Somewhere along the way we all go a bit mad. So burn, let go and dive into the horror, because maybe it's the chaos which helps us find where we belong.R.M. Drake
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Latest Posts by the-antihero-of-the-story - Page 2
“Depending on how you see it, you need either the fullest expert knowledge for philosophy, or none at all.”
— Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
Can We Find Paradise? (I found mine in You) - Submitted by alliveirrr
#E1AC97 #D6DA99 #F9EBE8 #496551 #DF8E88 #FADE9F #D05456
French verbs: all about stress
When learning French, I loved the verbs parler ('to talk') and aimer ('to love') because they were entirely regular. A thousand years ago, I wouldn't have been that happy. At that time, parler was irregular too: people said il/ele parole, not il/elle parle. And it wasn't aimer but amer, yet il/ele aime. Many more verbs that are now perfectly regular, used to have two different stems.
Click the video to hear a selection of these verbs evolve.
These irregularities were due to the regular sound changes that turned Latin into Old French. In Latin, word stress was different in the infinitive than in the third person, as indicated with an underline in the video. This stress difference had consequences for how the vowels developed:
a-MA-re > a-MER
A-mat > AI-me
On my Patreon (tier 1), I tell all about this phenomenon: how it affected vowels in a predictable way, the patterns that emerged (with a discussion of all of the forms in the video), and how the alternations were eventually eliminated. 1500 words, link in bio.
fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence, Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.
He Has A Question
You know we don’t actually have an accurate count of how many bilingual people there are in the US because our census asks people “do you speak a language other than English at home?” and not what some other countries might ask which is “can you comfortably have a conversation in a language other than your native language” or something similar.
When people say “20% of Americans are multilingual” they mean that 20% of Americans speak a language at home other than English.
This doesn’t account for people that speak English at home but also speak another language. I personally know multiple people who speak Spanish or another language even though they speak English at home. I know someone who speaks six languages conversationally and she’s not getting counted by these statistics because she speaks English at home.
We don’t actually know accurately how multilingual the US is. Like imagine if they just asked Dutch people if they speak a language other than Dutch at home. The Netherlands has a multilingualism rate of something like 95% but that number would probably go down substantially if you just asked if they speak Dutch at home or not.
Finally continuing on a book that i really really need to return to the uni library; and just skipped a chapter (they're independent essays) because it wasn't relevant/interesting to me; but this next chapter is coming through within the first paragraph:
"To know another's language and not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of yourself"
- attributed to Winston Brembeck
A group of far-future linguists and archeologists suddenly *poof* into existence in front of me. One is holding a tablet. "What is the difference between 'red sauce' and 'tomato sauce?'" they ask me. "The distinction is not clear in extant texts from this time and place."
"Uh, they're the same thing," I tell them. "Who are you?"
"Yes!" the being with the tablet exclaims.
One of the other researchers groans. "No! My thesis...months of writing wasted..." One of the others comforts them.
"Now, what is this object for?" The first researcher holds up a discolored, dinged-up plastic object. It's clearly been buried in the ground for quite some time, but the two holes and the scuffed plastic window are distinctive.
"That's a cassette tape. You record music with it."
"Interesting, interesting." The being enters something on the tablet.
"How are you speaking English?"
"Sophisticated translation technology," one of the researchers confides. "We are students of your society. From the future."
"What does this pictogram represent?" The researcher with the tablet turns it around so that the screen faces me.
It's the eggplant emoji.
"Sex," I say. "Why do you need to ask me this if you can time travel or whatever? Can't you just go wherever you want to go and look around and see how these things are being used?"
The beings shift guiltily and look at each other. "Technically, travel to times and places prior the advent of time travel is strictly prohibited. Paradoxes, you know."
"Oh."
"We must get back before our advisor returns to the lab. Just don't tell anyone you saw us, alright? The space-time continuity depends on it. Can you do that?"
"Uh, sure, I guess?"
One of them pats me on the head. "And don't go to Mars."
"Okay. Wait, why? Is it dangerous?"
