'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

The LibreOffice project has confirmed support for two new languages in the forthcoming version 7.3, Klingon and Interslavic. McMinnville, Oregon, USA: Closeup of a man dressed as a Klingon at annual UFO Festival in 2015 A potential user dressed as a Klingon at the annual UFO Festival in McMinnville, Oregon, in 2015 There's …

[b0llchit]

Qapla'

[davidp231]

Glory to you, and your house.....

We need a Gowron icon.

[Plest]

I'll start melting the Mars bars for everyone to wear...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done Liam...

For persevering where many, including myself, would fail.

I can do plenty of number stuff in my head, remember some very detailed things for long periods of time and other things some struggle with.

Not bragging, just something in the way my brain works.

Learning a language is something I've never really been able to do.

Learning foreign words, I can do that.

Learning a language, even an 'easy' one just doesn't seem to be in me, and I have tried.

Keep up the effort, I wish you eventual success.

But I guess it's a bit like 'learning' the guitar, It doesn't matter how long ago you started or how good you are, you are always still learning!

[Terry 6]

Re: Well done Liam...

I was unable to learn languages at school. Near total failure. After I left school I discovered I could pick up languages really quite easily if I was actually in a place that spoke them. Other people I knew did really well at school languages. I was really envious. But they proved totally useless trying to use them in real life. So I guess it's horses for courses.

[Pascal Monett]

If your intent is to truly master a language, there is no substitute for immersion. You need to go somewhere where that language is spoken and yours is not, so as to remove the crutch of falling back on your native tongue.

You learn very quickly when you have to learn to be able to eat, or find your way.

I think language diversity is essential. I am lucky, I was born in France to a French mother and a Canadian (English) father. I grew up in the USA, and moved to France when I was 11. I was young enough to learn French by assimilation. It took about two years, but it worked.

I am now bilingual English/French, but more than that, I have a perspective on things that my purely-French compatriots do not have.

A language is also a culture, and learning a new language means getting introduced to that culture. Czech appears to be a very interesting language, with intriguing ramifications on the cultural mindset. Intellectually, I would love to be able to learn that language and be introduced to the mindset that accompanies it, but I won't fool myself. I'm too old to wrack my brain with such an effort and, given that I can barely grasp German, it would take me the rest of my life to get to grips with Czech.

My loss, obviously.

[John Hawkins]

I agree also - I first came to my current country of residence when I was 23 and had the good fortune to work in an environment where few spoke English. After a year I was fully fluent and after a couple more people started wondering which part of the country I came from.

Learning languages at school felt pointless and a waste of time. A good comparison would be learning a new IT skill by taking a course and getting a certification as opposed to learning by doing.

[lybad]

The flip side of this is when people come in and tell you that you don't speak your native language properly.

Happened to a friend and me, when a Polish postgrad student came to the University I worked at. And promptly told us we didn't speak proper English. But then my friend comes from Blantyre... :-)

(I've a weird Scottish dialect - because my parents moved round the country a lot with their jobs when I was a kid)

[Tom 7]

My mother came from Aberdeen, hadn't left the place until she finished Uni there. She spoke better english than my incredibly english nationalist Dad!

[Anonymous Coward]

"My mother came from Aberdeen, hadn't left the place until she finished Uni there. She spoke better english than my incredibly english nationalist Dad!"

Of course we Scots can speak good English: for starters, we can pronounce the letter 'r' (and 'ch' as in loch, come to that), and we also have excellent words such as 'outwith'… :-D

«awaits incoming rotten tomatoes»

[Michael Strorm]

I didn't realise until a few years ago that "swither" was a specifically Scottish word. (Ditto "outwith", even more recently.)

I now tend to catch myself and pause when I'm about to write "swither" on a forum consisting of predominantly non-Scottish users.

[ChrisC]

Growing up NE England, there were quite a few things I just took for granted as being everyday aspects of British/English life, only to discover later they were actually Scottish things that had seeped far enough over the border to influence our ways of life. Wonder if the local newsagents still keep a regular stock of the Scottish newspapers these days - one of the highlights of the weekend for younger me was getting my hands on the Sunday Post after my parents had finished with it, to get my weekly fix of Oor Wullie and The Broons.

So whilst "swither" is new to me (and having now seen what it means, it strikes me as being one of those words that really ought to be more widely used as a rather pleasingly and appropriately sounding alternative to how we'd say it otherwise), "outwith" has been a part of my personal lexicon for as long as I can recall.

[heyrick]

No tomato throwing, but I'm quite proud of the fact that most of my spoken words don't have the letter 'r' in them. I am happy to donate all my 'r's to the former colony over the ocean. They need all the help they can get in speaking English proper like.

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's an 'r' in "letter" (unless you non-rhotically pronounce it "lettah") ;-)

[heyrick]

Yup, lettah. That's why I said spoken English, because it would be eally weid to dop the lette '' fom evey sentence!

[PRR]

> I am happy to donate all my 'r's to the former colony over the ocean.

Boston and north, they won't use your 'r's.

> They need all the help they can get in speaking English proper like.

Watching some Chinese and Indian geeks on YouTube, and a nephew in VietNam, I'm starting to see that "standard English" will move on beyond England and her spin-offs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ford made the Ka so Bostonians would have something they could pronounce.

[BobChip]

Language and diction...

Of course we Scots can speak good English - when necessary. It is only the glaikit English who sometimes have difficulty with our quite excellent diction.... (Scottish born and bred, and now also looking out for the low flying tomatoes ----)

[Anonymous Coward]

Scottish

Not a language story, but one relating to Scottish accents:

A local disc jockey (here in the US) told a story recently about his work recording radio commercials. One of his clients had developed a script that called for a Scottish accent. The DJ said that he can't produce a Scottish accent, but he did have a friend who was from Scotland, so he brought the friend in to do the commercial.

