Chasing A Dream

photography, linguistics, video games, and takes on life eco-socialist he/him

[goatsandgangsters]

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

[yvanspijk]

Slim, slim, schlimm

The word slim means 'slender; tiny', while Dutch slim means 'smart'. And then there's German schlimm, meaning 'bad'. What's going on here? Despite their wildly different meanings, these words all have the same ancestor, which is reconstructed to mean 'slanted; tilted'. Over the centuries, the meanings of its descendants underwent pejoration, getting more negative meanings, or amelioriation, getting more positive meanings. My new graphic shows how it went.

[uovoc]

English has different words for mouse and rat but in Chinese they're both the same creature (laoshu) so I asked my mom well how do you differentiate between mice and rats. She, clearly having never felt the need to do so, was like uhh big laoshu and little laoshu I guess. Then I went online to see how the difference between (the English words) "mouse" and "rat" was being explained to CN->EN learners and there are numerous articles delving deep into the analysis. Bigger vs smaller, indoors vs outdoors, cute and favorable connotations vs evil and ugly, tail length, fear factor, emphasis on the fact that you cannot call it a "computer rat." Much thought is being expended on this little mystery of the English language

[xiangqiankua]

Last time I was looking for an apartment, the guy showing me a room that opened directly to the alley was like 你怕老鼠嗎？and I, hoping to distinguish mouse vs rat, asked 大的還是小的? To which he replied, with great satisfaction: 都有!😃

[sladeofyaupon]

Translation: "Are you afraid of rodents?" "Big ones or small ones?" "We've got both."

[goopi-e]

@probably-ace-ok This is beautiful.

[jv]

I'm always utterly confused by the difference between Ravens and Crows, since we only have a word for both in Spanish.

Also, I'm very confused by the lack of difference between "búhos" and "lechuzas" in English, like if both things were even close to being similar.

[magess]

Can you illustrate with photos?

[jv]

Do you mean lechuza/búho?

Yup!

[the-pithy-aaaaah]

Oh we just give owls long multi word names so the buho is a great horned owl (even if it's not and it might not be) and the lechuza is a barn owl

[jv]

Yeah, but that's the thing, for you folks those are two categories of the same type of bird. For me they are different types of birds, like an eagle and a falcon, or a magpie and a blackbird.

I guess it's the same thing with ravens to me: I know about the differences: it's just what I've learned to see ravens and crows as variations in the same type of animal.

[jv]

@akasanata

Oh au contraire, mon ami. Maybe the Spanish from the Americas had lost the differences, but the euro Spanish is insanely specific about this type of prey bird, to the point that you need to be an expert to know what to use. This a list of prey birds that are smaller than an eagle and relatively common in iberia:

- halcón

- milano

- cernícalo

- alcotan

- gavilan

- azor

[vaspider]

In Yiddish & Hebrew, there's one word for both doves & pigeons. טויב, toyb, plural טויבן, toybn.

However, Yiddish has different specific words for the mother of your son's spouse and the mother of your daughter's spouse, and a specific single word which means "both sets of parents of a married couple." IDK why that's what I thought of, but I think it's cool. There's also a single word that means "the youngest person in a particular family."

[silvergryphonart]

Not sure if this makes it better or worse but dove/pigeon is known to be an arbitrary distinction in English; it has no connection to scientific classification. The common domestic/feral pigeon is descended from the rock dove. Whether a bird is called a pigeon or a dove is pretty much the choice of the person who named it, often based on size or aesthetics. Yiddish gets it right

[vaspider]

It's pretty much - not fully consistent, but largely so - that larger species are usually called pigeon (origin: French) while smaller and more delicate species are called doves (origin: Old English/Norse). So it's more common to hear "rock pigeon" vs "mourning dove" and "turtle dove."

They're all Columbidae the same way that a raven and a crow are both Corvidae, yes, but there is a general logic to which word gets used for which. Whether it's wrong or right, idk.

[whodoyouthinkithinkiam]

Not as cool as animals, but this reminds me of a time one of my coworkers casually mentioned another of our coworkers having brown hair, and a third coworker, whose first language was Spanish, said, "David's hair isn't brown! It's, uh, castaño. What's castaño in English again..."

She looked down at her computer screen, then back up, looking quite annoyed. "How can that also be brown? They're not the same colour!"

[elodieunderglass]

Bread-coloured hair is apparently in French, châtain clair, and, in Spanish, castaño claro,

a fact I learned far too late

[japanwords]

外柔内剛 (gai-jū-nai-go) “Soft outside, hard inside”

This expression refers to someone who is soft and gentle on the outside, but inwardly tough and resilient. Similar to the English expression “steel in a velvet glove”.

This is a special kind of Japaneses idiom known as a 四字熟語 (よじじゅくご、yo-ji-juku-go), or 4-character idiom. As the name suggests, these are idiomatic phrases made of 4 kanji characters.

