Hongkonger majoring in computer science with great interest in languages spoken in the ex-Soviet Union. Catch me adding entries in (mostly) Belarusian, Yiddish, Lithuanian, or Pannonian Rusyn, while speaking none of those languages. As the user information might indicate, I'm a jack of all trades, and also a master of none, and sometimes this gets me in trouble with certain Wiktionary language communities with very rigid standards.
By ancestry, as far back as I can trace, I'm boring old Han Chinese. I thought my father's side was northern Chinese, but it turns out his family had moved up north from the south before he was born. So yup, boring old southern Chinese. Despite this however, my Mandarin's pretty rusty. This is Hong Kong, we don't usually have much of a reason to speak it. Hell, I even construct sentences in Cantonese using an English syntax. Speaking of which...
Believe it or not, I don't actually speak HK-accented English. I can imitate it very well, because everyone around me speaks that accent, but I was raised in a neighbourhood full of Brits, and my English is naturally a bit Commonwealth-oriented, both in my spelling and my vocabulary. Problem? I don't speak RP either. Every time I try to speak RP, my accent devolves into somewhere between Aussie and Kiwi. I also learned a super authentic Scottish accent from a guy fae Glesga, and now I speak:
Broad North American (I call it Canadian, but really it's more northeastern US with an extra "zed" and "shore" thrown into it. My favourite word of all time is "colourize")
Scottish (some person told me it's something they'd hear in Edinburgh but I'd personally say more Glasgow; I tend to use /ɹ/ quite a bit before consonants and word-end which makes it Scots-Irish I used to use /ɹ/ quite often but now I've taken on the Glaswegian feature of /ʁ/ syllable-end and /ɾ/ elsewhere) (Aug 2024 update: I am living in Glasgow for three weeks, and on the off chance I talk to someone, I'm never sure whether to use a "neutral" accent or try to go all-in Weegie)
Australo-Kiwi (I don't know how I got this accent - I barely consume Australian media at all, I've been to Perth once, and not at all to NZ/Aotearoa. I tend to tune my accent to Kiwi, but in general it's more Australian-based. But somehow, I sound absolutely native to that region of the world, and one Australian friend even said I sounded like their teacher)
So I may have been a Scottish-descended Australian farmer in a previous life. Who knows. It gets even more complicated when you consider that I tend to pronounce English /θ/, sometimes even /ð/, like /f/, even though I'm perfectly capable of making the former sound. I think that might be influence from a very specific part of southern England on HK English, but I can't recall exactly which part that is.
I don't speak a lot of languages, but I can read a lot of them out with a native-sounding accent. This includes Turkic languages and even Chukchi, a language spoken in the Far East of Russia. In general, I'm fascinated mostly by languages of the former Soviet Union. I've taken dives into Mariupol Greek, Yiddish, Kazakh, Belarusian, Kalmyk, Tajik, Ingrian, Karelian, the lot, but by no means do I speak any of these languages even at an elementary level. My knowledge of Russian's also gotten me pretty far with Polish, Ukrainian, and even Czech and Bulgarian to an extent. I'm hopeless with Arabic, and don't even get me started on southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.
On Macanese though - admittedly I didn't really know much about it starting out, but the grammar (minus the idiomatic component of course) is quite straightforward; plus there's also the fact that, y'know, I'm a native Cantonese speaker. From a European-colonized city in East Asia. So some cultural references are more common to us than they would be between a Macanese and say a modern Portuguese person. Plus Wiktionary is just REALLY lacking on this topic.
Revisiting this section having done a semester at Vilnius University, my Lithuanian is definitely better than it was prior to my exchange, but I still can't call myself fluent by any means. More like A2 at best. I've also been able to make some headway into Latvian, although that's a whole different thing with a whole different phonology and a good amount of different words. Riga is lovely, however; went there for a few days in July, and I ended up buying a book with poems in Livonian, complete with Latvian translations. I tried looking for Yiddish-related things in Vilnius, to no avail. The most significant thing I found was one Yiddish-language plaque in central Vilnius talking about the ghetto.
Protologism (n.): a newly coined word or phrase defined in the hope that it will become common; a recently created term possibly in narrow use but not yet acknowledged.
Here is where I invent words. If anyone wants to use them, let me know, I'd be happy to see them incorporated into sentences and such.
Паграпу́йце сло́ва «да» з гэ́тага тэ́кставага фа́йла.
Pogrėpujcie słówa “da” z hetoho tekstovoho fajła.
Grep the word "da" from this text file.
