ma patrie, c’est la langue

A somewhat messy lingblr Personal: @windy-sky (more active there these days)

[writtenfoxscreams]

So, I recently learned about the “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media that has helped Iranians sentenced to die by the regime in the past.

I am now asking you guys for help with that again.

There is an Iranian Jew named Arvin Netanel ben Siona, whose execution date is set for this Saturday. The Iranian Jewish community have tried endlessly to pursue his release, but to no avail.

REPORT: Jewish Man Scheduled to Be Executed by Iran on Shabbos - VINnews

IRAN (VINnews) — A twenty year-old Jewish man is tragically scheduled to be executed by Iranian authorities on Shabbos, according to Iranian

Please spread his name.

[elvensilk]

the palestinian coffee company donates 20% of profits to the palestinian children's relief fund

[wymanthewalrus]

God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.

[fangoriousfae]

[ruhua-langblr]

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide

Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:

"I just want an identical experience to DL"

Busuu (Languages: Spanish, Japanese, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Korean)

"I want a good audio-based app"

Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)

"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"

Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)

Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)

*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.

"I have a pretty neat library card"

Mango (Languages: So many and all endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)

"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"

AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)

"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"

AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone

"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"

lingory

"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"

ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)

"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"

Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)

[mali-umkin]

Irish scribes & margins

Found in the margin of a ninth-century copy of Institutiones grammaticae by Priscian by Irish scribes; marginal note in ogham script that reads Ale [Lait] + killed [ort], i.e. an ale-induced hangover. St Gall, Cod. Sang. 904, p. 204. CC-BY-NC

‘the cat has gone astray’

Leabar Breac, RIA MS p. 164. Historical miscellany.

‘blood from the finger of Maelaghlin’

Note beside a blood stain, Dublin, Kings Inns MS 16, fol 5v. 16th century Irish medical text.

‘New parchment, bad ink, O I say nothing more’

St Gallen Priscian St Gall, Cod. Sang. 904, p. 214.

[yvanspijk]

While English has knife, the other West Germanic words for this tool - German Messer, Dutch mes, Frisian mes, and Low Saxon mest - stem from an ancient compound. This word was composed of the roots of meat and Saxon. If it had survived in English, it would most probably have become *messex. See the image for more information.

[how-to-make-mistakes]

My favourite part of learning a language related to your mother tongue (or to an L2 you’re fluent in) is the confidence with which you get things wrong

[power464646]

got fucked up to discover the concept of “cultural cringe” is primarily an australian thing. some of you would do well to understand cultural cringe

[vogelmeister]

ITS PURELY AN AUSSIE THING??? no matter anything i find about it is australian centric

[useless-catalanfacts]

If Wikipedia is right in its explanation, it’s exactly what we call “autoodi” (“self-hate”) in Catalan. The term “self-hate” comes from sociolinguistics (coined by Rafel Ninyoles in 1969 to describe precisely the process through which native Catalan speakers come to be ashamed and even hate their own language, culture, and identity and substitute it with the dominant language Spanish), but it’s not limited to just the language, it describes the whole attitude that Catalan people and other marginalized cultures end up having about themselves compared to the dominant culture that we’re taught to see as superior.

According to what I’m finding on the internet, term “cultural cringe” comes from anthropology instead. The wording is unknown here, but I can assure you the feeling is not :’)

[loubatas]

In Occitan we call this la vergonha (“the shame”), and that word is sometimes also used in French to speak about the issue of our state discrimination against Occitan speakers and all of France’s minority languages speakers in general

[sprachgefuehle]

“Mongrel complex”, or alternatively “mutt complex” (Portuguese: complexo de vira-lata, lit. 'street dog complex, mutt complex’), is an expression used to refer to a collective inferiority complex reportedly felt by many Brazilians when comparing Brazil and its culture to other parts of the world, primarily the developed world (such as Europe or North America), as the reference to a “mongrel” carries negative connotations attributed by Brazilians to the racist perception of most Brazilians being racially mixed as well as lacking in desirable cultural refinement.

X

[sam-the-pancake]

I could use some help/advice from AAC users.

I'm a middle school English as a new language teacher. I have a student who has multiple disabilities and is nonverbal, but it's very clear that she understands spoken English and Spanish (her home language). Despite living in the US and in this school district since she was a young child, no one has given her an AAC or other ways to initiate communication. Her teacher uses minimal ASL signs to encourage verbalizing, such as signing "name" while asking her name so she'll say her name. She has speech therapy but for some reason the speech therapist also has not given her an AAC or communication board, opting instead to encourage verbalizing and also using some minimal signs.

I'm all for teaching her ASL but this language is not being shared with the parent. The student also has motor control issues that make signing hard for her to do herself, instead it's being used to remind her of words the teachers want her to verbalize. I offered to send home ASL flashcards with pictures to the parent the other day, so she could have access to it at home.

That made me realize that I could make a/some communication boards for the student myself. The parent loved that idea. I'm kicking myself for not thinking of this before the last couple weeks of school. I know the basics of how they tend to look and general things to put on it (yes/no/stop, family, interests, etc), but i want to hear from actual AAC users what are things you think a middle school AAC user might want/need on her board. What are things you think are often over looked? Any other tips?

It's going to be a laminated pieces of paper with pictures and the word in Spanish underneath, with the words sorted by topic (example: i need... Food, drink, bathroom. I want.... Play, dance, walk.)

Any advice is appreciated. I know she has things she wants to say, and her mother seemed so excited by the idea that she would be able to communicate her needs. Someone should have done this for her years ago but I feel like I'm not properly equipped to help her like she deserves.

TL;DR - I need help designing a communication board for my middle school student. As an AAC user/nonverbal person, what kinds of things would you want on a low tech AAC? What do you think is often over looked that I should include? Any other advice or resources are greatly appreciated!

[fieldrecording]

bird with the best collective noun lets go

a banditry of titmice

a confusion of chiffchaffs

an asylum of cuckoos

a charm of finches

a flamboyance of flamingos

a prayer of godwits

a museum of waxwings

a deceit of lapwings

a mischief of magpies

a mutation of thrushes

Voting ended onJun 13, 2023

[headspace-hotel]

Wikipedia is good but holy shit, it's not good enough for the amount of internet it is single-handedly supporting. We editors are mere mortals, yet we hold up the sky like Atlas. We're fighting for our lives here

[headspace-hotel]

Listen closely—

We have just entered an absolutely wild new era of internet misinformation and the shit hasn't visibly hit the fan yet but it WILL.

It's quite simple:

Wikipedia has become the definitive online source of information to the point that other fairly reputable websites often cite or copy it. Do you have any idea the psychological whiplash of clicking "Info" on iNaturalist for a plant, and being confronted with text that YOU WROTE

The internet as a whole is being used as training data for AI bots, which are in turn used to generate online content.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, meaning it is supposed to summarize information that's already out there, NOT synthesize new conclusions. In my experience, Wikipedia is alright about labeling and eliminating unsupported statements, but not so good at pinning down and excising bad or disreputable sources, which can stick around for years. To make matters worse, reputable sources are often paywalled.

In conclusion: Oh god oh fuck

[headspace-hotel]

It is pretty funny though that anything can manifest "sources" relating to it and become increasingly legitimized just by being discussed on the internet. I have seen so many bot-generated websites advertising and discussing lawn alternatives pop up in searches relating to the topic.

[penrosesun]

xkcd saw this coming more than a decade ago:

Citogenesis

[headspace-hotel]

of course, randall munroe is the modern day king solomon

[fluentisonus]

society if there was a wiktionary app

[dreg-heap]

Can't let British people have air conditioning because first they'd call it something twee like "the climate fixer" and then in 20 years they'll call it "the climb" or "the climmy"

[dreg-heap]

French kids would call it "le climot", frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it "machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice"

[fusdoq]

cultural preservation is catching myself saying eww and correcting myself immediately by saying اععع

the /ʕ/ should be stressed too!!

[culmaer]

reminds me of my favourite description of 3ayn from an Aramaïc textbook

[thetudes]

langblr masterpost??

reviving this idea from pastelsandhazelnutcoffee --- i would love to see who's active on the langblr community and create a masterpost with all of us! please reblog if you would like to be included on this page i'm making and with the languages you mainly post about <3

[thismustbetheblog]

Source: X

[neonkarkki]

I just want to add the finnish sign language version here as well

Käärijän Cha Cha Cha -voittoveto viitottuna | UMK23

Käärijän voittoveto UMK23-finaalissa Miguel Peltomaan selostamana suomalaisella viittomakielellä.

you shouldn't need a vpn to watch that outside of finland

[ciaran-archive]

if we could read minds I still don't think we'd understand them.

[ciaran-archive]

like I've spoken to people who think in images, who have to translate each thought into words before they communicate. and I think entirely in words, laid out across the void inside my head. my father's thinking is 3d, concepts structured in ways that are incredibly difficult to translate into words. and how would that look to me, if I could see into it? how do I perceive a thought that my mind cannot contain by the nature of their construction?

[ciaran-archive]

we all speak a private language to ourselves and we are always translating so we can speak to each other...don't touch me I'm emotional