Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Question :D

"What is the difference between a hydrocarbon and an alcohol?"

"Hydrocarbons don't cause car crashes."


On a completely different note:

Korean and Japanese are apparantly a "close-surface languages" pair. What does that mean? Swedish and Norwegian weren't taken up as examples, while Hindi - Urdu and Indonesian - Malayan were, so is it about pronounciation? Grammar? Whatever it is, I have yet to find a single word in Korean that is the same as one in Japanese, or even seems vaguely similar. I am admittedly not an expert on either language, far from, but considering I'm studying their most basic words, like "hello" or "cat" or "I am", then... if only the advanced words like, I dunno, "exoskeleton" are the same, I wouldn't call them similar languages. "No" in Japanese means "yes" in Korean, for crying out loud. Maybe it is that they have approximately the same sounds in their language? But so does Swedish - Japanese, right?

3 comments:

Sara said...

I can guess that it's the similar sounds part, because I still can only separate the two by the fact that I recognize some of the words in Japanese. The sounds and melody is sort of similar. But maybe that's just me...

Riklurt said...

Close-surface languages sound to me as if they have different roots but a lot of loan words that are the same. Obviously loan words are not simple, but more like "exoskeleton", so that could be a hypothesis.

Like say, Swedish French are I guess close-surface because we've loaned in many words from French, despite being unrelated to it initially?

Yeonni said...

I have no idea, googling it gives me nothing, so although it was a highly scientific text they probably just invented the word then and there, and never explained it -_-

@sara: challange accepted. Next time you come here, we're listening to japanese and korean in conversation and in music, and we'll see ^^ I can't relly tell anymore since I've listened to both so much.