The friend's commercial was rejected by the customer. Not because he was an inexperienced voice actor, but because his Scottish accent didn't "sound Scottish".

Of course, for most Americans a Scottish accent is "Scotty" from star trek. The only native Scott I know doesn't sound much like Scotty.

[Terry 6]

Re: Scottish

But similarly, American producers seem to struggle to accept English actors playing English roles unless they sound like a cross between Jeeves and Rees-Mogg. Or just Rees-Mogg.

[Tom 7]

I recently decided to have a go at learning foreign for holidays and in the hope of fending off age related mental decline. I borrowed language CDs from the library and stuck them on my phone and made more progress in Spanish in 30 odd hr long dog walks than I did in 6 years of French at school. I did a bit of German in the hope of helping my kid for GCSE but never managed to catch up. We were going to go to Croatia for a holiday in the summer of 2020 but that got fucked up however I did notice the learning process was far accelerated compared with my first attempts.

I think what would really help is watching kids TV from the country you wish to visit.

[Terry 6]

And read kids' books.

Where's Spot available in all.

Also kids' songs.

These match conjugations cases etc.

[JQJ]

Subtitles.

With the subtitles turned on.

[Adam Trickett]

Re: Subtitles.

I'm in France and try to watch French TV with the subtitles on, as it helps me along. However the quality of the subtitles is utterly dire, and I now know enough French to notice that the subs aren't the same as what's spoken, sometime alternative words are used so it's not just abbreviations or dropping non-essential words.

The best though are the foreign programs that have been dubbed from foreign to French and have subtitles provided in French. Then the two French versions are not aligned, as if translated by different people, lots of different words are selected, and while the meaning is the same overall, the languages is quite different. In those cases I prefer to listen to it in foreign and read the French subs...

I spend many an hour using Duolingo, and if anyone wants to know if the cat is eating a croissant, then I know that... Local makers club a bit on hold because of COVID which is a real shame as I was just getting into that!

[heyrick]

Re: Subtitles.

"the two French versions are not aligned, as if translated by different people"

Oh. My. God.

I tend to watch with subtitles (long standing habit back, way back, when I used to use teletext subs), and I can tell you that this description is absolutely totally Netflix.

By all means watch something in local language with subs, or English without. But watching something foreign in English with English subs still on is often a mindscrew. Not just different people, but quite possibly a different script!

[IfYouInsist]

Re: Subtitles.

The difference between translations in dubbing vs. subtitles is natural, when you think about it. Dubbing optimizes for matching syllable counts (Japanese to English is a nightmare in this regard) while subtitles try to minimize the distraction by being quick and easy to read. The liberties translators take expose the dilemmas they face in pursuing these distinct goals.

I once contributed a set of translated subtitles to divxsubtitles.net for a rather chatty film (was it Being John Malkovich?) and it was fun to make them as brief as possible without leaving out essential details.

[Stork]

Have a bilingual household! My wife is Portuguese, I am Danish and as our first common language was English we speak three languages in the household.

My Portuguese improved loads when I had to instruct our Romanian builders

[Anonymous Coward]

"and made more progress in Spanish in 30 odd hr long dog walks than I did in 6 years of French at school"

Well, I think I see why you made so little progress learning Spanish in school...

[Kubla Cant]

If your intent is to truly master a language, there is no substitute for immersion

Too true. Despite seven years of learning French at school, I still find myself tongue-tied in France.

[heyrick]

Upvote for this alone:

"A language is also a culture, and learning a new language means getting introduced to that culture."

I don't understand those who so quickly reject foreign cultures, often in derogatory ways.

Different cultures bring different ways of looking at things, different concepts (like the French habit of protesting before negotiations), and a sort of richness that I find enhances life.

Sure, a lot of it might seem "weird" because it's something different to what one is used to, but often it helps to delve into why that thing is the way it is. Current cultures are the result of hundreds and hundreds of years of history. Disregarding (and disrespecting) that is really a loss.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: like the French habit of protesting before negotiations

I hear you :).

There is an historic tradition that has partly to do with pure tradition, and partly to do with syndication, but the fact is, in France, if you want to make sure that the subject is important, you need to yell before negociations take place.

From my point of view, that is somewhat logical. If you don't make yourself heard before the decision, what guarantee do you have that the decision is not going to be carefully considered (as opposed to handed out to whatever initial factor tried to influence it) ?

Of course, given the number of decisions that didn't give a damn either way, you could ask : what's the point ?

The answer ? It's l'esprit Gaulois, whatever that means these days.

[Terry 6]

Any one who goes on a foreign holiday and won't eat the local food..........

{embarrassed by English tourists who only eat pie/chips/spag boll- not other pasta o/c}

[Tom 7]

In my youth I was an egg and chips man abroad - largely because I have a problem with fish and I needed several thousand calories a day to survive on and couldn't make it on 'local' food. A holiday in Jamaica after starting my first job, staying with an Amazonian blonde I'd gone to uni with led me to the joys of eating local and some of the best food I've ever eaten is in restaurants where they 'DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH' and are nice enough to give you a few samples of things to try, Tripe is actually bloody nice if you dont know its tripe!

Also one of the best wines I've drunk was in a place on a remote Grecian island where they DSE and we just pointed at a the table next door and they brought us the same stuff - including the wine made by the restaurant that looked like something a dehydrated diabetic with kidney disease would produce (from 25l plastic container that looked like it had been re-used 1000 times) which was absolutely superb with all the food they served and by the 1001th refill of the container made climbing back onto our yacht from the dinghy one of the funniest and most painful experiences I've had.

[Agamemnon]

That mate... that's how to do it. Good on you.

