reading an article that uses the phrase "linguistic rights as human rights," and damn if that isn't the exact thing I want to explore and study in my life !!

so excited!

so i sat through a couple epiodes of d20 for the first time and. can i just say. such delicious sounding words. my vocabulary just expanded twofold. extemporneously

this [redacted] organization I follow unironically referred to as age-based discrimination as "ейджизъм" and I've been thinking about how cringe-inducing that is for days.

what the fuck is eydzizam? why did you have to literally transcribe a foreign compound word that makes zero sense when you could have simply said "discrimination based on age" and provided an insightful explanation for the issue you're addressing? how do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you can't even utilize language to make your point?

"oh but its terminology" it isn't! it truly isn't. right up there with "ейбълизъм" for "ableism" it's lazy, anglocentric and pathetically unaware of its own bias.

"but people who care about these things understand English so they know what it means" then why are you preaching to the choir? why are teenagers and 20 - 30 something year olds who have the means to master a foreign language the only audience that matters? what about people who don't know "terminology" or who are too old and out of the loop, or simply don't speak the language you're borrowing from?

I don't think wanting to have this information accessible in your own language, in terms you can fully comprehend, is somehow backwards or limiting. If this is what the entire "progressive" scene is like in this country, is it at all surprising that so many people (whether they're conservative, moderate or completely politically inactive) genuinely believe that these ideas are "planted by foreign agents" from the West?

And the fact that I get called "nationalist" for wanting the bare minimum effort to be put into adapting these topics for a localized audience is insane. If you can't make discussions on "ageism" or "ableism" accessible to a local person who doesn't speak English, it's not their problem for being "willfully ignorant" as most people coming from a place of privilege are. it's your problem for dismissing a huge segment of the population before they can even learn what the fuck you're preaching.

i do suffer from "will stop at nothing to get answers to questions" disease unfortunately its usually activated by fictional settings and never anything useful or interesting

All I'm saying is that in over five years of doing work in Ireland and Wales and regularly speaking to native speakers and linguistic activists in both areas, I have literally never heard someone actively call for Wales or Ireland to be referred to exclusively as "Ériu" or "Cymru" -- ...because they're too busy trying to build bridges with English speakers instead of actively alienating them with things that, in the context of English and Welsh/Irish relations (aka "do not fucking bring Aotearoa into this"), is not going to do all that much and will instead needlessly piss people off.

NOTE: if you pronounce BUTCH (adj. or noun), BUTCH (name), BUTCHER (noun) and BUTCHER (verb) all the exact same way, pick one of the first two options. if you pronounce BUTCH (adj. or noun) and BUTCHER (verb or noun) the same but BUTCH (name) differently, pick option 3 or 4. if you pronounce BUTCHER (noun) and BUTCHER (verb) the same, pick option 5 or 6. if you pronounce 3 of the 4 words the same way with one outlier, that's option 7, 8, or 9 (if you pick 9 tell me in the tags what your majority pronunciation is!)

i only had 10 options or i would have been even more exhaustively thorough here. sorry to people who pronounce the name butch and the noun/verb butcher the same but butch the adjective/noun differently

i will mostly miss twitter because it was my Commuting social media. social media exclusively used while going to work or leaving work. also for updating my friends on random bullshit because the register felt more casual

Just wanted to say your language breakdowns are incredibly interesting and I'm always intrigued to learn something new when I see one pop up (especially with all the Thai gls coming out as a person who doesn't speak the language but is hearing a lot of these words and phrases throughout the different shows)

Hey thank you <3

I love this language so I'm happy to hear that what started out as me wanting to share my love for Thai (and Thai shows) is interesting to other people as well :>

Your ask made me realize that all my recent language posts have been about Thai GLs!! I too can't wait for all the GLs to start coming out ✨ and I for sure won't be able to shut up about them and the language used in them lol

I saw your post about #tag linguistics and it was fascinating! I was wondering if you knew any online resources/references describing the phonotactics of different languages for a mostly inexpert audience? When I poke around with my meager googling I tend to only turn up English, but I'd be really curious to see the basic rules laid out for comparison among a few different languages!

Oi! Hey there! ^.^ Hope you're doing well and thanks for the kind words!

Unfortunately I've been out of the academic loop since 2016 and I only remember a handful of resources, most of which aren't inexpert audience friendly(?).

The resource that pops to mind, regardless, is WALS Online - The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. It's a cross-linguistic feature comparison tool. It allows you to generate and investigate global maps based upon a single linguistic feature or multiple features simultaneously. I think it's a cool shortcut because it checks plausibility (for people who might not know interrelatability) on whether a language might have a combination of features. It helps visualize patterns across languages, language families, and regions.

