Now if for some reason you dont know this, I live in Sweden. Sweden, Norway and to some extent Denmark pretty much have the same language. The only way for me to try and compare it is like this.
An american (swede) can understand a brittish (norweigan) person, and danish would be about the same as an american trying to understand a drunk irishman.
Now when we got that cleared up.
A potentional employer from norway called and woke me up this morning. I can only assume that we understood each other somewhat, since she said at the end of the conversation that she will call me back with more information in a few days. I think the job had something to do with pipes. But I cant say for sure. I know that she asked me if I had any experience in whatever she asked me about, and I said that ofcourse I do. I got years of experiences of just that. But then again, whatever she had asked, I would still have years and years of experience. Thats how you get a job isnt it? By saying you can do anyting and then cross your fingers that they'll take your word for it?
And hoping you wont be working alone so you can watch how others do and do whatever they are doing.
Anywas, languages have always fascinated me. The way you can put random letters together and all of a sudden they mean something. Pretty cool. Although some stuff dont make sense. I'm all for stuff making sense, I like sense. And some stuff would be so much easier if words related to each other were more similar. Two words that means the opposite, but are almost spelled and pronounced the same way can cause confusion and missunderstandings.
I will give an example, keep in mind that this is from a point of view from someone who doesnt have english as their native language.
* Humiliation
* Humility
Look at those two words, dont they seem related to you? Now I dont mean that the meaning of the two words are the same, ofcourse not. The whole point is that to someone who is learning english as a secondary language, they can easily be confused to mean almost the same thing.
While in fact they are quite different. This is how the dictionary describe these words.
Humiliation:
Humiliation (also called stultification) is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission. It can be brought about through bullying, intimidation, physical or mental mistreatment or trickery, or by embarrassment if a person is revealed to have committed a socially or legally unacceptable act. Whereas humility can be sought alone as a means to de-emphasise the ego, humiliation must involve other person(s), though not necessarily directly or willingly. Acting to humiliate yourself may be linked to a personal belief (as with mortification of the flesh, with some religions).
Humility:
Humility is the quality of being humble: modest, not proud, doing something out of the goodness of your heart, not for yourself, self-abasing. Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue in many religious and philosophical traditions, being connected with notions of transcendent unity with the universe or the divine, and of egolessness; by contrast, some schools of thought are sharply critical of humility.
Now maybe you have to have another language than english in order to see how these words can be confused with each other. Or maybe its just me. But to me I can see how someone who doesnt speak enlgish fluently to say something like this:
"You really need to learn some humiliation"
Which wouldnt really make sense. Did I mention that I like things that makes sense?
Granted the misuse of those two words can be funny, I can only imagine what trouble it can cause if said to the wrong person in the wrong situation.
And I can see that I'm just ranting right now, so I'm going to stop right here and just go back to bed.
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