1e6 = 1e9

also 50 "half-trees", 70 "half-fours"

-Lasse

;)

it is more like a half from five

like when telling time "half three" is 2:30

-Lasse

It's halfway up from four twenties. The same logic works for 70 and 50. See? Not so bad! ;-) (OK, it breaks down below that.)

In my experience, most people believe their mother tongue is the richest, most expressive language. It merely means they do not know so much about other languages.

Jeroen Belleman

Chinese has "crostalk"- kind of a punning banter comedy AFAIUI.

This

I was in Japan and wanted to buy a baseball cap for The Brat, something with Japanese characters. It can't be done; all the team names are in English.

You can use Street View to browse the streets of most big cities of the world. The two startling things are (1) how much signage is in English and (2) how many cars are colorless.

It's also interesting how many French and German and asian web sites have an English version, and, even on the native language version, how many words are English.

That's impressive. A few rare people have the ability to become fluent in new languages in adulthood.

I think engineering types have less than average ability to do that. Our language centers are crowded out by all that visual/math stuff. A lot of engineers stutter, too. My wife is a speech therapist and agrees. If she can corner the Google employee stuttering business, we're rich.

Pretty much everybody can get fluent in a new language as adults. The diffi cult bit is to get the accent right. The international phonetic alphabet (I PA)uses 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks to identify mor e than 200 more or less distinct universal phonemes, and all languages lump some of these universal phonemes together to get sets of about thirty to f orty language-specific phonemes. Japanese famously combines our "r" and our "l" into one phoneme, and Japanese native speakers find it difficult to pe rceive and generate the two different forms of what they originally learned as a single phoneme.

Some engineering types do. If you were good at languages, you'd be less lik ely to do engineering.

Not a statement supported by any experimental evidence. Engineering and the visual arts do seems to collect more than their fair share of left-handers , and right-handers are more likely to have the usual distribution of langu age processing within the brain. There's no suggestion that a difference in distribution means that there's less cerebral volume devoted to language p rocessing in the unspecialised brains, but the links between components mig ht be longer

Not something I've noticed.

More because Google pays well than because they hire a lot of stutters.

The only people I know who had serious problems with stuttering are both no w a very successful academic psychologists - making professor seems to be a n effective therapy.

Often words are only English sounding, but do not make sense to a native English speaker. Like in German "handy" for a cell phone. Or you find "Backshop" which is a bakery shop.

That one once bit me in Dublin. In Germany half nine means 8:30, in Ireland it is 9:30. So I was a bit early for the booked restaurant. :-) Fortunately I they also had a bar and some good Guinness.

We even know what dialectical materialism is.

Not with any precision. Most of you seem to think that it has something to do with socialism.