(no subject)

Journal entries: 1,387
Comments: Posted: 7,427 - Received: 4,385

Holy crap, I talk a lot. I've had this LJ since July of '03, though.

Also, not many of my friends like to change their name around. Go to your user info: There's a bit labled "user" and one labeled "name". One is the link to your actual LJ. The other isn't--on some people's comment pages the name shows up--there will be a bar labeled something like "Thread started by _______" and then your comment with your user link and your icon. My name shows up on the top of my actual LJ, as well.

Get creative, people...you can have spaces and punctuation like crazy in your name. Mine for a while was "....I'm sorry, what were you saying?" Right now it's "Director, Department of Redundancy Department" which is just under the length allowance.

(no subject)

In early October, Jupiter is going into my sign, Scorpio. Jupiter is the planet of luck, among other things.

It's going to be there for twelve years. Several places with information on astrology tell me I should start something that will take twelve years to do. I've been pondering various parts of my life to work on or develop for twelve years, but I often miss the completely obvious.

I'm making it so only I will see your answers, and you're free to comment anonymously (although then, of course, it'll be harder to respond, should I feel like doing so--you run the risk of me responding in my actual LJ for all to see).

What should I start now, that will take twelve years to finish?

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EDIT: The first answer, of course, was school. I knew someone would pop up with that one pretty darn fast. *lol* That came to mind as well, of course; but feel free to elucidate or be really creative.

(no subject)

We now have two employees in the records department who are Hawai'ian. One of them didn't move here until she was an adult, and often had people not understand her due to her accent.

I came upon the both of them upstairs in the break room discussing their respective families' use of Hawai'i Pidgin and laughing their asses off. They both grew up speaking it, even in school. They are now the unfortunate victims of the rest of the department's universal curiousity, as we keep asking them to translate random phrases into Pidgin. One of them told me that she's trained herself to speak "normal" English so well that when she gets back home it takes a few days to speak in Pidgin again.

I looked it up on Wikipedia (which is where the above link leads to). It's a combo of a bunch of languages, among them: American English, Hawai'ian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Philipino (which is actually called Tagalog). Vocabulary words come from all over, word order from one place, how you mark things as present or past or future tense from another... I don't know why this fascinates me now. I always think of English as this totally bastardized language (it's part German, part Latin, part WTF-ever...), but not in comparison to Hawai'i Pidgin!

I also found out something interesting by poking around Wikipedia: A "pidgin" language is not a language natively spoken, by definition. It's a language created by people of different native languages, trying to figure out how to communicate. It's very common in places that were colonized, and have a lot of commercial activity (otherwise, they probably wouldn't need to talk to each other!). They do not have a set grammar, and are often improvised.

A pidgin language becomes a "creole" when children learn to speak it natively, and it gets a set grammar.

So, technically, Hawai'i Pidgin is a creole language. Over here, Wikipedia has a long list of creole languages. That's so cool.

(no subject)

You are a Hippie. Wow.


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Well, duh.