The linguist's lingo

[narrow hinge]

A lot of the other courses contain a lot of things that aren't necessarily up-to-date with the language

Yeah there's not a lot of languages that have the background theirs does to bring it to its current form

They kept it through all their varying occupations over the centuries and, its variously, had forms heavily influenced by Latin, Arabic, and now Russian & Cryllic (for written form)

The root language itself is still more akin to a tribal construct language than a modern language, although, due to that context it has a very expansive set of additives while still keeping its old structure

[fast anchor]

im using this service called Mondly for Spanish and Russian just to learn new words i love the russian one, the way words are pronounced seem idk how to explain it but not only unique but fun to talk in

[narrow hinge]

You don't see that very much in other similar environments because, say, if you were to take areas in the Middle East for example, a lot of the lingual influence is more linearly Arabic or English, with the main distinctions being dialectical rather than language itself.

[fast anchor]

Yeah I’m practicing Spanish now it just all sounds the same from different people

I think what taking notes on is when reading I have to break up the vowel sounds where as in English I don’t the sentence feels like it’s flows

[fast anchor]

Hey I was watching a video on that chanel that’s interesting. So Russia’s population is in decline and seeing an increase in the Muslim population in i believe they said southern Russia?

[narrow hinge]

I'm actually not sure about a broader increase in Muslim population in southern Russia. It's kind of stagnated in the Northern Caucasus since it's mostly rooted in predominance and the other smaller religious presence is also pretty rooted so it'd be harder to sway those folks.

[gloomy blade]

There are some other minorities that had some increase before the war

[fast anchor]

https://youtu.be/D7LDhtw2oaU?si=4_smGibNOT9qGi5z @narrow hinge finally diving into and learning about the Chechen War any resources you want to add

[narrow hinge]

Before I add any resources I have a major nerdism to go through first

What interests you exactly? JUST the war?

[fast anchor]

I have not learned the backstory yet. Anything is good to know

[narrow hinge]

I approach it this way cause something I've noticed over the years is people first diving into the wars, or the war era - or people actually just interested in the wars. For both, they tend to lack out on a lot of very important details from older times that are critical to know

So its important there - is it say, their peoples and culture that interests you, and this is just your starting point?

Or are you specifically interested in the wars?

[fast anchor]

Yeah this culture interest me as well

[narrow hinge]

I'll shoot you two little lists then in that case

Ones gonna be more just the war relevant stuff

That's a really tricky period for their culture too so theres a lot of stuff you can find that er, conclusions can be very different without understanding things pre-war

[fast anchor]

Pretty much spent the last several months on learning about Serbia and the Yugoslavia wars and conflicts it’s all interesting giving it a break

[narrow hinge]

Yeah aside from any conflict stuff they have an absolutely beautiful culture

Most of the bad stuff we hear about it is botched to high hell understandings of it (not that, it doesn't have some issues ofc)

And it's really sad because really the only media attention they get is "fighting russia" "scary terrorist"

[fast anchor]

There’s always missing information in the main message

[narrow hinge]

So even those Chechens under Kadyrov fighting in Ukraine, Russia even explicitly had them doing stuff to pump up for Influence reasons (people STILL talk about the "chechen tiktok battalions" - that was actually a "PSYOP" from Russia, tho, they dont use the term PSYOP specifically for their practice)

In reality actually, their cultural code, nokchallah

If an enemy is fighting you, and they are wounded

You are obligated to assist them, and see them to health

And you are then further obligated to set them on their way back home with enough resources to survive

[fast anchor]

Moral code?

[narrow hinge]

If they come back to you with harm in their heart, you do what is needed. But as long as they do not die on the battlefield, that cycle continues

This is entirely lost in the ENglish space in favor of focusing on their religious extremists who exploit and ignore the cultural codes

[narrow hinge]

Yes/no

So they have a few of these

Nokchallah, Konahallah, Adamalla, Adats, etc

Nokchallah roughly means "Chechenness"

So while there is moral parts baked into it, it's more of an ethnic identity thing

Konahallah gets a lot more into actual moral and ethics

[fast anchor]

Was that the crew that allegedly stood up to Russia at the start of the invasion and then suddenly were all slaughtered?