[Rob Daglish]

A friend of mine said you should always try and blend in to foreign countries - eat like a local, drink like a local, and speak like a local as much as you can.

He does live by that standard as well, provided you don't count the bottle of Laphroaig that goes with him and gets shared round whichever bar he's in that night...

[BobChip]

How to learn foreign...

I have often heard it said (in both the UK and France), that the ONLY way to really learn a foreign language was in bed. If only I had stuck with that French girlfriend ......... Immersion?

[gerryg]

Re: How to learn foreign...

Causes great mirth in Japan (possibly elsewhere) as women use different language. So every Japanes bloke knows how you learned Japanese

[Rob Daglish]

Re: How to learn foreign...

Depends on what you're immersing, I suppose...

[heyrick]

Re: Well done Liam...

I suck at French, and I've been living here for twenty years.

But I take heart from the fact that people who are really great at conjugation and can use verb tenses that I don't even know what they mean in English (example: pluperfect subjunctive), they are completely unable to form basic sentences because all their effort went on getting the verbs correct. I tend to just say everything in the present tense and use helper words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" to specify when, and all those other little words in between the verbs that are actually rather important.

I won't ever claim my French is anything other than crap, but I have a full time job, sorted out the recent residency permit (thanks to Brexit), changed the insurance on the house, bought a car... so I can be understood.

[Terry 6]

Re: Well done Liam...

The best advice I was given was "start speaking". It then gets better as you go along, if you listen and gradually incorporate what you hear.

[Adam Trickett]

Re: Well done Liam...

I've been here three years, and can communicate with my mother-in-law very much as you say, in the present tense and then improvise. I just wish I had more vocabulary, as I'm always missing one or two words in the sentence that's important and I've no idea what they would be...

[NerryTutkins]

Re: Well done Liam...

I tend to just say everything in the present tense and use helper words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" to specify when

You'd love Chinese. People think it's hard, but once you get past the writing and the tonal pronunciation which takes a few months, the grammar is beautiful....

No tenses, no verb conjugations. You literally learn a verb, and that's the only form of the verb there is. You can add "yesterday" or "tomorrow" or "the time when I was young" or "next year" to clarify when you are referring to, if it is not clear from the context. If someone asks what you did yesterday, you can simply say "I go to school", because the time is clear from their question. And I, you, he, she, it makes no difference - no silly endings. Therefore no irregular verbs.

Also no plurals either.

Every language should work like that!

[GraXXoR]

Re: Well done Liam...

I'm an immigrant living in Japan and have been for a quarter century.

I remember when I got here, I had already learnt Japanese by making Japanese friends in the UK at uni, going out for drinks at night, sharing meals and generally interacting. By the time I got to Japan I was able to speak and read Japanese without too much difficulty. (Writing was a different matter. LOL)

For the first year or two, I picked a tiny town in the middle of the countryside where there were no English speaking foreigners, just to prevent me relying on anyone besides myself. Once I was fluent enough to do everything myself I moved to Tokyo.

Many visitors on the so-called JET Program at the time were big Japan fans and had learnt Japanese at university with the aim of living in Japan.

However, since they had spent the entirety of their education merely learning Japanese, they had absolutely no useful skills and were unable to find work. I on the other hand could already understand and speak Japanese more fluently than they could with their "book language skills" and had a number of technical degrees under my belt to secure any future jobs I might apply for, which I was able to easily find especially because I had serviceably Japanese on top of education.

The vast majority of those Japanese learners on the JET program could only find menial jobs or teach English as lowly paid unqualified assistant teachers. Some of the ladies were able to find night-time "entertainment" work or become a "model." O_O

Really not an ideal life at all. As such, most just gave up and went home.

So my advice to people is always this: never waste your precious time at university learning the language if you intend to live in that country eventually. If you do, you'll have squandered your precious time in tertiary education learning a skill that most native ten-year-olds have already mastered.

Instead, try to pick up the language as a hobby, find some visitors or locals who speak the language and get fluent by actually speaking it on a daily basis after class.

[jmch]

Re: Well done Liam...

I was on student exchange in deepest darkest Czechia for a summer - close to Slovak and Polish borders, anyone knowing any other language other than Czech knew German or Russian. Outside of the University I met 1 single English-speaking person the whole summer.

Luckily I had a phrasebook that allowed me to say "dva piva, prosim" (I also found intersting the distinction between dva piva and pet piv!) or "vaše vznášedlo je plné úhořů"

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Well done Liam...

In the introduction to one of my Czech language textbooks, the authors claimed that the Czech language was the ultimate secret weapon and the reason that the country had never truly been conquered. They cited the (not quite accurate) example of most textbooks for foreigners not including the verb "to say". Nonetheless, it is a very difficult language to learn, and contains many shibboleth (in the original sense)!

[Wade Burchette]

Re: Well done Liam...

During World War II, the Americans used the Navajo language to confuse the Japanese.

[Tom 7]

Re: Well done Liam...

And we use english to confuse the Americans!

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Well done Liam...

Quite.

[BobChip]

Re: Well done Liam...

I've worked with them (Americans) - they often seem to abuse English to confuse themselves. Lost in translation???

[EnviableOne]

Re: Well done Liam...

5 EYES are really the 5 nations separated by a common language, and nothing else.

Cookies, Thongs, Jellies, and trunks be damned.

[NerryTutkins]

Re: Well done Liam...

I was never really a language person at school.

In my early 20s, I met a girl and ended up moving to Taiwan for couple of years. I remember at the beginning chatting to an American guy who to me seemed to speak really good Chinese. I said to him I didn't think I'd ever learn, because it was so difficult.

He said something which I never forgot. How can it be difficult when over a billion people speak it? Even the stupid people in China can speak Chinese. But I said, well, that's because they learned it as kids. To which he said, looking at it another way, even stupid *kids* in China can speak Chinese.

