Heh

[fiat_knox]

I just got some troll telling me that he hopes that nobody talks in the manner of my colloquial Welsh on the dysgu_cymraeg forum.

My response was to retort, in Welsh, "What are you trying to do? If you are trying to frighten off the beginners, you're going the right way about it. Everybody can make a mistake. My Mum says "Heb ei fai - heb ei eni," ("Nobody born can be blameless") but nobody likes the company of a showoff know it all."

I get this problem with every bloody language forum I log on to. There's always some witless fucker who tries to show how much of the formal, correct language he knows.

If he had been teaching French, this would be the sort of man who would retort that "Enculer" is not in the French dictionary. And yet he would be called it everywhere he went, if he wandered over to France. And he would never stop to wonder why.

Comments

[sandchigger.livejournal.com]

Color me with your Clueless American crayon, but isn't there an actual regulatory body set up for the French language?

[fiat-knox.livejournal.com]

There certainly is.

However, I doubt they're patrolling LJ groups looking for people who leave out circumflexes and cedillas from French words.

Likewise I doubt there are many members of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg scanning the web looking for people who apply the wrong initial mutation to some random Welsh word, knowing that the miracle is that people are able to speak Welsh at all.

[sandchigger.livejournal.com]

Right, but you mentioned this guy being called a word that doesn't actually exist. In French. A language that seriously does it's best to cut down on that stuff. I'm more picking at the metaphor than the message.

[lemuria.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends why they are there. If they're there to learn grammatically correct Welsh in order to pass an exam, then they do need to know when to use the correct mutation. If they're there to try and learn to communicate with native Welsh speakers then they need to know how native speakers actually talk.

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

I get this problem with every bloody language forum I log on to. There's always some witless fucker who tries to show how much of the formal, correct language he knows.

Yeah. For extra fun, include a phrase in a different language in an RPG book, and then visit forums.

[fiat-knox.livejournal.com]

Particularly if the phrase is in German or Latin.