[narrow hinge]

nah there wasnt any of that happening with chechens

theres 3 camps of chechens in Ukraine

theres thoes fighting under Kadyrov, on behalf of Russia

There's those under the CRI MOD who, technically, are fighting for the Chechen government-in-exile

Which is a majority

Then you have a lot of individual Chechens who are fighting with Ukraine directly, rather than under the CRI MOD

All the named Chechen groups you hear about volunteering on Ukraines side are technically part of CRIs MoD

And yeah that's an actual thing they have generals and commanders etc that have a whole chain of command up to their exiled leader (Akhmad Zakayev)

[fast anchor]

That’s good info, I have to start from the 1900s

[narrow hinge]

It was actually kind humorous at the start cause, while everyone else was clambering for equipment for their units.... The chechen groups were posting videos of entire homes filled with freshly shipped M4s, grenade crates with the grandes still in their protective packaging fresh from warehouses and shit lmao

Still curious where they got all that from

I have some suspicions but for another channel

[fast anchor]

How Chechnya was as a society pre and post Russian constitutional crisis

[narrow hinge]

Yeah this is where I'd start honestly, just, focusing on the war period, but theres a looooot of history thats important if you really want to nerd out

There's a lot of stuff in the end of the Soviet era that's important to understand

eg the Chechen populace somewhat already had been conditioned to life under Russian rule (going back far into the Russian Empire years)

The Soviets treated them absolutely brutally compared to the RE + ethnic cleansing and attempts to erase ethnic identities in the North Caucasus

This is what creates the very alienized view you have now

Although it's also why a lot of people are not actively fighting against Russia (two facet- there's runoff conditioning there+Russia restood them up economically while.. well, the rest of the world functionally supported Russia's war, and we still spread Russian disinformation about Chechens. We just ask them to pick up arms and die for us because, hey, maybe we might recognize them as a nation? Who knows, probably not, no one cared before.)

Then keying into their culture specifics too, that type of two-faced support and etc has an even greater level of severity than it does in cultures like ours

[fast anchor]

Like how Russian language was indoctrinated into Transnistria?

Going to look into college library and find books on Chechnya around the 1900s

[narrow hinge]

Kind of but, much worse. Around the end of WW2, Levrentiy Beria approved "Operation Lentil" which was the forced resettlement of the entire Nakh ethnic family (more than just Chechens) to Central Asia. This was conducted in the latter parts of the year and the earliest, basically, when winter weather was at its peak. There is some debated, but an estimated 100k(lower band - English sourcing) - 400k (upper band - non-Soviet aligned regional sourcing) were killed during the resettlements, which, at a minimum, was a quarter of the entire ethnic family trees population. This set them all back functionally by centuries in terms of populace developments (and as a result things requiring people).
This was achieved by literally 100,000s of soldiers going door to door across their entire nations and rounding people into freight trains. The way they conducted this was absolutely brutal and there were many mass killings of Nakh peoples all across the region, like the massacre in Khaibakh where they basically rounded up the entire village of around 700 people and burned them all to death.
Beria then went on a rampage and ordered a witch hunt for Nakh peoples across the entire USSR. All of those that were resettled were also put into controlled settlements that were just as bad as some concentration camps the Nazis ran - the only thing lacking being experiments on them.

As an example of how that impacted their culture itself too. A lot of people point out their very strong views on women and children. Some of this is religious and cultural, although a major amplification point for example, was actually this. Because it already existed, the NKVD and Soviet soldiers would specifically target their women and children for violence as punishment to men. This was done basically across their entire ethnic population so it had a very grand effect on amplifying that protective element to a form a lot of people may consider "too much".

Small edit: Sorry for OT folks! We've moved the convo.

[north hazel]

Interested in ppls thoughts on this https://medium.com/occrp-unreported/the-dominance-of-anglo-saxon-journalism-840c4e54e274

[midnight mortar]

Translating stuff is really effective and a fun way to learn

[unborn turret]

Depends on what you translate

I have translated manuals in Singlish to Spanish and that's definitely not fun

And I learnt no Mandarin from that

[midnight mortar]

Video game and fictional media quotes 😄

Recently translated the whole “crazed marine in Halo CE, Flood Introduction” quote

[unborn turret]

That's far more appealing

[midnight mortar]

Poor guy tho

Saw parasites and hell, and some 7foot green armor guy rolls up outta nowhere? Of course I’d start emptying the mag too

[wheat sinew]

"Anglo-Saxon"

I thought this was going a completely different direction...

