Me: I don’t deny your identity. I acknowledge Palestinians exist today.
Them: Jesus was a Palestinian, not a Jew!
Me: Well, no - he was a Jewish rabbi. He had a bris, kept Shabbat, kept kosher, & his “Last Supper” was a Passover Seder. Besides, nobody would be called “Palestinian” for ~1,900 years after #Jesus died.
Them: Jews are #Khazars with no history in Palestine!
Me: Well, no - millions of DNA samples have now scientifically proven that Ashkenazi Jews (like their Sephardi & Mizrahi brothers & sisters) originate from the Levant (Israel).
Ashkenazi Jews migrated to the Rhineland (western #Germany) between 800-900 CE.
#Yiddish - the language spoken by #Ashkenazi Jews for a millennia - is a mixture of Jews’ original Hebrew & adopted #German.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence of any Khazar influence on Ashkenazi customs, language, or culture.
The #Khazar tale (claiming some or many Turkic Khazars converted to #Judaism), while interesting, is not supported by any archeological evidence, and can be considered nothing more than a story.
Besides, it’s unassailable that the Ashkenazim were living ~1,500 miles from the Khazars, which may as well have been on the moon in the Middle Ages.
Them: Palestinians are Canaanites, the original inhabitants of the Land!
Me: Well, no - there’s zero evidence the Palestinians are Canaanites. This theory followed other similarly false claims over the past several decades that the Palestinians descend from the Philistines (an ancient Aegean Greek “sea people”) and even the Jebusites - a people for whom there is no evidence outside of the Bible of their having ever existed (if they did, they have been gone for at least 3,000 years).
One thing is clear, all of these recent tall tales about Palestinians’ ancient roots in “Palestine” were created in an attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel & not as some academic attempt to find Palestinian roots.
The #Canaanites (who spoke a language similar to #Hebrew, not #Arabic) have been extinct for more than 3,000 years; and there are no #Canaanite influences in any modern Palestinian language, culture, cuisine, customs, or religion.
Furthermore, DNA studies now prove Canaanites are closest in descension to modern-day Armenians & Western Iranians - but, culturally, there has not been a “Canaanite” people in ~3,000 years.
Meanwhile, there is a practically infinite amount of archeological, biblical & non-biblical text, and architectural evidence proving beyond any doubt that Jews lived in the Land of Israel continuously for more than 3,200 years.
Arabs only started arriving in Eretz Israel in significant numbers during the Arab Imperial conquest out of the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in the mid 7th century CE when the Land was still majority-occupied by ~350,000 Jews.
Arab conquerers #colonized the Land of Israel & subjugated the Jewish majority.
That’s right, the Arabs were the #colonizers - this is historical fact no matter how much that might make your head hurt.
Them: The Jews are foreigners who stole Palestinian land!
Me: Ok, now you’ve officially ticked me off by repeatedly denying MY identity - one that was OBVIOUS to everyone before the last ~55 years when KGB-inspired propaganda went into mass effect in an effort to delegitimize Israel.
Can’t say the same about your identity … even though I keep trying to offer to respect it!
The Arabs only ruled Eretz Israel after conquering it in the 7th century & until they were kicked out by the Seljuks ~400 years later. Never during that time, did they even attempt to establish an Arab or #Muslim state or capital anywhere in Eretz Israel (Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran, and while the city is holy to Sunni Muslims, it is not holy to Shia Muslims).
And during the time of Arab rule, there was obviously no state or country called “Palestine.”
Then, during the 400 years before the start of the British Mandate around 1920, the Land was a distant & severely neglected province of the Ottoman #Turkish Empire.
In fact, in the late 19th century, as Jews began moving back to their homeland in larger numbers, there were only ~200,000 people living there (mostly a sparse, nomadic population), and Jews were the majority in #Jerusalem.
Post-WWI, the League of Nations (the precursor to the UN) legally granted Britain a "sacred trust" called the Mandate for Palestine (a name given to the land by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 CE).
The Mandate for Palestine was the least controversial of the 15 post-WWI mandates because everyone KNEW Jews were from “Palestine.”
So the Mandate for Palestine, which included the legal requirement for Britain to aid in the establishment of a Jewish National Home, passed unanimously by the League of Nations.
Among other things, the unanimously passed & legally-binding Mandate recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
Besides, before the Jews started returning to the Land in large numbers in the late 19th century, it had become almost entirely war-torn ruins, arid desert & malarial swamps.
But the returning Jews were determined to rebuild their homeland; and the evidence is undeniable that Jewish labor & the Western technology they brought along helped to make the desert bloom again.
The result of a new booming economy in the midst of mostly rural, undeveloped land is no surprise; and hundreds of thousands of Arabs from neighboring lands immigrated to Mandate Palestine in the early to mid 20th century.
In fact, once Arabs began to rebel against the Jews (with pogroms & full-blown barbaric massacres on a particularly wide scale in 1920, 1921, 1929, and in 1936-1939), they made extremely clear to the British that they resented the name “Palestine,” which they claimed (incorrectly) was a modern Zionist invention.
