they/them, 24 | atp it's really just the man from u.n.c.l.e interspersed with linguistics and germanposting | and the odd bit of music | and some art (actually a lot of it) | and
I'm curious: which book did you just finish that made you reblog the 'man are there some bad books out there' post? if you want to confide. if you don't, maybe you could tell me your favourite book instead? I'm still looking for something to tide me over the semester break :D
oh god I'm going to have to out myself here as an enjoyer of trashy murder mysteries. but the one that i just finished was "how to solve your own murder" by kristen perrin which was. annoying, to say the least
i think i probably have three favourite books:
"everyone in my family has killed someone" (and its various sequels) by benjamin stevenson, which is an australian book about a guy who writes guides on how to write murder mysteries accidentally getting involved in a real one
"several people are typing" by calvin kasulke, which is a short book about a guy who's consciousness gets trapped in the workplace messaging platform (slack)
and "house of leaves" by mark danielewski. which is just really good and everyone should read it at least once
ohhhhhhhh thank you! ngl, the premise of that first one actually sounds fun, maybe I'll pick it up just to see HOW annoying it is. but I'll definitely look for 'several people are typing' because that sounds absolutely incredible.
if you like murder mysteries, you might enjoy 'A Fatal Crossing' by Tom Hindle? it's a locked room mystery taking place on a ferry crossing the Atlantic Ocean that also involves art theft and one of the most batshit insane plot twists I've ever read. (tbf people either hate or love it, but it certainly makes for entertainment either way.)
reblogging this again because i just finished "and then things went dark" by bea fitzgerald and it was a FANTASTIC dark satirical thriller/murder mystery book that i highly recommend if you can get your hands on it
hello :) do you feel like answering questions 14 and 17 of the book ask game, by any chance? 👉👈 (about your top 5 children's books and your stance on dog-earing, that is)
Hi ty!!!!!!! :D
14. do you ever mark/dog ear books you own? I do this sometimes with my paperbacks, I like my books to looked lived in. I occasionally write in them too, and underline in all my books.
17. top 5 children’s books? when I was a kid I used to read almost exclusively historical fiction, most of which has likely not aged well. With that in mind, these were some of my faves:
–the american girl Kaya, Addy, and Samantha serieses
–the Grandma's Attic series by Arlela Richardson
–Someone Named Eva
–The Whale Rider
–A Picture of Freedom: Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl
–Red Scarf Girl
–Tangled Threads: a Hmong Girl's Story
–The Hobbit
–Tuck Everlasting
i need to get off tumblr i’m at the aquarium admiring the fish and my brain goes “posts that make you want to get in the water” what are you talking about. these are live fish in the room with you. what post.
Very interested to hear about your linguistics paper, if you'd like to expound 👀👀👀
gahhhhhh ABSOLUTELY YES, I cannot tell you how happy I am to have sparked your interest <3 it's rather... extensive, so I'll put it under the cut for the convenience of ppl who put up with the linguistics side of my blog rather than enjoy it hahahaha
since I'm a Master's student still, with very limited means to do research (and only basic statistical knowledge at this point, though I'm working on it), I just need to preface this for the sake of scientific integrity: I'm on shaky ground and I do not claim I have solved the mystery of language. BUT I recently had a little breakthrough with extremely interesting results that could be super cool in a certain linguistic niche if I got to run the experiment again on a larger sample of speakers and actually managed to replicate my first result.
so, besides my first love, phonetics, I do work on morphosyntax, specifically on German prepositions. I've been working my way through SO MANY corpora of German over three years now, and I began to notice that the younger the data got the odder things became, until online corpora from 2020 onwards were suddenly completely inexplicable to me. seemingly out of nowhere, people had begun to vary prepositions in previously unquestionably standard, well-established collocations. and since I'm a linguist, incidentally in dire need of a research project that would earn me course credit in the double digits at the time, I decided to ask why.
with the respective course being funded by a scholarship, that ALSO meant sudden access to previously unavailable, advanced survey design and statistical software, as well as departmental support to recruit participants. long story short, I ran an experiment that got completely out of hand sample size-wise (and probably took 20 years off my life in trying to finish it by the deadline, given that I got so deep into it I basically wrote a second Bachelor's thesis), but the results were so cool!
essentially I had people choose German prepositions for certain constructions and also tell me their age and level of contact with English. the more English-affiliated the participants (and, usually then, the younger), the more they chose structures parallel to what would have been the literal equivalent in English. (e.g., the German standard is "erzähl mir davon" - "tell me about it", with "davon" really translating into "of it". but people with lots of English contact preferred to say "darüber" - which happens to literally mean "about it". just one example of several.) this must sound like a no-brainer, initially.
