DEAR READER
taylor price
Cosimo Galluzzi
JBB: An Artblog!
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
occasionally subtle
art blog(derogatory)
Misplaced Lens Cap
tannertan36
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
No title available
#extradirty
tumblr dot com
will byers stan first human second
JVL
wallacepolsom
No title available
dirt enthusiast
🪼
seen from Malaysia
seen from Serbia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from North Macedonia
seen from United States
seen from North Macedonia
seen from Türkiye
@polyglotery
Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books that I try to update regularly
UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder
I know there’s so many more urgent things but if you like this resource you may consider buying me a ko-fi to keep this project alive
I think the "pre" and "post" parts in "preposterous" should cancel each other out but everyone else seems to find my idea completely erous
this is making me cry
sprong
Please just call me a slur 😔
Op deleted this and is 14 so this is not about him.
You do not have to like these terms. I myself don’t care for most of them. And, yes, you can criticize them. But that’s not what you are doing.
This, “just call me a slur, lol,” is just mocking the idea of having more gender neutral words. That’s what a lot of the comments are doing, “half of there already have gender neutral terms.”
Sure, but your missing that point. That point is to give non binary, genderqueer and gnc people language. Yes, parent is in fact gender neutral and you may very will be ok using that for yourself in place of father/mum/pappa/mammi, ect. But words have connotation and for many people just being a parent is not good enough. Many of us want words that are similar to mother, mom and mommy respectively. Because at then end of the day these words are closely related but ultimately different.
If you don’t like them don’t use them. If you have real criticism then give it. But if all you have to say is this above it all, “the English language is good enough as is,” maybe keep that to yourself.
Ppl will say this and then when ppl reclaim and id as slurs they lose their fucking minds lmfao
Wild people going after sprong for being some “dumb” “made up” word when in pretty sure that person just misremembered sprog? Which is an accepted term already?
Yeah sprog is already a word, I was called a sprog by one uncle and a kid
THE DAY OF LANGUAGES!!!
This 7th of May, 2026, we use our own language again!
If your language, native or not, is something other than English, on May 7th you're encouraged to speak that language all day!
You’ll blog in your chosen language(s) all day: text posts, replies, tags (except triggers and organisational tags).
Regardless of what language people choose to speak to you, you can answer in your own.
Non-verbal, non-written languages (like sign language and dialects) are more than welcome!
English native speakers can participate in any other language they're studying/have studied/know.
The tag is gonna be #Speak Your Language Day or #spyld for short.
Please submit me some language facts for me to share on this day <3
Pinned post and FAQ
I'm so fascinated by languages with different levels of formality built in because it immediately introduces such complex social dynamics. The social distance between people is palpable when it's built right into the language, in a way it's not really palpable in English.
So for example. I speak Spanish, and i was taught to address everyone formally unless specifically invited otherwise. People explained to me that "usted" was formal, for use with strangers, bosses, and other people you respect or are distant from, while "tú" is used most often between family and good friends.
That's pretty straightforward, but it gets interesting when you see people using "tú" as a form of address for flirting with strangers, or for picking a fight or intimidating someone. In other languages I've sometimes heard people switch to formal address with partners, friends or family to show when they are upset. That's just so interesting! You're indicating social and emotional space and hierarchy just in the words you choose to address the other person as "you"!!
Not to mention the "what form of address should I use for you...?" conversation which, idk how other people feel about it, but to me it always felt awkward as heck, like a DTR but with someone you're only just becoming comfortable with. "You can use tú with me" always felt... Weirdly intimate? Like, i am comfortable around you, i consider you a friend. Like what a vulnerable thing to say to a person. (That's probably also just a function of how i was strictly told to use formal address when i was learning. Maybe others don't feel so weird about it?)
And if you aren't going to have a conversation about it and you're just going to switch, how do you know when? If you switch too soon it might feel overly familiar and pushy but if you don't switch soon enough you might seem cold??? It's so interesting.
Anyway. As an English-speaking American (even if i can speak a bit of Spanish), i feel like i just don't have a sense for social distance and hierarchy, really, simply because there isn't really language for it in my mother tongue. The fact that others can be keenly aware of that all the time just because they have words to describe it blows my mind!