They often contain a small life lesson or moral message, similar to English sayings such as “you reap what you sow” and “the early bird gets the worm”.

[max1461]

I think linguists have, broadly, a culture of strong resistance to the core of the field being politicized. This comes in the form of a mathematician-esque kneejerk "we don't do our work for any practical reason, we do it for the love of the game, now leave us to our puzzles" attitude. This is stronger in some sectors of the field than others. But I think if you look at, say, economics—arguably the most politicized semi-technical field out there—you will see what an epistemic disaster the alternate path can be.

[unpickled-olive-deactivated2025]

historical linguistics is so cool/sad. there's just so much we can never know.

[unpickled-olive-deactivated2025]

Reading sci-fi: How is it that humans colonized the whole galaxy but don't remember what planet they came from?

Real anthropologists: we don't know the name of the people whose cultural hegemony resulted in half the world speaking a descendent of their language. We think they dug pits and had several h-like sounds.

[guerrillatech]

[reluctantbroodingdads]

So as an Antarctic expert I need to add to this that we had not in fact been to Antarctica when it was named. The ancient Greeks decided that because there was an Arctic at the top of the world, with bears, there had to be an opposite at the other end, without bears. Which is kind of ridiculous except that the fuckers were dead on

[hbmmaster]

etymology fact check: I doubt the people saying this are like just making it up because it's close enough to the truth that it might just be misremembered but it also might as well just be completely made up

the name "Antarctica" means "against/opposite of the Arctic", because that's where it is (the opposite side of the world from the Arctic). the prefix anti- does not mean "not" or "no", and claiming "Antarctica" means "no bears" is a blatant mistranslation.

the Arctic in turn is named not after the polar bears that live there, but after The Bear, as in Ursa Major.

the idea that ancient peoples speculated that Antarctica existed before anyone had been there appears to be conflating some ideas about Terra Australis, the theoretical southern continent that appears on a lot of old maps.

the part about people conjecturing that this unknown southern continent wouldn't have bears seems to be completely made up, and also doesn't even make sense. any speculation about the fauna of an undiscovered continent in ancient times was in the form of imagining what fantastical creatures would live there. nobody cared enough to talk about the animals that wouldn't live there.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Why does like every language do things with their R sounds that nobody else understands

[unpickled-olive-deactivated2025]

⟨r⟩ is out of control.

It's a chameleon, a turncoat. It's at the front of the mouth [ɾ] and the back [ʁ]. It's a flap, a trill , a fricative [ʀ], an approximate [ɹ], a retroflex [ɽ]. It's a consonant. It's a semivowel. It's a vowel. It's /ʐ/.

It's a color. It's nothing. It's the space between words.

It's tearing Sweden apart.

[pettson]

@svenskjavel

[linguistness]

The German <r> isn't even an <r> lots of the time. Sure, it can be an [ʁ] and an [r]. It can also be [ər].

Or... you know... an [ɐ] or [ɐ̯] because why not

[valencians]

"y'all's" is the best regional solution to the english second person plural possessive problem but "your guyses" is my favorite because it sucks

[jibunbosh]

god actually baited us into creating the tower of babel so that He could create His most beloved children: autistic linguistics enthusiasts

[indigosfindings]

the "chat is a pronoun" discourse is captivating to me because it goes so far beyond ordinary misinformation

like imagine if suddenly there was a wave of posts saying that Dogs Are Birds, like "omg you guys i just realized dogs are actually birds!!!" and any time anybody said "theyre mammals, not birds" dozens of people would get super defensive about it and make snide condescending posts/comments like "KNOWLEDGE is knowing that dogs arent birds, WISDOM is knowing that taxonomy is fake and all organisms are whatever you want them to be forever, peace and love on planet earth," and they would keep posting about how Dogs Are Totally Birds because "well dogs are majestic and have beautiful voices, like birds" and if you pointed out that those qualities are immeasurable (& have nothing to do with being a bird) and that metric could categorize most animals (& several things that arent animals) as 'birds' they would call you a gatekeeping elitist and say "let people enjoy things" or some thesaurused equivalent, and maybe someone would also say "we're just having a Laff, it's just a fun game dont be so Serious" but they (and a non-insignificant number of other people) otherwise speak as if they believe with conviction that Dogs Really Are Birds, and this is Really Big & Exciting News because Dogs Are The First 4-Legged Bird, and then when people who know biology made posts explaining in-depth what taxonomy is & why dogs arent birds theyd start getting asks like "what about cats, are cats birds??" "are hamsters birds?" "what about sharks??" "i think flies are birds because they have wings." and then imagine this all persisted for more than half a year

[tower-of-hana]

I appreciate that you didn't want to write Assyrian but did you have to abbreviate it "Ass"?

