Product Placement
sheepfilms
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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Cosimo Galluzzi
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titsay
todays bird
oozey mess
Not today Justin
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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noise dept.
art blog(derogatory)
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
ellievsbear
blake kathryn
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Oman
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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@synticity
sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.
ditto cockney accents being used to denote stupid and evil. why are you acting like someone who talks like a member of the working class is irredeemable and an idiot.
Today we were talking about how words can mean different things to different communities, and that people outside the community wouldn't understand. Like how a non-poker player wouldn't understand poker jargon the way other poker players would. Anyway, then my professor said he was gonna show us his "favourite example" and wrote a single word on the board that gave me instant psychic damage: beta.
Apparently sport climbers use this word with a meaning of "technique, method." But for a horrifying, horrifying second there was the possibility in my mind that we were gonna talk about ABO in my fucking linguistics class
Professor Betas Georg, who writes 50k omegaverse fics during office hours, boldy wrote "beta" on the board while observing which of his students went dead. still.
official linguistics post
uh oh
"etymologynerd" is at it again and this time i do feel i have to say something. the disability advocates have it covered on addressing the impact, but there's also a serious problem with the linguistics.
in a video shared on may 16, adam aleksic begins by saying: "i think we have to accept the fact that the 'r-word' [retard/retarded] is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people."
this first sentence alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of language change in several points.
this word never went away. what we're seeing now is an attempt at re-normalization by people who sense that they will not be socially punished by openly using this term.
we actually don't have to "accept" its return to mainstream use. for decades, disability advocates have worked to inform the public of the harm caused by casual use of this term. the harm has not disappeared, and neither will this advocacy and its impacts.
now i'm just mad. how tf does it NOT refer to disabled people? the entire point of a pejorative term is that it negatively invokes comparison to a person, group, etc. the assertion that the r-word has changed meanings is categorically false. at most, its primary context has changed from clinical to casually pejorative, but the insult fundamentally rests upon the original reference.
he goes on to refer to the "euphemism treadmill," another concept he misrepresents by extending the metaphor to say that terms which have been sufficiently distanced from their original reference are no longer pejorative. to quote: "...once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead."
which... what? what the fuck is he talking about? the words he uses as examples – idiot, imbecile, and moron – are definitely still offensive, if perhaps less impactful. "just becomes colloquial instead" is a nonsense phrase. are offensive words not colloquial? the only english word that comes to mind as having changed so much in definition as to no longer be offensive is "nice," which has been shifting in meaning for more than 700 years and was never a weaponized clinical term.
he ends by saying, "it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the r-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from." again, fundamentally misunderstanding language change in society over time. it rests on the assumption that we're all going to start or re-start using this slur and never have a conversation about its harms, which just completely ignores both the abovementioned disability advocacy and the fact that people tell each other not to use offensive words. you think i'm just not gonna teach my kids that using slurs is bad??
the whole video is devoid of both empathy and an understanding of long-term semantic change.
tl;dr etymologynerd is wrong, we do NOT "have to accept that the 'r-word' is coming back," and we all need to read more crip linguistics.
after continuing to stew about this during my lunch break, i'd also like to point out that framing this sort of thing as "inevitable" is some fascist bullshit.
don't fall for it.
LORD HELP ME I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED THE REBLOG. anyway,
this is to apologize for using the phrase "devoid of empathy." it was a bad choice on my part because i framed the lack of empathy as malicious, which dehumanizes and demonizes people who lack empathy as part of their neurotype.
if i'd thought through those implications, i should have said something like "the video is devoid of care or respect for the disabled community."
GLaDOS learns about isopods
When I made this comic, the Wikipedia page for “woodlouse” had a really long “common names” section. In early 2023, somebody pruned the section with the reasoning that Wikipedia “isn’t Urban Dictionary” and most of the names were “unsourcable”, but the older version of the article is still accessible here.