But you do have it! because American English has titles and also hierarchical treatment of last names (if your name is Jeremy Jefferson, there's a huge semantic weight difference between Jerry, Jeremy, Mr. Jeremy, and Mr. Jefferson, for example). English marks hierarchy and familiarity even if it doesn't do it in more grammatical terms. Think of being a kid and your parents yelling your full name across the house when you were in trouble.
I speak Icelandic. Icelandic doesn't have titles or last names or everyday use of a formal plural or any other obvious markers of formality and intimacy. Formality is still marked, just in non-grammatical lexical terms...but because it's not marked in ways I as a L1 English speaker recognize, it's harder for me to reproduce.
The reason you feel like this doesn't exist in English to the point where it exists in Spanish is because it's easier to spot for a L2 learner who has to think about categorizing the new language in a way that makes sense in the L1, and unless you have some more in depth information about language registers and intimacy marking and whatever it's easy to consider this as a novel phenomenon in the L2. But a lot of this semantic stuff is pretty universal, just marked in different ways.
THANK YOU. This is a misconception. Speaking from my experience of living in Japan and studying Japanese while being a native speaker of American English:
1. For folks who don't know, Japanese words/grammar change depending on formality, the genders of the speaker and listener, the age of the speaker and listener, etc.
2. But English words/grammar ALSO change depending on the above contexts described. It's just not formalized in grammar books. Consider the differences:
A. "The honor of your presence is requested for dinner this evening."
B. "I would like to invite you to dinner."
C. "Do you want to get dinner together?"
D. "Wanna grab a bite to eat?"
E. "Yo, bro, you want a burger?"
Etc. People will be like "it's wild that Japanese has different words for 'meal' depending on formality!! Gohan? Omeshi? Crazy!!!" But ENGLISH IS THE SAME WAY.
And this actually makes it harder for speakers of languages like Japanese to learn natural English, because they've been taught that there's no difference in tone between telling a waiter "I'd like a coffee" and "I want coffee." Since one of those feels easier to learn, they'll choose the option that makes them sound weirdly dickish to the waitstaff.
In short: English has levels of formality! Conveniently, saying otherwise fits the stereotypes of rigidly hierarchal East Asians, refined and sophisticated Europeans, and lawless/casual Americans and Australians—but us not recognizing these differences makes it harder for ESL speakers to learn real English
official linguistics post
This is so fucking funny
For non Irish speakers when translated it says “make a movie about black people they said” but in Irish putting a colour modifier when talking about a person/group of people it has a cultural meaning, some colours even have different words when talking about hair colour (like red). So in that vein, the word black (‘dubh’ pronounced ‘duv’) is associated with the devil and/or evil things and naturally it’s quite rude to describe someone as black in Irish so we call black people ’gorm’ (pronounced gurrum) which is actually blue. Frequently people claiming Irish heritage mess this up, most notably and hilariously is that cop who tried to make a ‘blue lives matter’ t-shirt and messed up every word single word in the translation except for the ‘blue’ modifier which made his stupid t-shirt actually say ‘black lives matter’.
All that to say that it translates as “make a movie about black people, they said” but directly translated it says “make a movie about blue people, they said”.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk
Give me more jokes requiring deep cultural knowledge!
OK, so in Irish there’s an old saying “Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin” (it sort of sounds like: ‘kneel ain tin-tawn mar duh tin-tawn fain’). It translates as “there’s no fireplace like your own fireplace”, as in ‘there’s no place like home’.
However the word for fireplace, thinteán (tin-tawn), is very similar in pronunciation to the words tinn tón (teen tone) and they sometimes get swapped out for comedic value or to low key make fun of someone complaining.
See, tinn tón means sore butt.
Which changes it from ’there’s no fireplace like your own fireplace’, a nice, relatable phrase that old people would smile at and agree with you about, to ‘there’s no sore arse like your own sore arse’, which, when deployed correctly, can be either a solemn commiseration with how it’s difficult for people to understand the deeper levels of the pain a person is feeling (you would have said it to the person who’s suffering in a sort of ‘here’s a silly joke to make you smile but also show I understand how little I understand of your pain. Plus we’re Irish and find it hard to show emotion without slagging so I’m pretending to make fun of you complaining but, really, we both know that the fact that I’m doing it in this way shows I care a lot), OR a jab at someone who’s going on and on complaining about some minor shit and you say it quietly to someone beside you who’s also been listening to this gobshite prattering on in the hopes that you can make them burst out laughing.
