The-antihero-of-the-story - 「ᴀɴᴛɪʜᴇʀø」

Just imagine a world full of beautiful stained glass windows which also generate electricity…

[Oxford Photovoltaics]

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Susan Sontag.

Alr, so this is just expressing my thoughts after reading It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby, as well as after watching an in depth analysis on it.

Honestly, I really really enjoyed this short story, especially as it is in the cosmic horror genre (absolutely one of my favorite genres).

Now, this is the message that I interpreted from the story:

I think there comes a fear in being unable to live. A fear in not being allowed to live. A fear in trying to make the conscious decision to live. And yet what do we do? Often, we take this conscious decision in our daily lives ‐ and we face this fear - knowing that, although unspeakable horrors may yet lie in the ineffable (or something we know and are unable to explain its ineffable consequences), our lives are good because we exist, and even if we're seen as the "bad man" (quote from the story; it could represent a multitude of things, but i see it, in the context of the story, the want to be able to express one's own individualustic desires, thoughts, and creativity), our 'rebellion' from this absurdity is what makes us ultimately human.

yeah looking back on my interpretation, it's definitely absurdist, but hey, absurdism is one of my favorite philosophies, so I'm not complaining!

Anyway, please go read this short story, it soooooooo sooo good it's such a well-written story.

last night i dreamt tumblr added like a billion buttons to the mobile app so instead of this

we got this

and everyone just rolled with it but sometimes the wide naruto got too wide and blocked off all the other buttons and people would just post "got naruto'd again :/" and the only way to reset him was to log out and log back in

Like to STAB

Reblog to STAB AGAIN

i wasn't familiar with the french philosophers' game

Looking up how many phonemes exist in different languages because I’m that guy and apparently Hawaiian only has 13 phonemes.

I don’t know what to say about that. That’s not a lot. I think it’s cool you can have a language with so few sounds.

another linguistics question, do you guys make distinctions between the accents of non-native speakers and accent from within the native speaker group? if so, how do you tell yhem apart, and what are some distinctions between them? I assume there's some kind of structural difference between the two

Yeah, so the first thing I should clarify here is that there is no technical difference between a "language" and a "dialect". Linguists often use the term "language variety" to be maximally clear on this point. French is a language variety, Bavarian (traditionally called a dialect of German) is a language variety, California English is a language variety. One language variety can be part of another: California English is a variety of English, "English" itself being a broader variety with many sub-varieties. We might further split California English, perhaps into Southern California English, Northern California English, and California Central Valley English, or some such. In the extreme, we can look only at the speech of an individual person; this is called an idiolect. Every human being who speaks a language speaks in their own unique idiolect, which differs from the speech of other humans in various ways. An idiolect is also a language variety.

Now, linguists do make a distinction, a very important distinction, between native and non-native speech. Roughly, a native speaker is someone who acquired a language by exposure during childhood. They were not explicitly taught the language, but picked it up by virtue of being surrounded by people who speak it. Human children seem to have various sorts of special cognitive mechanisms for acquiring language in this way, many of which we lose as we get older. This early period of life in which humans are primed for language acquisition is called the "critical period". There is a lot of debate about what exactly defines the critical period and when it ends (it's more of a gradual taper than a sharp cutoff), but there is basically no debate over the idea that children and adults have at least some fundamental differences when it comes to language learning. A non-native speaker, then, is someone who learned a given language in adulthood, after the critical period of language acquisition.

When linguists speak of a language variety, by fiat they take that variety to be defined by the speech of its native speakers. That is to say: the grammar of English is defined to be that set of rules which describes the speech of native English speakers. Where different varieties of English disagree, a thorough descriptive grammar will make note of that variation, and researchers will zoom in and study on its own terms the grammar of each relevant sub-variety. Every human is, by definition, a perfectly fluent speaker of their own idiolect in any language they acquired during childhood.

So, you asked about the difference between native and non-native "accents". In light of all the above, there are two differences:

First, there is the difference between native and non-native speech in general. Non-native speech is characterized by certain artifacts of the adult language learning process, including carry-over from one's native language(s), which broadly do not affect native speech. Thus, a non-native "accent" is different from a native "accent" in various empirical ways which are pinned down and studied in the field of second language acquisition.

By virtue of the way we have set our definitions up, above, native "accents" differ from non-native ones in that a native "accent" is in fact synonymous with a language variety; rather than being an imperfect specimen of some predefined standard language, it is a definitionally perfect exemplar of a particular linguistic system in its own right.

You could, of course, take up the linguistic system represented by the speech of some adult learner as an object of study in its own right, and some people do. But by and large, the standard which is taken up in linguistics is "language varieties are defined by the speech of their native speakers". I think this is a quite reasonable place to draw a line, especially in light of the empirical differences, as mentioned, between native and non-native speech.

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

— Albert Camus, The Rebel

life truly is about love and cats