[cobalt temple]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lost-civilization-alphabet-social-media

[unborn turret]

Thanks for sharing, I don't know how I missed out on this!

For anyone unaware, Tartessos is one of the likely candidates to have inspired Atlantis

[cobalt temple]

https://brill.com/view/journals/clao/aop/article-10.1163-19606028-bja10045/article-10.1163-19606028-bja10045.xml

[gloomy blade]

higher quality version https://i.imgur.com/GhgimyX.jpeg

[fast anchor]

https://fixupx.com/TheFigen_/status/1825558772271772030

[turbid scaffold]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIgKd0Ovzy8 I'm mostly putting this here so that I remember to watch it later, came across it while I'm working

[turbid scaffold]

now that I'm watching this, I find it very interesting but if you don't know anything about Finnic languages, I don't know how much would you get out of this

[turbid scaffold]

from that video I've learned for example that the word 'sauna' is a germanic loan and is cognates with English 'stack'

[wheat sinew]

On the subject of #bombs-arms-drones-other-killing-machines message

I saw this: https://vxtwitter.com/euan_macdonald/status/1827278462786158666

[unborn turret]

Looks like a different angle to this: #russia-ukraine-eastern-europe message

[wheat sinew]

Check out the last sentence.

It doesn't say 'see' as is usual...

"In future, the Russians won’t be able to say what hit them."

[unborn turret]

I mean, that's just the idiom I guess? "The won't know what hit them" is more common tho

[wheat sinew]

It's about the shibboleth function of palyanytsia.

Guess it's not as funny as I thought.

[unborn turret]

Ooooh, I get it now

[turbid scaffold]

I just realised that 'bourgeois' is just French for 'burger'

[pallid hound]

With X social media platform now and ex social media platform in Brazil (at least for the time being) maybe this might be an opportunity to discuss the many ways of pronouncing X in Portuguese.

I never really thought about it but what do Brazilians call X formerly twitter?.
Es, Eish, she's, cheese?

[wheat sinew]

https://bsky.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3l6cricwyhz2s

Nice thread 🧵

[narrow hinge]

brother in law ism

great translation lmaooo

not so much a funny translation but I love "don" with Chechen it confuses so many people who watch videos of Kadyrov or etc, its translation path is really weird and complex but its just a filler like saying "uh" or "so" etc.

[unborn turret]

I confirm this lol

[midnight mortar]

This language has been arounf for a century, just about if memory serves

hold on lemme google

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto ok cool, introduced in 1887

[wheat sinew]

That's an auxlang. 😛

[midnight mortar]

Semantics go brrrrrt

Hence why I fucking love this Discord

One wild thing about languages:
You get stuff like “abonatojn” which is the accusative plural present nominal passive participle of “aboni”, which means “to have a subscription”

[wheat sinew]

Have you looked into Finnish?

[turbid scaffold]

finnish is easy and fun, even kids speak it here

[midnight mortar]

I’d much rather not…?

Esperanto alone scares me

Because wtf is a “accusative singular past nominal passive participle”

[turbid scaffold]

how do you have an accusative of a verb

[wheat sinew]

A dumb idea for a lingua franca, that’s what.

Also goes for diacritics.

[turbid scaffold]

in finnish you can have an accusative of a nominal, and a passive participle of a verb but verbs are kinda the oppisite of nominals

actually you can have a nominative case of a verb, which then becomes a nominal

"tilatut" in Finnish is a plural present nominative passive participle, and you can use it as an accusative

where the basic form is "tilata"

[midnight mortar]

Languages are wild

[turbid scaffold]

https://x.com/qikipedia/status/1845857101408882863

Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) on X

And you know what English is? The results of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids… and no more legitimate than any of the other results. H. BEAM PIPER

Twitter · Oct 14, 2024, 4:00 PM

[drowsy sable]

At least the Fins pronounce all their letters glares at Denmark

[turbid scaffold]

you can hear this tendency even when Danes are speaking English

[gloomy blade]

In contrasst to Danish that hold the record for being the hardest for kids to learn

[drowsy sable]

Oh and then there's dialects. North-Jutland accent is not the same as the one in Copenhagen.

I don't remember which one I find easier to understand.