Here’s the list taken from that version of the article:
armadillo bug
billy baker (South Somerset)
billy button (Dorset)
boat-builder (Newfoundland, Canada)
butcher boy or butchy boy (Australia, mostly around Melbourne)
carpenter or cafner (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)
carpet shrimp (Ryedale)
charlie pig (Norfolk, England)
cheeselog (Reading, England)
cheesey wig
cheesy bobs (Guildford, England)
cheesy bug (North West Kent, Gravesend, England)
cheesy lou (Suffolk)
cheesy papa (Essex)
chiggy pig (Devon, England)
chisel pig
chucky pig (Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, England)
chuggy pig
crawley baker (Dorset)
daddy grampher (North Somerset)
damp beetle (North East England)
doodlebug (also used for the larva of an antlion and for the cockchafer)
fat pigs (Cork, Ireland),
gramersow (Cornwall, England)
granny grey (Wales)
granny grunter (Isle of Man)
grumper-pig (Bermuda)
hardback (Humberside, England)
hobbling Andrew (Oxfordshire, England)
hobby horse (Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, England)
hog-louse
horton bug (Deal, Kent, England)
humidity bug (Ontario, Canada)
jomits (Cloneganna)
menace (Plymouth, Devon)
mochyn coed (tree pig), pryf lludw (ash bug), granny grey in Wales
monkey-peas (Kent, England)
pea bug (Medway, England)
peasie-bug (Kent, England)
pennysow (Pembrokeshire, Wales)
piggy wig
pill bug (usually applied only to the genus Armadillidium)
potato bug
roll up bug
roly-poly
saw bug (Dingwall, Nova Scotia)
scuttlebug (New Zealand)
slater (Scotland, Ulster, New Zealand and Australia)
sour bug (Cambridgeshire)
sow bug
water bug
wood bug (British Columbia, Canada)
wood-louse
okay i'm reading the semantics chapter of my language development textbook now and i know i've already posted a bit about the wacky methods researchers have employed to test infants' and toddlers' linguistic knowledge, but this is a really fucking great one.
so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.
they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.
so it provided good evidence that kids do learn new words using their knowledge of sentence structure! my textbook says it's called the "syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis", which is also a fun term. anyway, i just think it's a fucking hilarious way to have tested this. imagine being a linguistics grad student and your advisor is like "hey i got this furry suit. i'm gonna need you to put this on for research purposes."
ever since I took a developmental psychology class in college I've wanted this job. I want to be a professional baby-confuser, for SCIENCE
bouba & kiki fan art
This young girl uses “los,” “las” and the gender-neutral “les” — watch her explain why. —from REMEZCLA on twitter.
to all the cowards who whine “how will i explain it to my kids??” i say: how about you shut up and let your kids explain it to you.
“Ma’am, you don’t have to be a lawyer to defend someone else” wow she snapped
dammnn she really popped off with that last line though
IN THIS HOUSE WE STAN THIS KID
as someone who studies linguistics, i will never not laugh when someone says “that word doesn’t exist” like, my good bitch. if a word is regularly used by a certain amount of people then it exists. if it has its own grammatical rules then its perfectly valid. it’s part of their lexicon now, sweetie. “It’s a made up word” honey, all words are made up. Linguists didn’t just fucking excavate athens and were like BEHOLD!!! VOCABULARY!! “that word isn’t in the dictionary” dictionaries are not rule books, they’re record books. “Refrigerate” didn’t exist 200 years ago and yet here we are. a language that doesn’t adapt to an ever changing society is bound to be lost because, eventually, it won’t be able to keep up with social progress. you motherfuckers.
Nobody has a problem with made up words. People have unspoken ideas on who gets to make up new words and who doesn’t. People get annoyed when they find these expectations ignored.
I'm noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl's translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don't have object pronouns like "it/its" and neutral neopronouns like "elu/delu" are considered more analogous to the English "they/them", so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There's also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it's emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot's internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it's just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that made me rethink this is this line that I just came upon of Dr Mensah's:
"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."