"No. Just not worth it."
The group disappears in a shimmering light.
The cassette clatters to the sidewalk behind them.
Out of befuddlement, mainly, I pick it up. It's clearly old, discolored and scuffed, but it still has tape in it.
I carry the tape around in my pocket for a while. The curiosity builds. I want to know what's on that tape. I don't have a cassette player anymore, so I go to Goodwill and pick up the first one I can find, praying that it still works. I plug it in. It turns on.
I slide the tape inside. It's dirty, but it still seems to be in decent shape. I snap the player closed and hit play. The wheels begin to turn. I hold my breath.
A familiar tune starts up. A wobbly voice comes out of the machine.
We're no strangers to love
you know what fuck it, I love you historical spelling. I love you weird fossilised preservations of obsolete alphabets, grasping for something that exists now like mist, like liquid, its true pronunciation lost to time but not quite forgotten, not yet. a ghost remains, a friendly one, comfortable in this old house. I love you repurposed letters for phonemes that neither the old language nor the variety they were borrowed into has any need for anymore. I love you sensible vowel pairings that have grown - improbably - centuries later, into unwieldy diphthongs, quietly thriving in an ever-shifting environment like weeds nestled cosily beneath the shade of grander plants that have long since turned to mulch. I love the word 'diphthong' (the little thicket of consonants in the middle of it, sprouting up from nowhere to trouble tongue and penmanship alike). I love how Phoenician fingerprints remain in a Norman revision of an Anglo-Saxon reworking of a Roman borrowing of a Greek repurposing, all these shapes and signs moulded again and again like clay, like mud, spun like flax to carry all those lovely glides and nasals and obstruents which come and go and come and go over time as the sounds mutate and grow apart, and the people grow and age and die, leaving behind nothing except (sometimes) a page. a poem. a piece of themselves, their voice, rendered in imperfect beautiful scratchings whose contours match the ceaseless flow of time, heavy with all that history and somehow also light with the sheer urgency of being written. look at it, isn't it wonderful? this moment in time that holds within it yet other moments? other echoes calling down through the centuries? this is how we spoke, this is what we sounded like, once. this is how we thought our ancestors would have said it. I love the inconvenience. English is so hard to learn. the spelling is so illogical. so cumbersome. it's frustrating. it makes no sense. it's inconvenient. yes and yes and yes, and yet you too are inconvenient, you too are inchoate and too much and you fail to resolve into a neat and comprehensible order. but look at you. how lovely you are. I treasure you. why should the words you speak be any less lovely.
Xiao’erjing is, at its core, a phonetic writing system which represents the phonemes of Chinese using adapted Arabic letters. In its phonetic aspect, Xiao’erjing is thus akin to pinyin, the system commonly used to write Mandarin Chinese in Latin letters, though differing notably in that tones are not explicitly marked. This lack of tone markings may be cause for confusion, given the vast repertoire of homophones in Chinese. In a given semantic context, however, native users of this writing system rarely encounter ambiguity, just as an experienced reader of Arabic or Persian has little difficulty inferring the short vowels of a given word despite the absence of diacritics from most texts.
Sharing this article that I thought might interest both Arab and Chinese speakers following me
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.
not very new hyperfixation rediscovered write a poem abt it
“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”
— George F. Will
life truly is about love and cats
“The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.”
— Rhian Ellis
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
i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:
compare with the real kanji
座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”
Peanut
Midnight Rain
The Wrong Turn
Guess who's back here? I had a bumpy ride but I made it eventually.
Tumblr Holidays:
• March 14th: Pi Day
• March 15th: Ides of March
• April 1st: April Fools Day and Mishapocalypse Memorial Day
• April 13th: Homestuck Day
• April 20th: Weed Day
• September 8th: Queen Elizabeth Killed By Sans Undertale Day
• November 5th: Destiel Canon Day
Wahoo, another pixel arts!
Bro is tired
Burden "You are not a burden. You HAVE a burden, which by definition is too heavy to carry on your own."