For instance, since we're talking phonotactics, here's the map for syllable structure. Problem is WALS pulls no punches on jargon, and most of the sources it cites are, like, grammars you'd only find in print on a campus library.

On WALS, each language has a page where its features are listed. To learn the details of how the feature manifests, you'd have to use other sources. But WALS at least provides the relevant starting point of individual languages to investigate. Wikipedia ain't... always accurate or comprehensive, of course, in something like linguistics... but it's an easy way to start poking once you know the names of languages you want to snoop at.

You could try your luck with the currently-defunct World Phonotactics Website on the Wayback Machine, though that's not one I know much about, and there is the whole, uh, defunct thing going for it.

I'm sorry I can't be more help!

Nice stopping in, and thanks for the kind words of that viral post. Funny (if typically tumblr) story about that. I posted it eight years ago intentionally at an off hour of night in hopes it'd get two notes and fade into obscurity. That's why it has nicher fandom-specific references; it wasn't anticipated to escape containment, just be a convo between two friends. Yeah oops bwahaha. Gosh I was so energized at the time. Anymore I don't think it holds up remotely, factually, from any academic standing, and the inaccuracies make me twitch, but I doubt most people notice, and I hope it gives people the fun and excitement about linguistics I was feeling. ^.^ Linguistics is so cool!! And I s'pose it's been cool that one of my most-spread posts is nerdy. Oh, alas, science side of tumblr, I was amongst y'all once.

Chomsky pushing 100 to keep defending his intuition based linguistics against Labov

I wish more of us understand the power we have by speaking a living language.

Dead languages act almost like historical archives—here is the way people thought, and how they spoke to illustrate those thoughts, in this language's last living era. This is an incredible resource, don't get me wrong, but going over some of the words and phrases, you kinda mourn that the language was not able to continue to grow and evolve.

For those of us speaking living languages, we have a chance to recast the die, so to speak, every time we communicate. Every word created from racial undertones is one that you have the option to help reclaim (if it's your community and therefore your right) or disregard completely. You can change the history of acceptance reflected in our language, simply by living and speaking it, whether you speak with your hands, an aid, or your lips. Every alternative way to connect can be looked at more kindly, can be embraced more readily, if every single one of us set out to do so.

There is raw power in communication and allowing some corporations to unnecessarily censor some of it is taking that power away from us, chip by chip (I'm referring to unalive vs. die, here, specifically. Or people censoring the word queer within the queer community. I am not referring to white people mad they can't say the n-word or be anti-Semitic on TikTok, you follow?)

I don't mean to ramble, but if we truly worked at it, we could have a language that gives our descendants a softer beginning and that is something I truly believe we should all strive for.

thinking real hard about translations today, specifically translations of the Iliad

One of the things that Ehrman has instilled in us through class is that we, as translators, have to make a decision on what word to use and i just think that a lot of people used the wrong word for μῆνιν

i mean, the line is μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (Sing, O Muse, of the wrath/anger of Achilles, son of Peleus)

and notice I put wrath/anger there, those are the two most common translations of μῆνιν. Wrath or Anger. but I don't think that does the story justice. Maybe it's because I've got my own story that I'm writing through the lens of the sublime and the wrath of the Gods but I think those words aren't strong enough.

I mean, book 21 Achilles doesn't get angry and throw a tantrum. Book 21 Achilles rages. Book 21 Achilles kills a God and nearly ends the Trojan War like years too early. Like, mans had to be put down like a rabid dog because he was going to upend the Trojan War Cycle and the Gods couldn't have that

that's not anger, hell, I'd say that's not even wrath

That's Rage

I think the first line should allude to that, gimme something like: Sing, O Muse, of the Rage of Achilles, son of Peleus. gimme the foreshadowing! make it dramatic! we all know the greeks loved drama, gimme!!

anyways, i'll def be using rage in my own translation but like. it's right there. and every translator has to make their own decision on what word to use, but also rage is RIGHT THERE

Cis men will do anything except shut the fuck up and leave someone alone when they've asked nicely 3 times

Hi, just popping in to say I'm alive, still working on the next chapter and those ask responses, everything's good. |'D In case anyone was worried!

anyway i will always trust and respect native speakers’ usage of their own language more than anyone who tries to police how others speak, or who deems variations in dialect “incorrect/improper” because it’s different from how they personally speak, especially since the history of language policing is chock full of racism, classism, and xenophobia

I don't know how to ask people to not use masculine gendered words when trying to refer to me. "guys", "dude", "man", "bro", "bruh", "buddy", "fellas", "boys", "lads", etc. are all extremely extremely extremely very very very very very very very severely very very uncomfortable. I'm not any of those. I'm a girl. But I'm too non-confrontational to say anything. I hate it I hate it I hate it I really hate it I hate it. 🫠