A Feast For Language Geeks

My brother just gave me a great present for ‘Eid: he sent me a link to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center’s (DLIFLC) Language Survival Kits. It’s unsurprisingly a little heavy on the vocabulary necessary/useful for foreign occupants (yay, USA!) … but it’s still a lot of fun. 😀

They provide the same set of sentences in several dozen languages with translations, transliterations and native writing. To top it off they have audio samples for unfamiliar sounds in each language and with a native speaker saying the sentences out loud and then saying them slow in order for you to repeat them … awesome! 😀

Interesting omissions from the list are German and South Korean, while the list even contains separate entries for several regional dialects of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashto, etc. … o.O

Er hot a gojischen Kopp

Er hot a gojischen Kopp

steht ungefähr für „Er ist dumm“.

Goi bezeichnete ursprünglich einfach Nichtjuden, kann aber wie oben, anscheinend auch pejorativ “als Hinweis auf ‘unjüdisches’,[…] lasterhaftes oder unintelligentes Verhalten” verwendet werden. 😛 So gesehen, scheint es das “jüdischen Equivalent” von Kafir zu sein; mit der Ausnahme, dass Kafir keine Konnotation bzgl. der Intelligenz einer Person hat. 🙂