For example, at the British Peel Commission in 1937 (looking into Arab riots from the year before), local Arab leader Audi Bey Abdul-Hadi testified that “[t]here is no such country [as Palestine]! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!”
Again, during the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that was set-up to make recommendations for the territory, Arab-American historian Philip Hitti testified, “There is no such thing as Palestine in [Arab] history, absolutely not.”
The Arab position was not particularly surprising, as "Palestine” is not an Arab word (Arabic does not even have a letter “P” or a sound for “P,” which is why you often hear Arabs today pronounce it with a “B” as “Balastine”).
The Arabs in the Land at that time mostly identified with their local clan & otherwise considered themselves “Arabs” of “Southern Syria.”
In fact, just about anyone who was called a “Palestinian” pre-1948 was a #Jew.
This is why nobody made any attempt to create a “Palestinian state” during the 19 years between 1948 and 1967 in which #Egypt occupied #Gaza & #Jordan occupied the “#WestBank.”
The hard truth - even though I’m still acknowledging a #Palestinian people exists today - is that an Arab “Palestinian” identity was created for the first time in any signifiant way at the height of the Cold War in the mid-1960s & at the behest of the #Soviet#KGB, which wanted to expand its influence in the region, undermine the only democracy in the Middle East, and which had been repeatedly embarrassed by Israeli victories over invading Soviet-backed & Soviet-armed Arab states.
So the KGB wrote the ridiculous “Palestine Liberation Organization” (PLO) charter & molded Yasser Arafat at what was known as “KGB U” in #Moscow to use #terror & #propaganda to destabilize Israel.
Over the decades since then, many Arabs in the Land have come to self-identify as “Palestinians.”
Even among Palestinians today, however, many still identify with their clan over a separate “Palestinian” nationality (e.g., the clans do not intermarry & many are constantly engaged in some degree of violent conflict).
And the 2 million+ Arabs citizens of the State of Israel (who have equal protection under the law & more rights & privileges than they would have in any Arab and/or Muslim country on Earth) almost exclusively identify as either #Israeli-#Arabs or as simply #Israelis - not as #Palestinians.
Them: #Jews … I mean #Zionists … are bad, ok? Just ask the UN.
Me: Right. Just ask the #UN
Captain Allen
@CptAllenHistory
I really enjoy the linguistic anaylasis and this just enriches the story so much
I saw this post by @danosphere91 and I was going to reblog it and just ramble in the tags for a minute, but it got way too long for tag rambling very fast and I figured if I’m going to ramble I may as well just go ahead and let myself ramble for days.
‘Cause, like, I’ve been thinking about One Piece having different languages since somewhere around Alabasta in my first watch, and I always kind of low-key headcanon it as being a thing going on in the background.
Like, there’s a standard language enforced by the World Government, but of course it gets tweaked a bit as the years go by and some islands don’t have much contact with other islands, and then there are places the World Government doesn’t control and it’s really anybody’s guess whether or not the people there will be able to speak a language anyone recognizes. While most of each individual sea speaks the same language, most islands in the Grand Line have their own languages, since going between islands can be so difficult. One of the most notable exceptions is the islands connected by the sea train, which have agreed upon a shared language to make trading easier.
The Marines all speak the standard language, and officially that’s all they’re really supposed to speak, though most are aware that there are some circumstances that call for a language shift. A good early indicator of what sort of person any given marine is is how willing they are to cycle through languages and dialects until they find the one the person they’re talking to is most comfortable conversing in. (Akainu probably doesn’t speak anything but Standard.)
The East Blue group has a bunch of inside jokes that only work in the East Blue dialect, and sometimes they’ll try to make a new one and it just completely falls apart because the slang in Syrup Village is not at all compatible with the slang in Cocoyasi Village and then everyone is just speaking nonsense.
Luffy’s language skills are just a fucking mess because he learned some from Garp, and some from the people in Windmill Village, and the entire time Shanks was in town and for like two weeks after Luffy just practiced talking the way Shanks did, and then he learned stuff from the mountain bandits and Ace and Sabo and people in the Grey Terminal so it’s all just a mashup of different grammar rules and slang terms and everything else until he’s almost speaking a different language altogether. You know how he does that thing where, after having something explained, he’ll go ‘ah, its a mystery (insert thing here)’? It’s partially because his standard isn’t very good and, rather than try to cross the language gap, he just lets it go. He usually understands a lot more than people think, he just doesn’t have the language skills to communicate it.
Sanji isn’t much better; the fighting chefs come from all over the East Blue - to say nothing of all the language quirks Zeff picked up in the Grand Line and from his crew - and it shows. He’s a little more aware of it than Luffy though, and can usually at least pick one style and stick with it for the sake of consistency over the course of a conversation. His ability to do this slips when he gets mad, and he’ll also start adding in stuff from the language he spoke while living in the North Blue - his arguments with Zoro usually dissolve into physical fights around the time no one can tell what he’s saying anymore. It’s even worse against enemies - Black Leg Sanji is known as ‘that one Straw Hat who will scream nonsense at you while he kicks your face in’.
