"Marhaba" to all the community of CodeForces! First of all , this blog entry has nothing to do with programming languages :-) It's rather about languages spoken by different nations. Recently , I have been well into the linguistic thing , and I thought it'd be cool if we share some pieces of information about languages we speak. Perhaps we can talk about :
1-Scientific Content (particularly algorithmic) in your mother tongue - is it widely available? 2-Difficulty of your mother language ( How would you rate its difficulty(to learn) for someone who is good at English?) 3-Literature ( any good novels that became international and were translated to English?) 4-Common Proverbs 5- Perhaps some good Jokes in your mother tongue :-)
I'd really appreciate your comment , so please if you have interesting information to share with us , do not hesitate !
N.B: the first word in this blog is the Arabic equivalent for "Hello"
Haha! What an uncommon post! Anyway, here are my answers...
*** My mother tongue is SPANISH ***
1) It's widely available, yes. Not as much as english, but there are lot of good books in Spanish.
2) I've heard many many times that spanish is one of the hardest languages to learn. There are dozens of verb conjugation (literally, each verb has dozens of conjugations) depending on the time, the person who is speaking, the person you're referring to, the level of formality, etc..
3) There are countless good novels written in Spanish that has been translated to a lot of languages. Many poets, for example García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda or Alfonsina Storni, just to name a few.
4) "A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes" (if something comes for free, you should be glad and don't look for imperfections), "Más vale pájaro en mano que 100 volando" (it's better to have something for sure, even if it's only a little thing, than a hundred possibitilies that might never come true)
5) No es lo mismo un metro de encaje negro, a que un negro te encaje el metro (it's a spanish words game that loses all its sense when translated).
5) i see the word "negro". You RACIST!
:D
My mother tongue is Morrocoian
5) A man comes into a bar and orders 99 khsfkrsijasd; the surprised bartender suggested that he took 100 khsfkrsijasd instead. The man agreed.
:D :D
It' good to see 'different' posts in Codeforces.
So, my mother language is 'Brazilian Portuguese'
1) Yes, but it's definitely incomparable with the amount of good scientific resource in English, unfortunately most of the translations for Portuguese are poor.
2) I've already heard that Portuguese is a very difficult language for foreign people. I have to agree, as Spanish, we also have literally dozens of verb conjugations, which are complex, also, Brazil is a very big country, so, there is a lot of different slangs and accents. I have an assumption that Portuguese is the language which has the biggest number of slangs among all other languages.
3) Brazilian contemporary literature is getting famous abroad thanks to 'Paulo Coelho', actually I have never read his books, but they are famous, we have some good old literature books, examples as Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, to name a few, but they are very hard to read, even native Brazilians have difficult to read their books.
4) 'Agua mole, pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura' (water is soft, rock is tough, but as time goes, water can pierce the rock). They aren't 'fun' translated.
5) We have tons of jokes, but I'm really bad to remember or tell them, but the most famous are mocking people from portugal.
My mother tongue is Russian. :)
P.S. something wrong with markdown. I can't make a proper sublist. =(
BTW, some great classical Russian jokes might be found here :)
Thanks for the beautiful comments ! Now , it's my turn to speak about my mother language , Arabic . which is an official language in nearly 25 countries.
Scientific content in this language is very poor. There is almost no useful algorithmic content at all. The main reason is that Arabic is not a flexible language . For example , one can never imagine a reasonably good translation of most algorithmic terms.In addition , most of the Arabic-speaking population is unfortunately not well-educated.
On the other hand , Arabic literature is great.Some of the oldest poems ever have been written in Arabic.Most of the poetry I enjoy is really old.There was an Egyptian novelist named Naguib Mahfouz who won Nobel Prize for a good novel.
It is really extremely difficult for a foreigner to learn Arabic.Some letters in the alphabet have a similar pronunciation to those of the Roman Alphabet. However , many other letters are hard to pronounce.There are literally hundreds of books on grammar.
One translation of a proverb I like is : "Full grain plants bow humbly, while the empty ones raise their heads proudly.". That's taken out of a poem in Arabic.
Jokes are usually slang. You need to have a taste of certain life aspects to understand some of them well , so it's hard to think of a suitable one to share it here :-)
let me help you remembering a joke since we have the same language:
First: when will the next friday come?
Second: I can't really remember maybe on sunday or monday
hahahaha
Haha you, too, love not funny jokes yeah? :D
this joke is really funny when someone tell it in Arabic, but it lost its funniness when someone tell it in english.
let me try with other joke, hope people like it:
once upon time there was a man always put a cucumber under his pillow when he goes to sleep.
people asked him why do he do that?
he answered: because if I put a tomato instead it will be Crushed.
hahahaha maybe he misunderstood the question =)
negative votes are welcomed in advance :)
Arabic culture used to be greatly involved in development and promotion of science and knowledge. Europe was so blunt that they burnt Arabic libraries. It's sad to hear that Arabic language nowadays has no vocabulary for modern science. Wanna read more? Here is an example article: Arab science in the golden age (750–1258 C.E.) and today.
As of Polish language: