No Matter What Pair Of Words You Try To Use To Illustrate A Difference In Pronunciation, There Is Unfortunately

ppl are always saying that women are "allowed to cry" more than men are but I don't really think being expected to is the same as being "allowed" to without judgement, because generally the social judgement is still extremely present and imo not made much better by it being a "typical behavior from the likes of you" flavor of contempt

How did you learn to mix?

i just accept the possibility of being really bad at something and then proceed to do whatever i want

I appreciate the sentiment behind posts like "if you can learn how to pronounce [european surname] you can learn how to pronounce [non-european surname]" but it does unfortunately rely on the base assumption that your average english speaker actually does make an effort to pronounce european surnames correctly

the other day my girlfriend told me "I like being flesh" and I just stared at them like this

The thing that really gets me is that a very large proportion (the majority?) of currently living, endangered indigenous American languages, at least in the US and Canada America, became endangered as a result of twentieth century policy and twentieth century developments. Residential schools, forced adoptions, and economic sabotage within the last century. And of course this is the case: languages that were already endangered 100 years ago are just dead now. But the point is that these historical wrongs are not wrongs of some distant past. The people fighting for the survival of their language here are not merely daydreaming about an imagined prelapsarian past. The are fighting for something that (depending on age) they or their parents personally experienced being robbed of. Tanadrin pointed out that the more time goes on, the harder historical wrongs are to right. This is the sort of historical wrong which is often in memory close enough that meaningful mitigation is possible.

my top 30 songs of 2024

5. death & romance by magdalena bay (x)

the one thing thing funnier than this caption is that the only reason they stopped doing it was that the ferret shit in the tube

i am going to tell you all about her so you can join my club

Microdosing on court intrigue by being really cagey about what I do in my spare time for no good reason

#the amount of people who genuinely don't understand that signed languages are in fact languages and not a coded form of spoken language is staggering

sign language & linguistics resource!

linguist Adam Schembri has been updating his amazing resource, What All Linguists Should Know (about sign languages). It's a really fantastic repository of info, including some really great basics that are great for students and non-linguists as well. Please share widely! I'll also copy a few links from his page, just as highlights:

What is sign language? (Schembri, 2013) https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-sign-language-21453 

How many sign languages are there? (Glottolog) https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/sign1238 (short answer: at least 220)

How are sign languages acquired? (Lillo-Martin & Henner, 2021) https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-043020-092357

I recommend that anyone interested in or studying linguistics at any level (from hobbyist to professional!) ask themselves (and colleagues, instructors, students, etc), frequently: wait - is that true about languages in general, or just spoken languages? Have we done any research about how this works in other modalities? Keep asking the question!