[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]
The reason that Mensah is referring to Murderbot in the feminine in this case is that it's referring to it as a security unit, right, and the word Unidade, Unit, in Portuguese, is a feminine word. So I just went back now and I found one other previous instance in which characters refer to Murderbot in the third person and, Ratthi, he calls Murderbot by masculine pronouns but that's when it's being referred to as a robô, robot, which in Portuguese is a masculine word. So I guess the way that Pohl found to express Murderbot's object pronouns is by just using whatever pronouns are in agreement with the word being used to describe it. Which to be fair makes a lot of sense for treating objects in Portuguese. If you call something a cadeira, chair, you're going to refer to it with feminine pronouns, but if you call the exact same object a sofá, sofa, you will be using the masculine pronouns.
okay I just realized the reason Murderbot refers to itself with masculine pronouns in its internal dialogue all the time is because it's referring to itself as a robô assasino, murderer robot, which is masculine okay this is kind of genius actually
okay okay this is so cool actually literally the next page and Murderbot is talking about other SecUnits right and it says this
"Elas não eram os robôs-assassinos mais astutos, (...)"
[They (feminine plural) weren't the (masculine plural) most astute murder robots, (...)]
...feminine pronouns for Unidades de Segurança, SecUnits, and masculine pronouns for robôs-assassinos, murder robots...
so yeah it's it's literally exactly as I understood it we are simply using our own grammatical gender rules for objects... it's so cool
hey, translator here! (: this was absolutely done on purpose. gendering Murderbot would always be a problem, so I, the copyeditors and the brazilian editors worked together to make sure that bots/constructs could be referred with both masculine/feminine pronouns, sometimes even in the same paragraph. same goes for ART in the second novella, who's also an It in english, but varies between nave (ship, femine) and transporte (transporte, masculine). it's an important detail and i'm happy it was noticed!
I read this post first like a month or two ago and it absolutely rewired how I thought about gender pronouns in French so thank you for that brazilian translator/editors.
That's not what the French translation of Murderbot does though, it uses "iel" which, while the most common gender-neutral neopronoun used by nonbinary French speakers I know, is also exclusively used by people. Like, a chair, table, etc can't be "iel", it has to be "il/elle". So "iel" preserves the gender-neutrality, but it's much less dehumanizing than "it" in English, something that I think the Portuguese solution does a particularly good job at.
The Japanese one is still really good and more people need to appreciate it:
In the Japanese translation of the books, Murderbot uses the genderless neopronoun 弊機 (heiki), which means through its characters "both “bad/evil robot” and “this second-rate, humble company machine"." It's also a homophone for 兵器 (heiki), meaning "weapon." The Japanese translator is Naoya Nakahara, and her translation of the first four Murderbot novellas won a translation award in Japan in 2021.
(From this long Reddit thread comparing Murderbot translations.)
fyi, linguistics researchers, I'm happy to share info about your study as long as you share enough info for me to check that you have human subjects/ethics approval from some reasonable body and the research question isn't, like, racist or transphobic or anything. tumblr people love taking surveys! don't ask me for super time-sensitive stuff, tho, I'm not always fast and I'll want to space them out sometimes. works best if you're going to be collecting data for at least a couple weeks after sending it to me
in the year 2101, in what would be remembered as the single most Unanimous agreement in anglophone history, humans across the technoglobe agreed to stop using the phrase "in large part" because it was deemed "grotesque" & "a horrible thing to say". dozens of new terms popped up to replace it, such as "in part that is large", "bigly partly", "largepartronic", "megapartially", "in the big bit", & "may the part be large". unfortunately the granulation of these new terms led, bigly partly, to an enormous outburst in conflict leading to 10 digi-million cyber-deaths
favorite word?
lately i'm getting back into "the" (english definite article) because what the fuck is that thing. it's so fucked up. semanticists hate her!
honorable mentions: fae (english pronoun), X也 (mandarin neographeme recently added to unicode), of (english case marker tbqh), lopi (icelandic wool). if you ask me again i should hopefully have some more icelandic words, i'm procrastinating on a pimsleur about it
One time this man approached me in a bar talking in Spanish. So I assumed he was Spanish and we started speaking, we had a whole ass conversation and at some point he was like. So what part of Spain are you from? And I said well I’m Italian actually. What part of Spain are you from? And he was like. I’m Greek.