BUT. the thing is. they were doing the entire thing (a 20-minute survey!!!!) in German. they never even activated their English competence. there was nothing that should have primed them to do this, but they were STILL consistently choosing the literal translation of an ENGLISH prepositional construction when there was a perfectly well-established, standard German option right there. (and they knew that one too, I tested that. they simply didn't like to use it.)
and THAT'S the really cool thing about it. because it's an indicator that the omnipresence of English has begun to cause structural changes in German grammar that actually get entrenched in speakers mental representations, at least when they are in a lot of contact. it's structural, because the shift also fucks up the German case-system, which requires different case with e.g., "über" and "von". it's also systemic and habitual rather than contextual, since it seems that immediate contact with English isn't required, so as long as overall, long-term exposure is high enough. people either generally adopteded that new structure or not.
and again, that may sound like a no-shit-Sherlock moment when you're a layman but there is a CENTURY worth of linguistic literature on lexical influence of English on German, loanwords and calques and the like, but only ONE (1) reference that properly touches upon grammatical influence so far. a lot of older sources even claimed that German was 'immune' to structural shifts lmao. and my study wasn't like, completely airtight, but it was large enough to not be immediately dismissed as 'inconclusive', and it actually lines up with that one (1) other source to suggest we've reached the point where English has become lingua franca enough to finally leech into German grammar.
which, lastly, I am so incredibly obsessed with mainly because I have pointless discussions about 'aNgLicIsMs rePlacINg oUr bEauTiFul geRmAN lAngUage' every day with people who believe they are linguists simply because they can speak. I cannot wait to see their faces when I tell them that English might actually be 'replacing' not only vocabulary but also syntactic structures.
(PSA: there is no such thing as 'language degradation', scientifically speaking. it's ALWAYS xenophobia, ageism, traditionalism, conservatism, classism, or any combination thereof. always. language change is value-neutral. languages simply cannot change 'for the worse', because linguistic features only survive in the long run when they fulfill a purpose, or at least they will die pretty quickly if they truly make communication less efficient (which, incidentally, loanwords or shifts like these do not).
yes, language death is a real threat for minority languages, and concerns about English being set as a global norm are legitimate from a sociopolitical standpoint, but neither of these worries has any relation to natural language change in a stable, non-threatened, even legally established national language that makes up 90% of non-online communication - like German in Germany. it annoys me to no end. but I digress.)
anyway. it's preliminary evidence by a nerd with a mere Bachelor's degree. I'll need to see whether it actually holds with improved methodology and larger samples in the future (and if I don't get the 'go' for my other Master's thesis topic, I'll probably do exactly that to finish my degree). but it IS something new. and I'm ridiculously proud of it.
this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
I'm curious: which book did you just finish that made you reblog the 'man are there some bad books out there' post? if you want to confide. if you don't, maybe you could tell me your favourite book instead? I'm still looking for something to tide me over the semester break :D
oh god I'm going to have to out myself here as an enjoyer of trashy murder mysteries. but the one that i just finished was "how to solve your own murder" by kristen perrin which was. annoying, to say the least
i think i probably have three favourite books:
"everyone in my family has killed someone" (and its various sequels) by benjamin stevenson, which is an australian book about a guy who writes guides on how to write murder mysteries accidentally getting involved in a real one
"several people are typing" by calvin kasulke, which is a short book about a guy who's consciousness gets trapped in the workplace messaging platform (slack)
and "house of leaves" by mark danielewski. which is just really good and everyone should read it at least once
ohhhhhhhh thank you! ngl, the premise of that first one actually sounds fun, maybe I'll pick it up just to see HOW annoying it is. but I'll definitely look for 'several people are typing' because that sounds absolutely incredible.
if you like murder mysteries, you might enjoy 'A Fatal Crossing' by Tom Hindle? it's a locked room mystery taking place on a ferry crossing the Atlantic Ocean that also involves art theft and one of the most batshit insane plot twists I've ever read. (tbf people either hate or love it, but it certainly makes for entertainment either way.)
tagged by @starsfromuncle (I'm feeling honoured!) so let's goooo!
no-pressure tagging (as usual) @akaryotic, @avatarskywalker78, @elementaluncleagent, @skyborneveggie, and whoever else feels like doing this. I love reading people's little rants and responses :)
What's your blog title from?
since the title is self-explanatory - it is simply my current state of being - I'll go for my username instead.