Turns out, it's actually rather easy. No tenses, no verb conjugations, no plurals.

Everyone has the capability to learn languages. There is nothing inherently difficult that is beyond the brainpower of anyone. It's not calculus.

I ended up getting pretty fluent in Chinese in about 18 months.

The important things:

1. Speak it. You will make mistakes. But unless you just keep doing it, you will never get fluent. Like playing a musical instrument, you just have to keep on doing it or you will never get good.

2. Get in a class with a teacher who doesn't speak English. If your teacher explains things in English, you'll ask questions in English, and so will everyone else. After a year, you'll have learned quite a lot *about* the language, but you'll have learned virtually zero of the language. It's impossible to learn when you keep flipping back to English because trying to explain your question in Chinese is difficult. But if you don't force yourself to do that, you have no hope of doing it in the wild when you have someone who *doesn't* speak English.

3. If you're single, get yourself a girlfriend who doesn't speak English. I was in my mid 20s in Taiwan, I realized pretty quickly that the pool of English speaking girls was pretty small. A little bit of Chinese, and suddenly the pool was much bigger. There is nothing that motivates you to learn like hormones.

I ended up marrying a Brazilian, moving to Portugal and now have to speak yet another language. But after doing German and Chinese, I knew what I was in for, and even in my 40s, I can get by now though it's definitely a little harder now.

If you don't think it's in you, you're wrong. Those people who go to jail in Thailand end up fluent in Thai in six months. It's all about necessity. If you put yourself in a position where you need to speak it to survive and no one around you speaks English, you'll be amazed at how quickly you'd learn.

[unimaginative]

What is this supposed to mean, from the article:

"(It's also free, resistant to MS Office viruses, and legal even for commercial use."

What software is not legal for commercial use? Nothing well known. Something using some weired license no one else uses maybe?

[SImon Hobson]

I suspect that's aimed at those who've fallen for the FUD that using FOSS will land you in hot water, cost you big money in fines, land you in jail, kill your firstborn, bring on the apocalypse and the end of the known universe. Or you'll need to employ an army of compliance people and lawyers to avoid that happening.

Whereas (turns sarcasm up to 11), we all know that using MS or Oracle stuff is a walk in the park: their licensing is easy to understand and written in plain English, and they never EVER sue their customers over disagreements about what the easy to read stuff actually means.

[heyrick]

"...kill your firstborn, bring on the apocalypse and the end of the known universe."

Nah, that's Covid, not FOSS.

[blurglar]

FOSS made my hard drive magnetic.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

The "non-commercial" Micros~1 Office Home & Student editions (check the EULA), which leave breadcrumbs in the files that can attract the lawyer-vultures and lead to the doom of your sole-proprietor monetizing-the-hobby side job. All businesses, regardless of size, are supposed to shell out much more for an unencumbered Office edition.

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who relies on Word for my freelance work,* I've long been troubled by the fact that I would have to pay ~10× more (making it a major fraction of the income I earn from it) for a version that is exactly the same except for some lawyer stuff to officially be able to use it.

It doesn't cost them any more: I have no interest in support beyond what I would expect as a home user, so it just seems c#ntish for them to ask me to pay for telephone support, an email server, and that godforsaken mess that is Teams when I know I'll use none of it. As such, I just rely on it being considered petty and perceived as very bad PR for MS to sue anyone as small as me. Fingers crossed that I'm right. (But I've still gone AC just in case.)

^{*Before you start: no, much as I would love to, I simply cannot use LibreOffice for reasons of the need for precise compatibility in my particular field (and yes, I know that's MS's fault, not LO's).}

[jake]

I seem to remember multiple shareware titles back in the day that specifically and expressly forbade commercial use. There were also a few that forbade commercial use without paying an exorbitant fee, which amounts to the same thing. To the best of my knowledge, those titles should all still be available with their original license.

[Terry 6]

There's still free software for "non-commercial use only". Belarc I think uses that.

[ChrisC]

And some with some quite specific exemptions on use based on the authors personal beliefs - definitely used one that's forbidden to be used on military sites, and I have a vague memory of another that was forbidden to be used within the nuclear power industry.

[Agamemnon]

PKWare ZIP being the most glaring example that pops to mind.

[jake]

Is the other person who actually bothered to pay the registration fee for PKZip also here on ElReg?

[HelpfulJohn]

"Is the other person who actually bothered to pay the registration fee for PKZip also here on ElReg?"

Yes.

Yes, I am.

I also paid for Irfanview but only because I loved the thing and felt that Irfan deserved the money.

However, I did drop PKZip after it went bloated or something. I think it got bought up.

[Anonymous Coward]

@unimaginative - you can have free software

which is not legal for commercial use. Like VMware Workstation Player for example.

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of applications (and fonts!) are free for non-commercial use but need to be paid for by businesses. CoreFTP and IrfanView are a couple I know off the top of my head.

[Anonymous Coward]

What software is not legal for commercial use?

Ah, you're the type who will install some shareware on your office computer and then cost your employer a fortune when FAST gets tipped off.

Best start learning about license conditions, it is important.

[Tom 7]

And nigh on impossible! At one place we did a lot of stuff cos FAST were making headlines at the time but many of the licenses were impenetrable. We had a thing from MS that told us what licenses we had and what it thought we might need and would produce random seemingly contradictory data on different days.

[ChrisC]

Visual Studio (no, never heard of it either...) has introduced some frustrating limitations on commercial use of the free versions ever since the introduction of VS Community to replace VS Express.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides invisible diacritical marks

my native language also has sounds that are simply not transcribed as well as extra letters that are not translated into sounds. You just know they're there that's all.

