I see. Rugby is more of a real sport than football. Football is more like a game, but it's a sport of the people, unlike tennis. American Football is just weird. I don't understand why they started calling it football anyway, since they don't kick the ball most of the times...
Yeah they're the so-called indigenous people. Well, 'so-called' in that it's nothing like Australia or Africa or the Americas where there were people living and thriving for millennia before they were "found" by white people. The Maori came here in about 950, from this place they called "Hawaiaki" which is either somewhere in Indonesia or Hawai'i. So that makes everyone here immigrants to a greater or lesser extent. Oh, and *looks down* ... rugby is far superior to football and American football.
You are absolutely right about me not knowing whát the hell your on about. But it sounds pretty interesting over there. All those islands. And the Maori, that's like the Aboriginals of New Zealand?
As an aside, did you know that the two main islands of New Zealand were, literally a few weeks ago, found to have no official names? They've been calling them "North Island" and "South Island" (no "The" in the names), and intend to keep it that way. Which I think is a shame, as the Maori alternatives are so much more beautiful: Te Whanganui a Tara (North Island) and Te Wai Pounamu (South Island). Hmm yeah just to leak some New Zealand geography
Yeah it's a couple of 100 kilometres from New Zealand, it's just New Caledonia. I don't know why all your European brethren came here and started calling everything 'new' this and 'new' that, but they did. Apart from loads of Pacific Island languages, French is the next most used, pretty much because New Caledonia is so close, and also because the French tentatively tried to take over South Island before the British, and they even speak French to this day in Akaroa, near Christchurch. Of course, you probably have no idea where these places are, but that's all good
I had never heard of Nouvelle Caledonie in my life until you mentioned it. So I looked it up. Turns out it's some old colony of France. What's the importance of that island?
Man I really wish I was bilingual, but only speaking English, I really don't have a great need to learn something else. Though I did learn French for three years. Kinda the next most useful language around here, what with Nouvelle Caledonie and all
Esperanto is an artifical language created in 1887 by Ludwig L. Zamenhof to improve international communication. Although English seems to be the world language today, Esperanto was meant to be like English is now. But I'm not going to go into detail about why an existing language surpassed Esperanto's success. It's a mixture of Germanic and Roman languages, though it's really an entire new language. But it was made so it would be really easy to learn, which it is. The number of people that speak Esperanto (apart fomr their native language of course, since it's not actually used in business relations etc.) is estimated to be several millions.
What's Esperanto? He made a good point in that video (surprisingly); what's the point of making a new language? Only reason I can think of is like a hybridisation of two or more languages (like Bahahsa Indonesia), or a simplification (Simplified Chinese - or does that only apply to written Chinese?).
I haven't heard of him yet. But if he's still alive, I'm not surprised. I learn about Charles Sanders Pierce and Ferdinand de Saussure, but not about this guy. I'm surprised he didn't mention Esperanto when Ali G came up with the idea to invent a new language. Esperanto was developed by Ludwig L. Zamenhof in 1887. Just thought I'd spread the knowledge I'm obtaining for my exams.
Noam Chomsky, Major Twentieth Century Writers He's a linguist and left-wing thinker. Quite possibly my favourite 20th century figure. He's a libertarian socialist, so we'd both agree with his writings. Here he is with Ali G: YouTube - ali g interviews noam chomsky
I have no idea whatsoever about what Chomsky might be. Is it a guy or a language? Or Both? O_o And I knew about the comparisons. We had a paper with some of them on it in High School on the wall of the economy class, but there are some funny new ones in your thread.
http://thefinalfantasy.net/forums/hu...-cow-game.html Dunno if you've seen this yet. Thought you'd like it. If not, just ignore it
Mean, linguistics? Have you studied nom nom nom nom nom Noam (Chomsky)? I like old Chomsky, and his name. Yeah learning the finer points of something you enjoy can ruin things. Like when I was studying geology, because I really enjoyed it at school, but to come to uni and to focus on the biology and chemistry behind it all really stripped away the fun for me, so I moved to human geography, which I used to hate, but now I love. Go figure, uni does some strange things at times. It would suck to be under the US system, here in NZ getting into uni is easy, and they give loans to anyone who applies. I don't know if that's to the discredit of our institutions, but it certainly evens the playing field, and we have fewer of those elitist types here too.
second part of response: I quite like what I'm studying. It's really something I'm into. But interesting or not, it's still tough as hell sometimes. I barely had to study in High School and got good grades easily, so it's extremely hard for me to study for days in a row just for 1 exam. Sometimes I wonder how all the people who got lower grades than me in High School pass all their exams. But High School doesn't matter now... It's not like in the US, where the grades you get in High School determine what kind of colleges you can go to. A lot of kids **** up in High School anyway. And they should. But yeah, I feel guilty for not passing my exams while 1. I'm really into what I have to study and 2. I know I just have to work for it. It's great to study shitloads about what you find interesting, but you still have to know every little detail of those shitloads when exams arrive. O_o
