Arseny KhakhalinNov 6, 2022

It turns out that in Thai, to make a plural you just repeat a word. (At least for some words?) So "dogs" would be dogdog.

But wait, there's more! As writing dogdog is boring, in writing they use a _modified number 2_ (imagine something like dog²) to indicate that it's actually a dogdog! So dogs is written as dog² (but pronounced dogdog).

Very hot is hot². Really far is far².

Isn't it nice?

https://twitter.com/thai101/status/1589250728446787586

Rikker Dockum /ɹɪkɹ̩/ on Twitter

“Reduplication in Thai is so important that it has a punctuation mark specifically for reduplication: ๆ เด็ก /dèk/ “child” เด็กๆ /dèk dèk/ “children” What many don’t know is it’s just an orthographic offspring of the numeral two ๒ with a straightened-out tail: ๒ > ๆ”

Twitter
Show threadArseny Khakhalin

Japanese also has a duplication symbol (々), but I just cannot grokk the rules from Wikipedia. Seems quite complicated, as apparently there's a difference between phonetic and semantic reduplication (if I got it right? 🤯). Makes one want to learn some Japanese (but then, I need to learn German first, and then I want to learn Ukrainian, and then I want to learn some Czech...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iteration_mark#Japanese

Iteration mark - Wikipedia

Nov 6, 2022 at 10:42pmWeb
Show threadGlen BrownNov 6, 2022
@ampanmdagaba I am learning Japanese and the rules around Kanji in general are usually of the form “This the rule, except for the 40% of the time that it’s not and you just have to memorise everything anyway” 😓
Show threadArseny KhakhalinNov 6, 2022

@glen Yeah, that's my fear / eary observation with Japanese (I tried to start learning it once, for about 3 months, long time ago). It's just super-scary, precisely because of these blurry imperfect rules that almost tease you with their potential existence, but never quite completely materialize...

I bet that's how people get into conlang. They just try to learn smth like Japanese, and then go full fuck it, Volapuk it is!