#musicbrainz

it will?

poor cookie

nope

that was months ago!

so she's back from the moon?

yes, and now she thinks she's a mouse.

oh

probably because of the different gravity

she needs to get used to it again

my dictionary says polka dot is tupfen

was ist tupfen?

getupft probably

cause tupfen is a verb :)

what in english?

*stamps Germa/English Dictionary on Shep's head*

"polka dot ['pɔlkə-] n Tupfen m"

hm ok dict says tupfen may also be a noun also i only know it as tupfer.. must ba in some other area. as a verb it means to dab

*although

and *be -.-

matthias used gepunkteten

gepunktet

ah

well, he was talking about the table

ok in another form gepunkteten

do you think genders or cases are more evil?

my grammar knowledge is == zero :)

hmm

that's why i always had difficulties learning other languages

genders are der die and das, and cases are when they change to things like den dem des and so on.

hard to say.. for english speakers of course the genders are difficult

cases are too :P

but not much more as when I learn french.. cause there is mostly no relation between the genders in .de and .fr

I think gender is more evil, because it doesn't really have any meaning

the cases at least show what function in the sentence something has

genders are also discriminating

thanks for the help guys... and gal laters

because for example it's "der Mensch"

nikki__ is now known as nikki`

there's a joke about it

the teacher says "-chen is to show a 'verniedlichung'. Bäumchen, Mäuschen. Fritz, tell me some original forms." Fritz: "Eichhörn"

yeah it's stupid

dumbkopff

eichhörnchen is squirrel, isn't it?

jup

I love squirrels...

there were red squirrels in karlsruhe :O

we don't have many here :(

more than us

I've never seen a real red squirrel until I went to germany

all we have here are grey squirrels

i saw a lot in the US

grey?

yes i think

but in general a lot

see them very rarely here

there were lots in karlsruhe

I was so delighted :)

and mb has always had lots of germans, has it not?

*shrugs*

i told you why ;)

yea we have lots of squirls here

I never said I disagreed!

oh that's not how i meant it

mööp

björk

great sen

did you work out how to type them then?

is mööp something like merp?

cookie is sat at one end of the room scowling at whiskers, who's sat at the other end

probably

no i just copy and pasted nikki's ö from eichhörnchen

at least for german it's legal to replace it with oe

i guess for björk it won't

smørebrød

mustaqil is now known as mustaqila

bjørk

mustaqilä

Yes sen?

üÜ*#äÄ'öÖ

I wonder how you look up what the right way to write accented letters is

when you can't use accents, I mean

How'd you mean?

As in transliteration?

like in german ä ö and ü become ae oe and ue, and norwegian æ ø and å are ae oe and aa I think

but french just drops the accent

It's worse when the nonenglish language doesn't even use latin characters ;)

there's no proper way then.

Hence why my name is a pain in the ass people what with the lack of the u after the q

what's your name from anyway?

Arabic

ah

I think writing latin characters without accents isn't exactly the same problem as normal transliteration

because with normal transliteration, you just have to define what everything becomes, it could be as strange as you like

but with something already in latin, you're going to get conflicts

It's all down to opinion with latin to latin I guess in some ways

like in german, you can't replace ß with b, even if ß does look like a B

because süß isn't süb

Doesn't ß make a SS noise?

yes

So it'd make no sense to make it a b then

yes, but my point is that people generally go with whatever looks closest

That's a rather stupid thing really, It'd be better off going with what sounds most ismilairly phonetically

like I see icelandic ð and þ as d and p

What about æ or ø then for norwegian?

that's the point, if you ask the native speakers, they're going to say ð sounds like ð and ö sounds like ö!

true :)

so using o for ö is like using b for ß

it's not the right sound

English is a crazy language what with "I before e except after c" and magic e rues and whatnot. There's always an exception to English, so there's no phonetic standard

depends, our consonants are fairly consistent.

Easiest language is arabic, it's all phonetic :)

so is japanese

hmm.

this was all very interesting, but I still haven't solved my problem.

I think that is the answer, there isn't one :P

nani? was? Que?

Afternoon yllona

oh

and hi yllona

'lo mustaqila, nikki_

hi yllona

hello shep

hooray i found my lenore flash movies again

*watching*

oh?

sooooooooo funny