[muted wigeon]

allegedly not even adults learn to speak the language clearly

[midnight mortar]

Granted, once a language becomes "big enough", theres gonna be regional differences

[drowsy sable]

If you live in the same house as people from other places long enough you develop a dialect

[midnight mortar]

humans and languages go brrrrt

[drowsy sable]

What I mean is that you start using whatever phrases in whatever language describes the situation best and if you live together long enough you start building a story-mythology together. I have always thought it was very cool. I can hear which of my friends have lived in english-, spanish-, or polish dominant house shares by their word choice in some cases. And then we all have a common language based on those house languages. It's less now we're older than when we all hung out more, but we must have been incomprehensible to people who weren't part of the extended community.

[narrow hinge]

Doesn't even need to be big enough 🤣

[midnight mortar]

Never said how big is "big enough"

[turbid scaffold]

I think the current theory in for Finnish is that there's been two separate migration waves of Finnic speaking people coming to what is now Finland, one from south via Latvia and Estonia, and one directly from the east

[midnight mortar]

[narrow hinge]

Chechen has a little over 1m speakers but over 12 dialects. Highlander and lowlander dialectical categories are generally not entirely intelligable. The "why" for specific dialects change - some have followed modern developments, some have not. For some its prununciation distinctions.

Circassian has a similar thing going on but not sure how many specific dialects there are (Circassians also have beautiful music)

[drowsy sable]

I did not know this.

[midnight mortar]

TIL

[turbid scaffold]

I mostly learned that from this video that I linked back in August

[drowsy sable]

Ah yes working. What I should be doing rn 😛

[midnight mortar]

lol

[turbid scaffold]

because of who Finnish linguistics as a science started when the Finnish national identity was also starting to become more of a thing, it was quite political and for a long time it was a taboo to even suggest that there would've been Germanic speaking people here, before there were any Finnic speaking people

but the current consensus is that that's how it went

but those Germanic speaking people aren't ancestors to the current Swedish-speaking minority in Finland

they were assimilated into the Finnic people, and the Swedish-speakers came later, from Sweden as you might have guessed

[drowsy sable]

Yes, I know one, interestingly.

(Swedish minority I mean)

[midnight mortar]

One fun thing about learning a language: realizing you can kinda understand stuff now https://www.liberafolio.org/2024/01/16/esperanta-mastodon-servilo-blokis-giganton/

[north hazel]

Continuing from #money , i know many people who speak Arabic (and other) as a first languages is more likely to use phrases like "off the light" rather than "turn off the light" which i find interesting

[midnight mortar]

Always fun reading books in another language. Helps one learn a language

[wheat sinew]

I do it all the time. 👍

[midnight mortar]

Hell, translating memes and explaining the cultural aspects of said meme works too!

Literally page 6 of this book im reading, and I love it when authors do this: ||"1 Ronkokluki: eligi la sonon, kiu estas miksaĵo de kluko (chuckle) kaj ronko (snort). Angle: chortle — inventita de la verkisto Lewis Carroll, tiu nun estas konata angla vorto."||

[midnight mortar]

https://www.ddinstagram.com/reel/DBOaKG8JP8S/?igsh=MWtveHBmZnBiMXozdQ==

Sometimes all you can do is smile and agree

[north hazel]

Not a new article but one new to us https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0405448102

Paper on Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, 2005

[north hazel]

Is this a good place to ask for advice on preventing misunderstandings over the internet?

We're autistic and frequently have our intentions and ideas misunderstood when we think we are being very clear. This happens more when communicating with neurotypicals, more so online but it happens offline as well.

[midnight mortar]

This is the language thread of Bellingcat, so yea. What advice do you want?

[north hazel]

Sometimes even when we feel like we are being clear and concise, people assume we are speaking from a place of ignorance and we get dismissed.

Like we struggle with communicating clearly.

So attempts at being concise ends up being unclear.

And more verbose answers annoys people

[midnight mortar]

Yea, that’s the issue with neurotypicals: they aren’t used to other methods of communication

[vagrant lance]

You're welcome to @ me to go over a post or sentence. I'm a professional communicator and I'm happy to go over a sentence and point out areas of ambiguity or ways things could be misinterpreted

I might not be available right away. I have autistic family members that I feel I communicate well with, so I'm not unused to helping them work through refining communication

[north hazel]

That is very useful, thank you!

