Army Rumour Service

Register a free account today to join our community
Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site, connect with other members through your own private inbox and will receive smaller adverts!

The Joys of Speaking a Foreign language

I was brought up saying that to you? Have we met? Are you actually my real Dad?

Depends...

Were you born in the Medway Towns?

Did your mum frequent the ‘Army and Navy’ or the ‘Two Sawyers’?

Does your birth certificate say “the Royal Engineers” under both ‘father’s name’ and ‘father’s profession’?

Are you congenitally ugly?
















Then there’s a distinct possibility :)
 
French French, ie inside the Hexagon, has:
Soixante - 60
Soixante dix (60 and 10) - 70
Quatre vingts (4 x 20) - 80
Quatre vingts dix (4x20 and 10) - 90

Swiss French, though, has:
Soixante - 60
Septante - 70
Huitante - 80
Nonante - 90

I know Walloon has some of the numbers in common with the Swiss, not all, but I can’t remember which.


Its like when I asked for directions & got "tout droit" instead of "direct" which I thought meant straight on!
 
Yes.

‘One hand plus one’ essentially.

It’s also how the Asian abacus is strung.

The Khmers also have a different number for 10,000, which, considering there are 4,000 riel to the US$, gets used a lot.

Nepali has a lakh, which is 100,000.

Useful for discussion with NGOs when calculating bribes.
 
And has the cror, as does Indian, useful for when one needs to express quite how many rupees are required to pay for something.

It is rather odd to read "x cror rupees ($y mn)".
 
And if you were interested, I would highly recommend this.



Book_SpecialDuty_Samuels.jpg
Halfway through this. Fascinating, thanks very much indeed for the tip.
 
I think @Boumer is more than deserving of a special award for - having some of the most 'niche' intelectual / reading interests on this site!

It's only an amount of time until he pulls 'A treatise on the influences of Etruscan pottery upon Old Church Slavonic -from the perspective of a 1998 lesbian web developer' out of the hat :)
 
I think @Boumer is more than deserving of a special award for - having some of the most 'niche' intelectual / reading interests on this site!

It's only an amount of time until he pulls 'A treatise on the influences of Etruscan pottery upon Old Church Slavonic -from the perspective of a 1998 lesbian web developer' out of the hat :)

Plenty of that in my history list.
 
I think @Boumer is more than deserving of a special award for - having some of the most 'niche' intelectual / reading interests on this site!

It's only an amount of time until he pulls 'A treatise on the influences of Etruscan pottery upon Old Church Slavonic -from the perspective of a 1998 lesbian web developer' out of the hat :)
I take it you've not read it yet.
 
Yes.

‘One hand plus one’ essentially.

It’s also how the Asian abacus is strung.

The Khmers also have a different number for 10,000, which, considering there are 4,000 riel to the US$, gets used a lot.
Most of Asia uses an abacus like that, with five beads on Earth ( i.e. lower frame) representing one each, and two in Heaven (upper frame) worth five each.
The Japanese have four beads on Earth, one in Heaven, their preferred technique rarely having used the fifth Earth and second Heaven beads.
 
Just to add that yes, Welsh also counts in twenties, the word being 'ugain'.
Basque has 'hogei'.
I did a little comparative research inspired by this; I stopped when I found 'pixa' and 'kaka', Welsh 'pishw' and 'caca', which are exactly what they sound like. Both are common words in Indo-European languages, sometimes with shifted meanings, such as Hindi 'khaki', meaning dust/dirt, or Greek 'kakos', meaning bad.
But the big stumbling block was 'mendi'; a mountain. Compare Welsh 'mynydd', Latin 'mons', but root 'mont-' in oblique cases.
I doubt that either language family would need borrowed vocabulary for any of these words.
A paper published in the last few years claims to have found Indo-European roots for a number of Basque verbs, but I've not been able to track it down.
Incidentally, there are at least two words in Cornish of likely Basque origin. I am aware of a family originally from the mining community who claim (convincingly) an ancestor who was shipwrecked from one of the Armada.
'Piskie' (not 'pixie') from 'pixka' or 'piska' (depending on dialect) and 'oggi ' - pasty - from 'ogia', bread (perhaps meaning a generic baked good?).
 
Just to add that yes, Welsh also counts in twenties, the word being 'ugain'.
Basque has 'hogei'.
I did a little comparative research inspired by this; I stopped when I found 'pixa' and 'kaka', Welsh 'pishw' and 'caca', which are exactly what they sound like. Both are common words in Indo-European languages, sometimes with shifted meanings, such as Hindi 'khaki', meaning dust/dirt, or Greek 'kakos', meaning bad.
But the big stumbling block was 'mendi'; a mountain. Compare Welsh 'mynydd', Latin 'mons', but root 'mont-' in oblique cases.
I doubt that either language family would need borrowed vocabulary for any of these words.
A paper published in the last few years claims to have found Indo-European roots for a number of Basque verbs, but I've not been able to track it down.
Incidentally, there are at least two words in Cornish of likely Basque origin. I am aware of a family originally from the mining community who claim (convincingly) an ancestor who was shipwrecked from one of the Armada.
'Piskie' (not 'pixie') from 'pixka' or 'piska' (depending on dialect) and 'oggi ' - pasty - from 'ogia', bread (perhaps meaning a generic baked good?).

Does that mean a badly turned-out soldier in khaki is literally a 'bag of shit'?
 
My uncle told me about a friend of his, an officer in the Irish Army, who had to go through a slew of applicants for a much sought-after posting. All the candidates were pretty much of a muchness ie not much to recommend any of them, until he came across one form in which the applicant, a lowly private, stated he was fluent in a foreign language, he was called forward.

"I see you speak a foreign language Flaherty," says the officer.

"I do, sorr."

"Excellent, which one?"

"English, sorr."

Apocryphal, I am sure.
 
Top