[tanadrin]

lmao actual investigation into the mathematical essence of the slur

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

"The eigenslur cannot be spoken" sure is a genuinely completely sensible sentence and also decidedly eldritch-dread-inducing!

[tanadrin]

I mean the mundane reason is that not all locations in semantic space have a word associated with them in every/any language. We have a word for female + parent’s sibling (aunt) and male + parent’s sibling (uncle) but not aunt - female/uncle - male. In this representation, whatever concept communicates just the right melange of bigotry and contempt just happens not to be lexicalized on its own, though of course you could immediately coin one and start using it if you chose, just as people have tried to coin gender neutral terms for a parent’s sibling.

[yaldabaothadeez]

I've wondered for a while about what the biggest gaps in these word-to-vec spaces are.

(i.e what are the vectors it can encode that are furthest from any actual word, and can we approximate what a word would have to mean to be there?)

...I could probably do this myself.

[tanadrin]

i imagine there are a ton of interesting possibilities, if only because the vector space is huge and you don't need that many words for everyday conversation. and i guess it would be also fairly sensitive to the dataset you used to train the model.

anyway if you do this let me know i wanna know what the results are

[eastern-lights]

[yvanspijk]

The loss of English verb forms

It's a misconception that languages become simpler over time. In language change, you win some, you lose some.

Over the last two millennia, English has gained more different vowels, a stricter word order, and a greater number of verb tenses. For instances, in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, there were only two tenses: present and past. Nowadays, English also has tenses such as the present perfect and past perfect.

On the other hand, English has lost most of its verb forms. A verb such as to tell has only three finite forms: tell and tells in the present tense and told in the past tense. These are what's left of twelve Proto-Germanic forms: one for each of the six persons in the present and past tense.

Click my new video to hear how the three modern verb forms evolved from twelve different forms.

In my free Patreon article below, you can read more about this and about a special category of forms that I left out: the dual.

The loss of English verb forms | Taal aan de wandel - Yoïn van Spijk

Get more from Taal aan de wandel - Yoïn van Spijk on Patreon

[tanadrin]

Nò ti kòòma i hyéé táá no. Nlìì ní me-me Tleesaso; wanimwè-mu nwíí kwí là yaya kwewò ti Tleeámáe. Te sù yúú i, tsútsú te hame-hame i kii sú, yaya wanimwè nwíí wewe ehe i káá sú; ya wanimwè tòwe là hame-hame. Sunómwi wewe sù nììtsiyáá. Watsyo àà sunó wee sí, te iyé apa pààsi. Watsyo te apa taate i ya maame i ti wanimwè áámo, hwo Káátíhlòò te yè sosoke. Ma táálele lútíí, ma kúú apa sù iye sù. Táámama là ehe nwèè, ya hlòò-ma tsyama ma pwù apa. Tsútsú kii ma tàà sí te apa helo atuu; yúyú iyé sù ti nyii ata táálele; ya hlòò-ma wààso sù enaa apa taya lele.

I finally got the Tleesaso grammar into shape enough to post on my website; writing lots of example sentences and translating the sample texts is kind of a pain in the ass. It still feels incomplete in several important regards, but I am happy enough with this as a first draft.

Highlights: ultra-isolating grammar, extremely simple phonology, no pronouns, absurd amounts of homophony. It is highly likely that Tleesaso as known to Sogantine historical linguistics is incomplete, but due to the archeological situation many outstanding questions about the language may never be resolved.

[mxwhore]

chilean spanish is often regarded as the most degenerate version of spanish but its so unique and fun

[mxwhore]

One of its most overlooked yet iconic quirks imo is our use of unnecessary definite articles. For example, other spanish speaking countries may say "Voy a hablar con Martín" i.e I'm going to speak to Martín but we chileans dont. We say "Voy a hablar con el Martín" (I'm going to speak to the Martín). All the time. Doesnt matter if theres more than one Martín. Everytime we speak about someone, they are the most powerful person in the sentence. The one and only. Thats so awesome of us

[lightlybow]

I learned Spanish in Chile from Chileans and let me tell you, those figures of speech will get you some LOOKS in other countries

[mxwhore]

Damn right! Heres are some of my favorites

Duró menos que un peo en un canasto (Lasted as much as fart in a basket)

Se puso el pijama de palo (wearing the Wooden Pajamas): dying

Se fue a Canadá (They went to Canada): they went to prison. 'Cana' is a slang word for prison so its like an homonym but also really funny. Canada bad

Otra cosa, le dijo la yegua al burro (Thats something else, said the mare to the donkey): It means exactly what you think

Más pesado que tanque a pedales (Heavier than a pedal powered tank) In this case the word "heavy" means someone is extremely unpleasant.

amigues chilenos, coloquen sus favoritos

[eltrolodecadadia]

@inthewaytoamultilinguallife