лётнішчаn(ljótnišča): airport. лётны(ljótny) + -ішча(-išča), modelled after Polishlotnisko. Okay, it seems it actually already exists, but I'm bringing it back into popular use.
няшпо́рыm pl(njašpóry): vespers. Borrowed from Polishnieszpory. This actually already exists (the не-(ne-) form comes up with more Russian-language results), but as far as I can tell it's just used in strongly Polish-coloured Belarusian, or when used to specifically talk about Polish vespers. It also lends itself to joke-protologisms like шпо́ры(špóry, “not vespers???”), or more serious ones like няшпо́рны(njašpórny, adjective) (which also already exists in a Swobóda Radio article).
тэляды́скm(teljadýsk): music video. Borrowed from Polishteledysk. Belarusian has тэле-(telje-), it has дыск(dysk), so it feels weird that this word doesn't exist, given the proactiveness of Belarusian borrowing from Polish (cf. лёды(ljódy), мэлён(meljón)).
gender(adjective): (slang)Synonym of pansexual. My definition of it does come from the transgender slang, but I use it slightly differently to denote someone who is comfortable presenting as any gender or sexuality.
Andrew Garfield is such a gender actor. He's able to act as a gay man in one movie, and be a loving father in a straight relationship the next.
populate(verb): (colloquial,figurative,transitive) to make a number of entries all beginning with the same letter in a given language on Wiktionary. By analogy of bringing in more people to live in a given location.
Yesterday I made three entries related to cevapi to populate the ⟨ч⟩ section for Pannonian Rusyn.
Boris: Boris(given name). My problem with Lithuanian as it stands is that the name Boris is actually Borisas, even though -is is a valid masculine noun ending in Lithuanian. For example:
ґрифтm inan(grift): (neologism)grift. Borrowed from Englishgrift. I feel like we could all use that one. I don't know how well "swindle" or its equivalent translation gets the nuance across.
пролетеришицкихдержавох, зєдинїцеше(proleteri šickix deržavox, zjedinjice še): workers of the world, unite! I think I've got the translation correct. No one's used it on Ruske Slovo, but I translated word-for-word the Serbian translation. But since it's my own creation, I won't put it on the translations hub.
באַנאיריסm(banirís): banoffee. A rather awkward blend of באַנאַן(banan) / באַנאַנע(banane) and איריס(iris) that makes me wish I would've just gone for באַנאָפֿי(banofi) instead, but I'm sure someone's used that latter one at some point.
ביסקוויטן און גרייוויpl(biskvitn un greyvi): biscuits and gravy. I used גרייווי(greyvi) over e.g. יויך(yoykh) because I've been informed that the latter is used for all kinds of sauce, plus American Yiddish speakers genuinely say greyvi (albeit spelt גרעיווי(greyvi)). גרייווי(greyvi) is probably also more apt for the specific kind of milk gravy found in the southern US.
בלעזלעך־טייf(blezlekh-tey): boba tea. You have NO IDEA how tempted I was to just use באָבקעס(bobkes), but obviously there's a tiny semantic issue there. And yes, בלעזל(blezl) is a real word.
פֿאַנקייקm(fankeyk): (US) a pancake, specifically American-style. Blend of פֿאַן(fan) + Englishpancake, in imitation of פֿרוכטשייק(frukhtsheyk). לאַטקע(latke) and בלינצע(blintse) are great words, but I don't think they can appropriately express the concept of an American-style pancake, and the CEYD alternative אַמעריקאַנישער לאַטקע(amerikanisher latke) doesn't have quite the precision and snappiness.
גרעפּן(grepn): to grep. This already exists in Germangreppen. By surface analysis, Englishgrep + ־ן(-n). In case you forgot, I'm a CS major. Using UNIX shell script is kinda my thing.
נערדיק(nerdik): nerdy. Borrowed from Germannerdig. By surface analysis, נערד(nerd) + ־יק(-ik). Honestly, I'm really quite surprised this isn't already a thing, what with the majority of Yiddish speakers being American.
סמאָרm(smor): a s'more. Given that the (I must remind you, American) CEYD has words for egg cream and mac and cheese, I'm honestly quite surprised there isn't a word for this. Surely Jews also roast marshmallows over campfires? In fact, while researching the Yiddish word for marshmallow, I found fascinating tales of 1930s American confectioners making ads in Yiddish to sell their marshmallows to Jews.
טשילי־וווּרשטלn(tshili-vurshtl): a chili dog(hot dog topped with chili). See also טשילי מיט פֿלייש(tshili mit fleysh), a very much real dictionary entry.