I used to call myself something super clunky related to a fandom I don't really dabble in anymore, and I noticed that people avoided addressing me because the handle didn't work well as a name. so I tried to find something that did. my final choice came from Palmkätzchen (palm willow in German), which is just because it was Easter at the time so the plant was literally everywhere (also -katz is the root of the word cat, so that's cute). I replaced the first morpheme with the only gender-neutral name I could think of then - Sasha - and yeah, the blending worked surprisingly well, so that's my name now. I've grown quite attached.
2. What movie have you watched most recently? What did you think of it?
I CAN NEVER REMEMBER. I think it was Finding Dory, though. I love that movie. Finding Nemo was my favorite thing to watch growing up, and I just really, really love marine life.
3. What are you looking forward to right now?
a semester abroad! I'm very excited!
4. What's your drink of choice?
I'm a Spaßgetränk-girly. all kinds of fun drinks in unnatural colors are appreciated (I have tried probably every flavor of lemonade under the sun). my daily go-to is still coffee, though, especially when I have lectures.
5. What's your hair routine? Anything special?
I'm growing out an abomination of a short haircut. my routine mainly consists of daily affirmations in front of the mirror to leave it alone and have patience until it's long enough again to do something with.
6. What's your favorite way to travel? Is there a mode of travel you haven't done that you want to?
trains all the way! I've never been on a sleeper train, though, and there's nothing I would love to try out more. alternatively, crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a ferry also sounds like a great thing to experience. (my locked-room mystery fascination is no secret to anyone at this point.)
7. Favorite month and why?
October! it's when temperatures drop again for good, and if there's anything I hate it is heat. (I also have the inverse variety of seasonal depression where summer makes me want to kms. October is usually when that lifts and I begin to remember what joy feels like.)
8. Favorite time of the day and why?
sunset! it's just really pretty.
9. Do you play or follow any sports?
I'm a scuba diver and I have tried out a lot of martial arts, although I'm not actively training at this moment. during the Olympic Games I like to watch pole vaulting, ice skating and gymnastics, but otherwise I really couldn't care less about sports tbh.
10. What song has been stuck in your head a lot lately?
Paradigm by The Plot in You.
11. Dishes or laundry?
dishes. I actually enjoy doing them ngl.
12. What's something you've learned recently?
resulting from a conversation with a friend about how I would love to carry the title Sir, I now know EVERYTHING about the process of knighting (including the fact that it is essentially impossible for me to ever achieve that).
13. If you could give a TED talk on anything, what would you talk about?
I talk about linguistics 24/7 - I study it, I teach it, I post about it, I blog about it. I could give a pop-science style TED talk on about 20 subtopics from scratch. sadly, that isn't quite what the current economic climate demands :/
14. What's a piece of advice you find yourself giving a lot?
it's not that deep. (for context - I work as a tutor and study advisor. I tell this to freshers about twice a week, because, really, I had to learn myself that fucking up a course or two isn't the end of the world. I do not say this about the big, personal things, though. I have enough situational awareness to realize when that kind of advice will not be appreaciated.)
15. What's a piece of advice you'd give yourself five years ago?
put yourself out there. I spent my first few years at university in very small social circles because I was scared of unfamiliar social settings, and it felt suffocating and lonely a lot. my life drastically improved when I actually made an effort to meet new people, especially those that I would not initially have thought I could become friends with - which is exactly what did happen, to my surprise and delight.
16. Do you believe in luck and superstition? Do you carry any lucky items?
I'm more of a 'let's not take the risk' than an 'I firmly believe' type. I do have lucky items which I carry, but mostly because they were gifts from people I love.
17. Are you musical? Would you ever perform for an audience?
god, no. absolutely not. to both of those questions.
18. Write, type, or speak?
to my great shame: type.
19. What would you wish someone would ask you?
'hey Sashkatz, would you like to tell me everything about that linguistic thing you've been writing paper after paper about, in excruciatingly painful detail?'
20. If you could vacation anywhere in time, where are you going? How long would you stay? What would you do/who would you see?
I kind of like the idea of going to ancient Rome and hear actual, spoken Latin. I think a day would be enough, though. there's too much in that time period that would get me killed if I stayed longer. in fact, I'm not quite sure I wouldn't be dead by the evening. my survival instinct is rather underdeveloped.
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