[ID: A screenshot from the movie Avatar containing two Na'vi people, who have blue skin. It is captioned with the Irish words “Scannán faoi dhaoine gorma / dúirt siad”. End ID]
(ID by @whatuegg)
Tumblr did not “Goncharov” Poob. Poob is Glupp Shittoing Tubi/Pluto/Roku Channel/Hulu/etc.
none of these words are in the bible. or the dictionary, for that matter.
#While this is a joke#For the etymologists out there#Tumblr did not “goncharov” poob#translation: Tumblr is not making a fictitious thing called poob that we insist is real#Poob is glup shittoing (streaming services)#Translation: Poob is now a generic name for whatever streaming platform is out there when you don't feel like naming something specifically
I often find myself really, really wishing I liked mushrooms. They're nutritious, they're versatile, they seem like they elevate the taste and texture of dishes so much. Unfortunately they elevate it by making the taste and texture fucking awful.
as much as it is valid to hate certain specific textures and tastes: the polish part of me got really insulted at the (unintended) insinuation that mushrooms are fundamentally awful food to eat.
That being said: bread technically is a dish that in many cases requires fungi to be made.
And cheese also.
Therefore I conclude that both bread and cheese are part mushrooms.
That's like saying yoghurt is part chicken because there's an animal product in it.
Yoghurt is not part chicken but you could, perhaps, argue that yoghurt is part cow and that an egg laid by a chicken is part chicken.
You are completely missing my point. Saying that bread is part mushroom Because Fungus is the same as saying yoghurt is part chicken Because Animal. Yeast isn't a mushroom.
You’re right I am missing the point. I thought @aromantic-ghost-menace was saying that there are breads and cheeses that are made with fungi that are mushrooms…. I retract my argument sheepishly.
okay to explain the obviously bullshit conclusion I made in the beginning: mushrooms and basically the entire kingdom of fungi are both called "Pilz" in german (my mother tongue, and yeah I have both a german and a polish parent there) and I had mainly the fact that fungi were animal cells acting as plants and not doing photosynthesis in my mind there. So I figured "eh, close enough."
I'm not aware of any specific common linguistic distinction in german between fungi and mushrooms.
Like... yeast in german is "Hefe" and sometimes specifically a "Hefepilz" @derinthescarletpescatarian
So... yeah sorry for my linguistic confusion.
Also: there is menace in my name for a reason.
Fungi cells aren't animal cells but I get what you mean re: plant cells being more clearly different.
This is a fascinating linguistic difference. No dedicated word for 'mushroom'. Interesting.
Completely unrelated but dutch DOES have a word for mushroom. It's paddenstoel, which literally translates to "toad chair".
In English, mushrooms of a specific shape are also called toadstools!
These fuckers!
In german those are called "Fliegenpilz" (literally "fly(s) mushroom/fungi")
In English the name of this specific mushroom is fly agaric. (Agaric is the proper name for this type of mushroom structure, toadstool is a casual term.)
the weirdest thing about learning a language is not knowing a specific word.
not sure what a puddle is called but i can say little ocean in the road !
They call them conlangs because there are no pros in making them
It's not fun, it's not easy, it's not quick, and God help you if you want it to be pretty
really wish Arabic had uppercase letters :(
what I want to say: NOPE
what I end up saying: لا
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.
ID: A screenshot of a conversation between two people. The messages read:
"Me: What does ya tu sabes mean
Reanne: You already know
Me: No I don't"
End ID.
The other day I was in the elevator at work and there was this guy from another department and he was like "you're the language guy, right?" And I was like yeah and he asked me if I knew his native language, Filipino, and now I'm like-
SHOULD I LEARN FILIPINO ToT
you will encounter words in foreign languages that look or sound like something funny or offensive in your native language and you can acknowledge that without being weird about it btw
