The Thing About "don't Shame People Who Choose To Try To Lose Weight" Is Like In Its Initial Iterations

the way you guys treat transmascs is actually fucking disgusting

that's a very unfair accusation, I have many transmasc friends who I treat with only love and kindness :)

the short answer is that babies are just goated at phonology. the working theory is that in order to acquire language as fast as possible, our brains need to be receptive to any and all phonetic information from birth (and possibly even earlier; there's some evidence that prenatal infants pick up on rhythm and pitch information from the sound waves that travel from the parent to the womb). linguists have been testing them on this for a long time, and until they're about 6 month babies can distinguish phonemes from languages they've never been exposed to and who's phonology is completely different to their own. eventually the brain starts to lose that ability in order to focus on correctly articulating those sounds, which is an incredibly complex task, not to mention once you have to start arranging them into patterns to form words and sentences. basically to do takes up lot of cognitive effort that then can't be used to maintain such a massive inventory of sounds.

as for adults, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that it's impossible to learn phonology, since in order to fluently speak a second language you have to be able to understand and produce all the sounds, even if they're not 100% perfect. but in terms of why it's so much more difficult to perfect than something like syntax, it's partly of your brain not being as flexible anymore and, consequently both having a worse memory and a deeply engrained phonemic inventory, to the point that it's difficult for non-native speakers to even "hear" the difference between contrasting sounds your not familiar with (to be clear it's not that you physically can't hear it, it just doesn't register phonologically). this is also why people have consistent accents instead of making pronunciation errors at random; they're still following a set of structural rules, most likely very similar to the ones of native speakers, but with the influence of their first language changing it slightly.

so like. as i understand it, at any age, if your exposure to language is restricted to a single language, you will learn that language. like it just sort of happens, your brain figures out its grammar, semantics, etc, formal training HELPS but is not required. but this is *not* the case with the language's phonology! people will live in a foreign-phone country for years, primarily exposed to its language, they will understand it perfectly, generate it perfectly, and yet will still have a strong "accent" if not trained how to avoid it. that's weird, right? why doesnt the brain learn the phonology? (and why does it learn it perfectly as a baby?) is it too "low level", muscular-level, and that stuff gets "hardened" while higher level stuff is more flexible..?

gender to me is like a car i dont really want one and society would be much better if it was not structured around it. but i got one because it helps me get around and sometimes its fun to make it go fast

i really try to distinguish between being annoyed by semantic shifts in a pointless prescriptive way and being annoyed by semantic shifts because they make language less useful but whatever is happening to the word gentrification it's the latter

been enjoying some media/content by makers lately

I do lowkey think everyone's a little autistic/adhd/ocd/etc. but in like a cool anti-psych non pathologizing way

Just finished reading my third book on marxist political theory, just a few more and I think I might be ready for this "Disco Elysium" you guys have been telling me about,

— Gilles Delueze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

People (sometimes rightfully) criticize negativity and hatred as foreclosing thought and the enjoyment of life but nowadays it’s much more often the case that enforced positivity and agreement foreclose thought and life. It’s so obnoxious how the second you start going into your actual thoughts about something and your belief that things can and should be different, people just start trying to stop you because it doesn’t involve immediate agreement with the way everyone lives their lives. Who fucking cares, I’m not jumping in front of them and restraining them, and I’m not gonna just yammer about myself all day. I’m already part of the world, how am I supposed to skirt around the edges of it without ever saying anything about any of it? These positivity freaks want to reduce all language to description and affirmation, they want everyone to sound like a fucking advertisement

imagining a lesbian who insists that the etymology of yearning comes from yuri

usamericans and europeans love to moralize objective economic categories by transposing the relations of oppression to a good-and-bad dynamic which affects everyone as individuals, so that a statement of fact without any bearing on their individual personhood becomes an accusation to them, one that must simply not be true because their self-imposed moralization goes against the real oppression they do face, an oppression which has of course also been unnecessarily moralized, resulting in a completely self-fabricated contradiction between being oppressed (good and righteous) and benefitting from the oppression of others (bad and despisable)