unable to pronounce the name of the characters of your fandom (which is very cute btw)
I know it’s a real struggle. As long as we don’t talk about Bossuet and Feuilly Irl then I can kinda cope!
My friend and I are discussing various English/UK accents and I just fucking blurted “Australian accents are like if Britain had a Texas” and guys I feel like I’ve cracked the goddamn code
There are 4 types of responses to this post
1) “I’m Australian/British/a Texan and this is fucking disgusting/offensive/problematic and here’s why”
2) “I’m Australian/British/a Texan and you’re absolutely right and I hate you for it”
3) Actual smart linguistics/etymology people describing the progression of accents and proving how big of a dumbass I am
so exodus says that aaron stretched out his hand over the waters and the frog came up and covered the land of egypt and while english translators usually render “frog” as “frogs,” today at shul the rabbi challenged us to consider whether it could in fact have been one giant frog so we spent literally forty-five minutes arguing about whether there were swarms of frogs from the beginning or rather a single monstrous godzilla frog that split into multiple frogs once people started trying to destroy it and the congregation got so worked up that even after we’d sung aleinu and were heading out of the sanctuary people were still excitedly debating the moral implications of one frog versus many so what i’m trying to say is @judaism never change
I’d never heard of this before, so I looked it up.
The reason we’re certain it says “frogs” singular rather than just being an irregular noun (which was my first thought, especially since my dad was just lecturing me a few weeks ago on how Biblical Hebrew plurals aren’t nearly as regular as Modern Hebrew plurals because Modern Hebrew is more or less a conlang) is because in the first part of the passage God commands Aaron to call forth frogs, plural, but then the passage ends with Aaron calling forth frog, singular. So both forms are right there, they both exist.
The authority is considered to be Rashi (an 11th century French rabbi). He gives two explanations. 1) That a giant frog was called forth that covered all of the land of Egypt, and whenever the Egyptians struck it, it split into multiple frogs. 2) In some languages, some animals have both a regular plural form and a plural that’s the same as the singular (e.g. “fish” in English), so maybe that was the case for frogs in Biblical Hebrew.
The counter-argument to (2) is that the regular plural was used in the very same passage, which is why we need both explanations.
Rashi apparently gets this argument from the following Midrash (Biblical quotation in all-caps, Midrash in regular text)
AND THE FROG(S) CAME UP, AND COVERED THE
LAND OF EGYPT. Rabbi Akiva said: It was only one frog, but this bred so
rapidly that it filled the land of Egypt. Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah said
to him: ‘Akiva! What business have you with Haggadah? Leave homiletical
interpretations and turn to Neg’aim and Ohalot! Indeed, there was one
frog at first, but it croaked to the others and they came.’
The upshot of all of these interpretations is Aaron summoned one frog, but God provided many.
[I got so into reading about this I forgot I had water boiling on the stove, and it all boiled off and I didn’t notice until I smelled the pan burning. I feel like this might be one of the most Jewish moments of my life.]
I love that this is basically the equivalent of the “would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck” debate.
Love the idea that Aaron was told to summon a plague of frogs but he either 1) accidentally summoned a single frog instead due to mishearing or misspeaking or better yet 2) thought to himself, you know what would be really great though, is just one GIANT FROG PIÑATA
from A1 to A2: omg I’m nearly fluent! I understand so much and I just love this language! learning languages is so amazing!
from B1 to B2: day 2746261. dear diary, today I tried to read a newspaper article in my target language and I found 12 irregular verbs, 3 incomprehensible grammar structures, and 7 words I couldn’t find in any dictionary. I will never be “fluent”. This language is too difficult. I hate learning languages.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 