All those verbal tics characters have? Heavy accents. Law, for instance, never really got the hang of speaking Standard and when he does it - as he usually does in the Grand Line - he does so with a heavy accent that’s a mix of the general North Blue accent and the Flevance-specific one. All of the Minks have accents because of the way their mouths are shaped. ‘Garchu’ is a general greeting and carries a strong sense of community because they can all say it with pretty much the same pronunciation. Bepo lost his accent as a child from trying to sound more like Law, Shachi, and Penguin.
Speaking of Law. He rarely speaks Flevance’s language, but he writes all his notes in it. If people see them, they often assume he’s being paranoid or planning something, so he’s writing in code or something. Really, he’s just trying to make sure this last piece of Flevance doesn’t die before he does.
Big crews with people from lots of different backgrounds, like the Whitebeard Pirates, have to learn each other’s languages in order to communicate, and the crew ends up with a language that’s made up of all their different slang words and figures of speech. You’re really part of the crew when you can communicate fluently in it. Ace isn’t good at picking up new languages - Makino teaching him the proper dialect to be able to thank Shanks for saving Luffy was a nightmare - but the rest of the crew, especially the second division, helps him out where they can. Marco has a pretty heavy accent but he’s fluent in pretty much every language that’s ever come onboard.
The language of the Celestial Dragons is holy and no one else is allowed to speak it. With the exception of a few slave commands and a handful of employees, no one else is even allowed to understand it (plenty of people pick up on parts of it, of course, but you’d better not let on that you can understand it where they can see you). Doflamingo still speaks it to himself or at other people sometimes, as a ‘fuck you’ to all of them. No one else understands it so no one realizes how he’s forgotten a lot of the grammar rules, how he’s lost the accent and now the words break on his tongue, how he’s never had - never will have - a vocabulary better than a ten year old child.
Brook’s speech patterns range between ‘posh gentleman’ and ‘your embarrassing grandfather who thinks it’s still normal to say things like ‘groovy’ unironically’.
Chopper had to learn how to speak human languages from scratch. He can read tons of different languages fluently, but he can’t really speak any but Standard - he can’t get the hang of pronunciation, slang words, or context clues. He’s also not very good at tonal indicators or facial expression cues, since they weren’t things little baby reindeer learn (this is part of why he never realizes when Usopp is lying about things like having 8,000 men - in addition to his naivety, he can’t pick up on the tone shift that Usopp takes on when he starts telling stories).
Franky, in addition to whatever his biological parents spoke, Standard, and the language of Water Seven, can also speak some of Fishman Island’s language. Iceberg used to speak it better, but these days Iceberg is out of practice because the government doesn’t think much of people speaking it (yay, racism). Franky spoke it with Kokoro when she’d come to visit, and would help Chimney practice it too.
And while we’re on the subject of Fishman Island, they probably don’t get access to very good education, especially for the lower class citizens (*coughracismagaincough*), so the lower class the citizen the less likely they are to be able to speak Standard well, if at all. This is one of the arguments used for keeping them out of world meetings, to justify enslaving them, and so on - ‘look, they can’t even speak the language’. Those who can speak Standard usually do it with a thick accent, partially because of the education system and partially because of their mouth shapes.
Koala learned a decent amount of the Celestial Dragon language while a slave, and then the Fishman language from the Sun pirates. The latter is a comfort language; lots more positive associations with it than any other language. She relearns the Celestial Dragon language in the Revolutionary army to help translate things.
Sabo and Koala have some difficulties at the beginning of their friendship because Sabo’s noble accent and some of the terms are ingrained in him and last past the amnesia and it reminds her too much of the Celestial Dragons and other nobles. He purposefully uses more slang and forces a more casual accent around her. He isn’t sure why he’s so much more comfortable talking like that than he is talking like a gentleman.
So, yeah, I could go on for about a thousand years because I’m a linguistics nerd, but basically languages and the cultural and social implications thereof are super interesting and I like thinking about them, can you tell.
OMG the backstory behind the whole boop thing is amazing.
lydia davis
Okay but seriously if you’re anxious about political results to the point of literal crippling anxiety you genuinely need help. This goes across the board and I’m saying this as a kindness because that’s not normal and not healthy.
Sorry, it's Hualian.
Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water
it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.
“Oh yeah, Babs and Tim are the computer geniuses,” any one of the other Batkids say as they hack into the Pentagon for the third time that week.
“Oh yeah, Dick’s the nice, happy one,” one of the other Batkids say while Nightwing walks off whistling from where he left fourteen assassins unconscious and bleeding in an alley.
I need all of these in my life.
Here are some Sokka centric fics! Most of these works are not labeled as Sokka centric and so it’s very hard to find! There’s only 64 fics out of 15019 fics
Keep reading
Good morning to those who wish people a good morning, those who mean that it is a good morning whether anyone wants it or not, those who feel good this morning, those who feel it is a morning to be good on, those who suppose they mean all of these at once when they say good morning, those smoking a pipe of tobacco out of doors in the morning, and those who never thought they’d see the day they’d be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son.