[steelpillow]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

English is bad enough, as we native speakers tend to forget. For example, just you try enumerating all the pronunciations of "ough", all the various spellings of a given vowel sound, or when and why a "y" is or is not included in, or used as, a dipthong.

TEFL - teaching English as a foreign language - is an academic qualification in its own right, while Simplified English is its own sub-language, equivalent to Interslavic but not needing more than a single native language to encapsulate all the horrors it expunges.

[Totally not a Cylon]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

English is a constantly evolving unholy amalgamation of :

Norse (and other Scandinavian), Germanic, Norman-French, Latin, Greek and any other language we like the sound of.... (mostly from countries which we also liked the look of and took over....)

example: North of a line across the country a 'gate' is a road whereas south of that line it is an opening in a wall or fence.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

example: North of a line across the country a 'gate' is a road whereas south of that line it is an opening in a wall or fence

.. and in Westminster it represents a scandal :)

[jake]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

"and in Westminster it represents a scandal :)"

Which you borrowed from Watergate ... Have fun with it, we do :-)

[Dave559]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

"Which you borrowed from Watergate"

…and, if the Watergate complex had had a different name, that's one particular journalistic cliché which would have turned out entirely differently, or perhaps just wouldn't have existed (Let's be honest, the whole cliché-gate, or similar 'sequence', does sound pretty nonsensical when you think about it. But then, the equally weird, and even more ancient, gerrymander also seems to have stuck around…!).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Yes, it probably really annoys people called Gerry..

[Not Yb]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Specifically, one named Elbridge Gerry.

[jake]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Note that Mr. Gerry pronounced his name with a hard "G". I'll bet you pronounce "gerrymandering" wrong :-)

Next up in the list of useless arguments: Gif or Jif?

[jake]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Modern English is mostly an amalgam of Celtic, Latin, Ænglisc ("Old English"), Saxon, (Old)Norse and French. Not necessarily in that order.

_{Yes, there are other languages involved. I said "mostly" for a reason.}

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

There's very little Celtic in modern English, a few words but nothing grammatical or syntactical. It's fairer to say that it's an amalgam of Old English with Norse and Norman French with lots and lots of loan words, mainly latin and greek but also things like turquoise, tea and chutney.

[Terry 6]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Verandah bungalow pyjamas etc

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Tea vs cha(r).

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

The "ch" to "t" happened before the word got to Europe. But you can also add orange and coffee to the list.

[Tom 7]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

A dyke is a ditch in some places and the mound dug from the ditch in others. And in some places its a hard well earned slap if spoken out of turn.

[ChrisC]

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

"North of a line across the country a 'gate' is a road whereas south of that line it is an opening in a wall or fence......."

I found myself reading that in the style of Jack Dee at the start of an episode of ISIHAC, waiting for it to conclude with something like "...whereas south of that line it's a common rock formation".

[demon driver]

StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Just for the record, not every change in LibreOffice after the fork from OpenOffice was an improvement.

Then again, hardly any changes in OpenOffice over StarOffice 5 have been improvements to begin with.

More languages, of course, is always a good thing.

[veti]

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Unless they're imaginary languages used by nobody, anywhere, ever, with no underlying culture.

I'm that case they're just a waste of perfectly good bytes. An abuse of the time of everyone who has to scroll past it in a menu.

[Terry 6]

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Sometimes it's just fun.

[Dave559]

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

"[in] that case they're just a waste of perfectly good bytes."

You do realise that all of the language packs (apart from, usually, en-US) are add-on packages, that you have to choose whether to install; it's not as if LibreOffice comes by default with every single language pack included in the base install, which would indeed be rather wasteful.

[keithpeter]

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

@demon and all

Below is a quote from the OA

"If you're still using OpenOffice, don't. It's basically dead. Download LibreOffice, uninstall OpenOffice, then install LibreOffice instead. It's completely compatible because it's the same program, just a more modern version – smaller, faster, less buggy, and more secure."

I'd agree with the first sentence of the quote for new users or users without a large number of files produced using [Star |Open]Office.

Draw and Impress files with drawings produced in OpenOffice and opened in LibreOffice may warn about new settings and an incompatible change depending on the OpenOffice version that they were last opened with, so users like me who have files going back to OpenOffice 1 days need to step carefully. I'm still scoping this one out...

Icon: for all who contribute to either project. The more languages the merrier.

[Dave559]

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

There's nothing stopping you having both LibreOffice and OpenOffice installed, should you need to, of course.

[karlkarl]

"a more modern version – smaller, faster, less buggy, and more secure."

I find "modern" is such a weasel word these days. How is LibreOffice more modern? Also how is LibreOffice "smaller" than OpenOffice? Open-source software *never* gets smaller; everyone just keeps piling on more useless shite ;)

(I'm not biased between them. Instead I maintain a Gtk2 version of Abiword and Gnumeric because I find both LibreOffice and OpenOffice a bit of a mess)

[mmccul]

Smaller...

The libressl team, in the wake of heartbleed which spawned the project, eliminated tens of thousands of lines of code in the first few weeks of the project existing. That code was never going to come back.

Yes, software (OSS or COTS or custom build) can get smaller, but it does take some discipline, something that is often lacking in any codebase (not just OSS).

[EnviableOne]

Re: Smaller...

I cite the second law of thermodynamics, it applies in general not just in thermodynamics

Entropy increases with time.

in other words, in order to tidy things up, one must expend a lot of energy

[F. Frederick Skitty]

After the initial fork from OpenOffice, LibreOffice did get smaller as a lot of redundant code was removed.

[Charlie Clark]

At least on MacOS, OpenOffice is more stable and better looking.

[Anonymous Coward]

.. but neither support the Mac accent entry system where you hold down a character like "e" to access its accented cousins like é and ë, maybe I should take a look at Collabora if they have it implemented.