One time I was in Argentina and I was so tired of trying to speak Spanish because I’m not very good at it lmao so I broke into exasperated English and the retail seller girl quickly understood me and engaged me in conversation. We talked for a while, she introduced me to a makeup brand, and then I decided to buy it. While she was packaging the purchase, she asked me if I were from the US or perhaps the UK and I just said “oh no I’m Brazilian hahah” and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in clear Portuguese, “I’m Brazilian too”
When my dad went to China on a work trip, his Mandarin speaking wasn’t great but his listening was fine (his first language is Cantonese) and he encountered a German guy who had moved to China to work. My dad knew how to speak German because he studied it in university (but wasn’t great when it came to listening to new vocab he hadn’t studied before), and the German guy knew Mandarin because he lived and worked in China, so they had a conversation where my dad spoke to the German guy in German and the guy responded in Mandarin. I’m sure it confused a lot of their coworkers who just saw the Asian guy speaking German and the white guy speaking Mandarin.
Some years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company that had a service depot in China. One of the engineers from the main office here in the US spent most of his time at the depot. The problem was that he didn’t speak *any* of the various Chinese languages, and no one at the depot spoke any English. They all, however, spoke Spanish.
I love the world
clavicular = the protagonist of our tale. a frail man desperately clinging to the semblance of virile strength given to him by his looks but understood by most and even by his loyal followers to be a pathetic and clownish figure
almost caught a career-ending cortisol spike = almost had an anxiety attack that could've ruined his career and reputation as a streamer
after a larpmaxxed stacy = after a woman just as desperately pretending to be gorgeous and confident
tried jesterfying him on stream = attempted to make him into an object of ridicule in front of his live audience as he streamed
by calling him a good boy = by calling him a good boy (this is supposed to be sexually emasculating)
while he was mid-mog = while he was in the middle of winning a contest of unbothered masculinity
between 2 low-tier normies = between himself and two other young men less concerned with projecting an ill-conceived ideal of virility
at ASU = at arizona state university in fair tempe where we lay our scene
hmmmmm. Linguistics
I think a fun way to have he/she pronouns would be by helping other avoid the ambiguous antecedent problem and taking on the pronouns that are less represented in the current group.
Neopronouns? More like Nemopronouns am I right
are there any modalities of natural language other than speech and signing?
in intro to ling classes we sometimes talk about whistled languages as another modality, or drummed languages¹; but i think in actuality most linguists you ask would say that those modalities are a language technology, just as writing is. writing is a technology that enables us to language through an alternative modality, but it's vanishingly rare (or maybe nonexistant) for anyone to acquire writing as their first language modality. signed and spoken (and tactile-signed) languages, however, are acquired by babies as their first languages.
[1] This wiki article is not very well-cited and could be improved.
200-page paper on language and thought just pulled this thing out. shouldve ended the paper there
(renee magritte has talent but he accidentally painted a train instead of a fireplace this is a rookie mistake meme template, but replace with "forgot about other modalities of language")
lvl 1: the plural of octopus is octopuses because the plural version of a word is the word with an s at the end
lvl 2: the plural version of octopus is octopi because if a word ends with "us" the plural version replaces the "us" with "i" e.g. cactus -> cacti and fungus -> fungi
lvl 3: actually, that rule is only for latin words. octopus is a greek word and the correct plural is octopuses or octopodes
lvl 4: actually, language is descriptive not prescriptive. since enough people over time have used octopi as the plural for octopus, it's a valid plural
lvl 5: the plural of octopus is octopeese, like geese
