English considered badly designed [entries|reading|network|archive]
simont

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Fri 2007-06-15 14:01
English considered badly designed
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[personal profile] pthaloMon 2007-06-18 13:34
On Hungarian passports, gender is listed as either F or N, which expands to Férfi (man) or Nő (woman). It always takes me a while to remember what language I'm supposed to be thinking in when I see either an English female's passport (sex: F), or a Hungarian male's passport (sex: F)
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[personal profile] simontMon 2007-06-18 14:15
And that in turn is reminding me of the confusion on taps between the UK and France: H(ot)/C(old) versus C(haud)/F(roid). ISTR being tripped up by this a couple of times when I was a small child on French exchanges, absentmindedly turning on the C tap and finding it was unexpectedly hot.

As I recall, I eventually solved this problem not by learning to think in French, but by pretending the French had higher standards for hot water, so that our "hot" and "cold" were by their standards "cold" and "freezing" :-)
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