That said, we haven't had any problems so far. I did have a crash issue once at which occasion I started to appreciate that LO's crash document recovery actually *works*, but one update and it was solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Manx should be spoken

"Native Manx people are a minority in their own country"

That's as daft as saying English people (off of England), that speak a Brythonic language are a minority. Thanks to a bunch of Romans, some enterprising tribes off of the continent, and a bastard from northern France and other murderous terrorists, we end up with the modern situation. The proceeding is, of course, complete bollocks but slightly true.

Welsh is largely healthy as is Scottish. Irish is of course looked after by the Irish. Cornish is seeing a resurgence: I think the last native speakers died off a about 40 years ago but it is being successfully resurrected as a second language.

Cumbric is dead and I don't hear much about it apart from a mention in a book about it's numbers being used by shepherds for counting sheep - "yam, tam, tithera" etc.

Language is largely what defines us. Diversity of language, for me, is just as important as any other form of diversity. I think that the Brythonic languages need to be conserved and ideally spoken and evolved. Follow the Welsh model - it works. I understand that Manx is a separate country but if you play your cards right, you might make it work. Don't whine. Roll up your sleeves instead.

[Tom 7]

Re: Manx should be spoken

Kernow (Cornish) is seeing an interesting resurgence. It's not taught in schools much but with Cornwall's increasing reliance on the tourist industry for wonga it would be very useful for the service staff in pubs, cafes and restaurants to have a 2nd language so they can openly discuss customers that need the 'amphibious landing craft' treatment B Faulty handled so well.

[Timbo]

Re: Manx should be spoken

This idea also works well in reverse - as I took a friend of mine who has spent many years in Hong Kong and is fluent in Chinese, to my local fish & chippy, who happen have a Chinese owner and staff (but who speak very good Engrish).

So, ordering "2 large Cod and chips to take away please", to the counter staff, resulted in them speaking to the "fryer" in Chinese what the order was...at which point my friend, translated what they had said to me, and to their amazement, he then spoke to them in Chinese, to tweak the order slightly, as they had missed out translating the English word "large"...

The look of surprise and shock on their faces when this tall English guy spoke fluent Chinese back to them was priceless...and they ended up chatting in Chinese while the order was cooked...

[EnviableOne]

Re: Manx should be spoken

something like this happened on the Tube...

Behind us in the train were a group of Germans conversion in their native tongue and discussing how great it was that no one else could understand a word they were saying, but they could easily understand the locals.

My little sister, having spent considerable time over the preceding years visiting in southern Germany, and not being of the sort to stay quiet when a conversation is to be had, stood up turned around and smiled, issuing in perfect german the phrase "Ich Verstehe"

queue the four young germans going red in the face, some awkward silence, followed by an interesting conversation about educational differences and the propensity for young English people to actually learn german, some ahead of french as was more traditional

[Liam Proven]

Re: Manx should be spoken

> That's as daft as saying English people (off of England), that speak a Brythonic language are a minority.

Less than 50% of the ~85,000 people who live in the Isle of Man were born there.

Simple.

This is why Mec Vannin finds it hard to attract much support.

https://www.mecvannin.im/

The more vexed question is of ethnic Manxness. Of the people born there, many are born to non-Manx parents. There are multiple uniquely Manx surnames (Kissack, Mylchreest, Quayle, Quilliam and many more) and Manx families, but these days, there are more people of English, Irish and Scottish descent living there than Manx people.

Some of my native-Manx friends from my teens over there learned the Manx language as adults, in night school, partly as a way of reinforcing their Manx identity, and more power to their elbows. It's come back from the dead.

Now they have finally ratified a unified spelling system, maybe Cornish could be next.

[TimMaher]

Re: Quilliam

Didn't he work with George Smiley?

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Quilliam

That would be "Gwillam", the Welsh cognate.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Manx should be spoken

With it being an island, it's not surprisin that the Isle of Man also has a very proud Norse tradition so any kind of Celtic purity was lost over a millennium ago. Same is true for much of coastal Ireland including places like Galway.

A lot of common linguistic ideas are caught up in the 19th century romatincism that created them

[dvd]

Re: Manx should be spoken

I'm going to risk getting downvoted to oblivion here, but here goes.

When a minority language dies I think that we should document it, dance on it's grave and move on.

Why revive it? Why force it on the kids?

Think of the advantage that a young person would have learning Spanish or Mandarin or Russian rather than an obscure extreme minority language that you can only speak to fifty other people in, and fifty people that you could talk more efficiently to in English anyway. And a language whose vocabulary for everything invented since the industrial revolution is English, just badly spelled.

[Daniel M]

Re: Manx should be spoken

I think that it is dangerous to forget history. Examples abound.

That said, I really wonder about the modern Western preoccupation with "extinction." Ever since caveman took up a club, we have been killing things. Eating is good, and it is preferable to getting et.

Maybe it is the way of nature, and God's plan, for species to go extinct from time to time, just as it could be for new species to arise from time to time.

Circling back to the question of languages: should we forbid Esperanto and Klingon as illegitimate languages, or do we have to preserve them somehow as soon as they become some poor infant's first language?

[Timbo]

Re: Manx should be spoken

"Eating is good, and it is preferable to getting et."

I though ET had left the planet already...so it can't be "got" anymore ? ;-)

[jake]

Re: Manx should be spoken

I'm pretty sure et was a correct past tense of eat (12th C), at least in English, long before ET got here.

We won't go into proper use of capitalization here ... it always attracts the loonies who seem to think CAPS don't matter in written English

[Bowlers]

Re: Manx should be spoken

I'm confused, here in the NW lots of people speak Mancs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

Not sure if Bill Shatner is a Libre Office user or if he speaks Klingon, but he did once make a movie in Esperanto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)

[Kane]

Re: Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

"Not sure if Bill Shatner is a Libre Office user or if he speaks Klingon, but he did once make a movie in Esperanto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)"

Oh yeah? Well, as the Esperanto would say, "Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!" And I think we all know what that means.

