Cosmic Funnies
RMH
Xuebing Du
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Origami Around

shark vs the universe
Mike Driver

Love Begins
Keni
🪼
No title available
almost home
No title available

if i look back, i am lost
KIROKAZE
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

No title available
occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United States

seen from Belgium

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Spain

seen from Portugal

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
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seen from T1

seen from Japan

seen from T1
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@freutsch
Source: https://twitter.com/notedbreadthief/status/1060547599348961281
Cold take but all languages are beautiful actually. Every single one. Every single human language on earth is a collection of stories interwoven into the very fabric of the words that are spoken.
“Oh but this language sounds scary-“ have you heard a child speak it while pointing at a butterfly?
“Oh but this language sounds silly-“ have you heard someone’s grandma recite a recipe with such practiced ease it comes off as poetry?
“Oh but this language is really weird-“ and yours isn’t? Everyone’s language is weird, dumbass, it came free with your fucking humanity.
Every tongue that is spoken is a work of art. Every language a unique window into the world.
Isn’t it wonderful?
oh yes of course my mistake
official linguistics post
re: ce post, je propose qu'on fasse appelle à la démocratie + qu'on donne une seconde chance aux anciens
choisissez votre équipe
canada
cartoffel
crompîre
kmotierre
patate
pomme de terre
tartufflo
tartifle
poiratte
poire de terre
pomatte
wie haltet ihrs mit den potaten
Kartoffeln
Erdäpfel
Herdäpfel/Härdäpfel
Erdbirnen
Grundbirnen
We need to bring back crompire (derived from grundbirn) as a name for potato :O
Not least because it sounds like an undead potato that sucks your blood
My personal favourite is the Luxembourgish version of crompire, which is 'gromper'. I really enjoy gromper. Gromper is a good word for what those things are.
Its wiktionary entry is a personal favourite as well:
official linguistics post
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
comment dit-on “pondering my orb” en français?
en soit pondering se traduit par "réfléchir" ou un truc du genre mais je trouve que "j'observe mon orbe" est plus sensé + ça claque beaucoup plus. observer mon orbe. orbserver if you will.
Plusieurs propositions qui me viennent :
- consulter
- se plonger dans
- étudier
- contempler
- sonder
Dépend du contexte évidemment mais dans le cas de l'orbe j'aime bien sonder ou étudier
Scruter n'est pas mal non plus pour la signification, mais "je scrute mon orbe" sonne presque obscène
I bring un certain "je scrute ma boule" that they n'aiment pas beaucoup 😔🤌
“lost my train of thought” doesn’t even begin to cover it. it’s like fucking deutsche bahn up there
The most impressive communal shitpost I’ve yet seen from a linguistics Facebook group
official linguistics post
by the way. being educated/trained in linguistics does not automatically free you from having reactionary thoughts about the validity of different ways of languaging. it does give you the tools to recognize and counter those thoughts as being false. you still have to be an active participant in shaping your own linguistic worldview.
can also be phrased as:
you're still gonna think stupid shit sometimes about how other people do language. tell your brain to shut the fuck up and get over it, because you know better.
California girls we're [untranslatable]
daisy dukes hapax legomena
Sun-kissed skin is [molten? bronze?] (conjectural)
languages that don't distinguish between formal and informal you are missing out on so much petty drama. my grandparents have two neighbours who once got into a huge fight over something honestly pretty trivial, so neighbour A said he was going to revoke neighbour B's du (informal you) privileges. neighbour B was like "okay but can i use du one last time?" and neighbour A was like "yeah go ahead", and neighbour B said "du arschloch" (you asshole). incredible.
using definite articles with names is so funny, more languages should do this. hi, I'm the Katie and that's the Brian.
I am in direct contact with the people behind the Ban Conversion 'Therapy' campaign in EU and we would really like to reach the threshold in a couple central/eastern European countries (e.g. Poland 🇵🇱, Czechia 🇨🇿, Hungary 🇭🇺, Romania 🇷🇴, Bulgaria 🇧🇬, Slovakia 🇸🇰) but due to the language barrier it is a bit harder. These countries can sometimes be more conservative so them reaching the signature threshold carries a lot weight!
We don’t know how (where) to reach these countries effectively! ~12 years ago I was on https://www.interpals.net where you can chat with people from all over the world, it still looks to be active so we can campaign there BUT, we would love to receive more ideas how to reach people from the above countries.
Don’t forget to share the campaign (actively messaging/asking friends is by far the most effective method!!)
Give your support !
Another suggestion: Find a Tumblr/Instagram post from 2025 in for e.g. Czech and DM everyone who liked/reblogged it!
Takes 2 minutes, please help!!!!!
WE GOT THIS!!!! ⚔️🌈
If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?