[jake]

Re: Bill Shatner & Constructed languages

"And I think we all know what that means."

Beware of Alice's poisoned lasagna run through my bidet?

I guess they were right! Esperanto is easy!

_{Kiu sciis? Mi scivolas, ĉu estas mono en ĝi...}

[Yeti]

Fourth gender

Which one is the fourth Czech gender? I'm aware of only three.

t. Czech

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fourth gender

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a joke made in bad taste about 4 genders not being enough for my language; an LGBTQ+ Compatible language needs to be more ‘inclusive’ and have even more genders.

No joke, a mate of ours is that way inclined and even he refers to the sub-culture as the alphabet people.

A/c because this will no doubt offend someone. Welcome to the internet!

[Tom 7]

Re: Fourth gender

Is not one gender enough for 99.99% of purposes? You dont serve coffee any differently to any of the above so you dont really need to differentiate someone's sexual orientation unless its actually pertinent and 99.99% of the time we're not trying to shag each other.

[renke]

Re: Fourth gender

Isn't the masculine gender divided in animate and inanimate?

Full disclosure: I could be totally wrong. I struggle enough with my first language :)

[Yeti]

Re: Fourth gender

All three (four??) genders may be animate or inanimate but I ain't no linguist.

I'm just getting more and more curious.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Fourth gender

As I understand it -- I do not speak Russian -- all 3 basic genders in Russian are divided into animate and inanimate, but Czech does it only to masculine.

[Charles 9]

Re: Fourth gender

Well, in general, gender can have several groupings depending on the language: masculine/feminine/neuter, personal/nonpersonal, and animate/inanimate, for starters.

[jake]

Re: Fourth gender

And yet we have people attempting to completely remove gramatical gender from English.

Ain't nowt daft as folks.

[42656e4d203239]

Re: Fourth gender

>>And yet we have people attempting to completely remove gramatical gender from English.

I think you are getting gender (male/female/whatever) mixed up with masculine/feninine/neuter in the linguistic sense - they are both called gender (don't you love English?) but mean different things (depending on context of course)

Grammatically English is all neuter - IIRC becasue various tribes who invaded eventually had to talk to each other and the pople they vanquished. The gendering of the separate conquest languages made things too difficult so it was just abandoned. English is (almost?) unique, globally, in not having masculine/feminine verbs as well as netuer

In our local geographical neighbours, French and Spanish and, probably, Portugese have abandoned Neuter as a bad job... arguably they should have abandioned masculine and feminine. Don't start on about German though, get the m/f/n wrong and you can say completely unintended things.)

To what I think you were saying..... Socially people are trying to de-gender English as she is spoke/writ large so as not to offend/misclassify sections of the population which is a whole other discussion.

[Stork]

Re: Fourth gender

Confirmed: PT doesn’t have neutrum

[doublelayer]

Re: Fourth gender

"English is (almost?) unique, globally, in not having masculine/feminine verbs as well as netuer"

You may be unfamiliar with non-European languages, but it's really not that unique. For example, one other language that doesn't have grammatical genders is Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and other variants included). Most of languages spoken in eastern Asia do this, including Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. That's quite a large one. Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of largely-spoken languages that don't have grammatical gender: Bengali, Yoruba, Javanese, Basque, Persian/Farsi, Turkish, Finnish, Tamil, and Quechua. There are loads more. It's just that a lot of the languages spoken in and around Europe do have genders, so they have become expected in many cases.

[42656e4d203239]

Re: Fourth gender

Thanks for that.... it was something I heard somewhere - I should have gone to fact checkers first!

[EnviableOne]

Re: Fourth gender

linguistically English actually has 4 genders, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and Common.

He, She, They, IT.

[doublelayer]

Re: Fourth gender

That's gendered pronouns, not grammatical gender. You, for example, do not have different adjective forms if the described noun is one of those genders, nor do you assign those genders to inanimate nouns. For that matter, you also don't have different adjective forms (though there are different verb conjugations in some cases) for singular or plural nouns.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Fourth gender

I believe Polish has the personal/impersonal split, but Czech -- thankfully -- does not. I do not speak Polish either, though.

[F. Frederick Skitty]

Re: Fourth gender

I'm thankful that Finnish, my second language, has no gender distinction. It does make Czech sound easier in other respects though, as it has fifteen cases...

[Yeti]

Re: Fourth gender

Finnish is allegedly 100% regular, whereas Czech is a completely different beast. Or so have I heard.

[jake]

Re: Fourth gender

If you had to live with an outhouse in Finnish winters, you'd be 100% regular too.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Fourth gender/an Underground Movement and Novel Race of Alien Species

That made me laugh, jake. :-) Thanks for that. Have a beer on me.

It has been my experience that there can be even a great number of native English language speakers who do not understand that the future cannot be revealed and experienced by them if they do not accept and realise that new words are necessary for them to escape from their captivity which has them stuck in the past slaving to the status quo mastering race/executive office elite.

The opportunity then that presents itself is that foreign language native spaces, similarly interested in the nature of the future, are an equally valid and possibly rabidly virile market place to enter with one’s wares for sharing/import/export/sale/purchase/lend/lease whenever the only logical conclusion on the home team is reached that they are either retarded or terrified and petrified and/or incapable of change themselves.

[F. Frederick Skitty]

Re: Fourth gender

Standard Finnish is extremely regular - the only exception I can think of is the case endings on place names can be a bit unpredictable. Colloquial Finnish is a bit looser with grammar, while regional dialects can differ quite a bit as well.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Fourth gender

As well as no grammatical gender, Finnish also has no subjunctive mood and no true future tense.

In other words, in Finnish, there is no sex, no hope and no future.

[F. Frederick Skitty]

Re: Fourth gender

I'm surprised I've never heard that joke before - it's brilliant!

[Liam Proven]

Re: Fourth gender

Veděl jsem, že se nekdo zepta!

Ženský, střední, mužský životný a mužský neživotný.

(There are probably mistakes in there. Mea culpa.)

I knew that someone would ask.

Feminine, neuter, masculine animate and masculine inanimate.

So, for example, "I will have grilled salmon" is "já se dám grilovaného lososa" (got to remember that accusative declension) but "I will have grilled cheese" is "já se dám grilovaný sýr".

I know, it only changes the accusative and not the nominative, genitive, dative, vocative, locative or instrumental but even so, it's different.

And it's impossible to work out, so I have to remember.

A snowman is masculine animate (sněhulák) but a tree (strom) and a forest (les) are masculine inanimate. But trees are alive, while snowmen are not.

[Yeti]

Re: Fourth gender

No mistakes up there (well, except "zeptá"), good job!

OK, what about "I will have grilled fish" = "dám si grilovanou rybu"? Ryba is feminine, animate.

As you most likely know, there are "model words" (or how's that in English) for each gender and er... "animateness". Each gender has two animate and two inanimate + masculine has two more specials ("předseda" and "soudce"). So you only have to learn declension of these 14 models and then determine which of them fits the word you're trying to say. Easy peasy! ;)

Have several of these, they help communication -->

Still relatively cheap here, despite the inflation.

[Haynomonous]

Nice to see Stephen Fry in the pic, out and about trying new things.

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Unique features

"the only language I've ever met with invisible diacritic marks, which aren't written but you must pronounce"

Every language has its own special features. Welsh is the only language I have met which, in some circumstances, conjugates prepositions.

[Tom 7]

Re: Unique features

Are these the drunken umlouts you meet outside a pub on a drinking night?

[khjohansen]

Re: Unique features

Pffft - as if drånken ûmleüts wære particulær to Wæls!

[alain williams]

Pity that Klingon Unicode ...

did not make it. There is still a proposal which probably will not go far.

[Balcom A]

Open Office & or Libre Office.

Must agree with "Demon Driver" above. The changes to Libre Office have not always been successful and (over time) the altered / reduced colour palette has thrown a spanner in the works. I have generated my genealogy charts over the last 10 years using both suites, but every change throws something out.

I use both. With the size of modern hard disks / SSD's why not keep both of them. Manipulating lines and boxes is currently easier in Open Office, so that's what I use most.

[John Sager]

I have a template for generating and printing Christmas card address labels from a Libre office database. It gets used once a year and every year I have to fix something to get the print to register correctly on the label stationery. I used to have to export to PDF and print that but this time that didn't work - the scaling isn't 100%!. Then I found that printing from Libre office worked perfectly when it didn't last time for other scaling issues. I wonder what I'll find next December!

[Dwarf]

Dont know what took them so long.

Google search has had Klingon, Bork. Elmer Fudd, Jawa, Pirate and Hacker for a good while. Its a great way to teach people not to leave their computer unlocked as its not immediately visible to them.

Go to Google, settings (bottom right), Search Settings, Language.

Often English is fairly readable from the list when you need to get back to some form of normality.

[heyrick]

Re: Wait, No Ferengi?

Maybe some day, Hymmnos and Ar-Cielan too.

[EnviableOne]

Re: Wait, No Ferengi?

Ferengi have no interest in LibreOffice, Open Source is an anathema to the rules of acquisition

[nautica]

"...Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic" ...

...but NOT, in almost thirteen years, Microsoft-Office-formatted documents.

..."Don't worry, there is a point to this"

What, exactly, is it?

Why, the fact that The Document Foundation considers the "supporting" of "Klingon" ("KLINGON", for God's sake) to be the only way to keep the brainless twats continuing to support its pathetic, useless existence (thirteen years, Remember?!).

As one wag has said: considering LibreOffice to be a real office suite, with any utility and reasonable functionality at all, makes "reality TV" look like the invention of calculus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic" ...

You have tried using it in anger, haven't you? I don't deny the MS offering's utility, but the level of compatibility is LibreOffice is very good indeed. And as noted by the article, it's ability to recover damaged documents has literally saved staff around my office hundreds of hours.

Genuinely, don't knock it till you've tried it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic" ...

Also, the ability to support Klingon and Interslavic is essentially just expanding on what Unicode support is supposed to offer. Given that Klingon is available in Unicode...

[Anonymous Coward]

Donation option

130 comments later so not sure how many will ever read down this far but I downloaded the new version and clicked the donate button to pay via Paypal but found that LibreOffice Foundation apparently *need* my full postal address in order to receive a donation. So I've backed out for the moment.

Is this some US regulatory thing or are they just trying to hoover-up details?

As a general point I'm finding it harder and harder to donate anonymously any more. Even the Salvation Army insist on contact details.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Donation option

Contact details? Certainly.

c/o Mr. Claus

Arctic Circle

96930 Arctic Circle

Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Donation option

Unfortunately if I pay by Paypal then Paypal provide the details and I don't get to edit them. Otherwise it's credit card and for that they do need my name and address.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead? Really?

"If you're still using OpenOffice, don't. It's basically dead." Funny then that v4.1.11 was released on openoffice.org last October and it was the 4th update of 2021.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the difficulty of some languages, there's maybe a reason why languages go extinct?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kerplunk!

Pointless useless nerd bloat.

[bert1]

Yuppi!

LibreOffice rocks! If they add the languages I will use it.

Slavic languages are beautiful.

See comparision: www.slovanto.eu