[vagrant lance]

Of course! It's intellectually intense work (that I'm already doing 40 hours a week) so that's why I say I might not be available right away, because when I'm not at my best, things slip

[narrow hinge]

I don't touch the interpersonal side in as much depth as Sarah but I'd be happy to lend a hand also - admittedly won't be as helpful in every case.

I figure you've already poked into the sorts of speech programs catered that way, although as a side thing, have you ever looked into things like oratory and rhetoric in an academic sense?
If that's something that interests you from a learning angle also, I know there are quite a few neurotypical folks who dive really deep into learning and applying that and become absolutely kickass communicators.

https://youtu.be/jrR4BLoUNpU Thomas is probably the most publicized example dude is very brilliant and has become an insanely good public speaker even (he put in a lot of time with Toastmasters doing formal practice though not entirely self learned)

[north hazel]

We've started learning BSL in the hopes that it will help with non-verbal communication (plus it'll help with my union work), but i haven't heard of either those things in the academic sense. Will definitely look into that. Thank you!

[turbid scaffold]

It's sometimes annoying when you learn the etymology of some word

and then you start to notice that everyone is using the word "wrong", ie. to mean something else than what the word's original meaning was

I've been annoyed at the word "decimate" recently

[unborn turret]

That's totally me with the very common misuse of the word genocide, used as meaning mass killings when it is actually a very well defined word and it doesn't strictly imply any killing (a good example of genocide without killing is the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia). Whether something is genocide or not lies upon the intent of the perpetrators rather than merely the mass killing of people, even if it is targeted to a group or ethnicity (hence why it is very important to study and find evidence of genocide before using it lightly, since otherwise it can mask real genocide).

There are more generic words like democide that fit that use better but it didn't stick. It has become one of those loaded words with blurry use (terrorism is another similar case)

[drowsy sable]

Indeed. Also the genocide of Indigenous people in the U.S. (for a large part forced assimilation through residential schools, though also mass killings)

[cobalt temple]

podium

[midnight mortar]

One thing I love about learning a language: more fluent speakers will happily help you out if you let em help

As long as you are making a genuine effort, people are more then willing to be “hey, don’t say (thing) like that, say it like (this)”

[wheat sinew]

@unborn turret explain yourself! https://bsky.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3lbajywzlx22z

[unborn turret]

Spanish dubs like to rename characters to more names that are more familiar to the audience 😄

Or alternatively they change the pronunciation (it's not Spiderman, it's espíderman)

This is my personal opinion but let's say that I was very pleased when I moved to NL and saw that most shows didn't get dubbed and only subbed

[wheat sinew]

You probably wouldn't have been watching Sesame Street here, but ours is mostly standalone clips from the US - like Kermit, or Cookie Monster - these are dubbed.
And then the inhabitants of the street are played by Dutch actors/puppets, with their own stories.

But anything aimed at people of a decent reading age is subtitled, yes.

[unborn turret]

That's why I said most

[wheat sinew]

Italy, looking at you too...
https://bskye.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3lbadwm52gs25

[turbid scaffold]

that's not exactly true

it's basically true, but for example in Croatia it's Miki Maus

[midnight mortar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WnWlXIltAw oh fuck yea

[pallid hound]

I'm sure it's because USA has large Spanish speaking population and Spanish dubs are made early often even before shows are first aired in English and before it's known if a show will be a success.
Dubs into other languages happen later as a response to demand. You're developing a global brand at that point.

[pallid hound]

For anyone who doesn't already know the back story is quite interesting especially how Topolino was usurped for two years by a fascist imposter Tuffolino.

[unborn turret]

No, to start with, there are two different dubs in Spanish, one Iberian and one Latinamerican. And this comes from before the US had a significant Spanish speaking population

[pallid hound]

The US did have a significant Latino population in the 70s ~10m and the shows were dubbed to Spanish during original run by a Mexican studio which wouldn't be unusual for the time.
Seems Kermit was originally la Rana René...
Are were all out of our depth on this topic. Every detail is Muppet related is documented on the Muppet wiki. It's one of those topics like startrek or Eurovision, you think you know a lot then you find people have completed university assessments on the topic and have their bubbles for its debate.

https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/El_show_de_los_Muppets

[unborn turret]

That in Latinamerica. I am talking about Iberian dub which was done independently

[midnight mortar]

https://www.liberafolio.org hel yea

[midnight mortar]

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher"

[muted wigeon]

One that doesn't require extra punctuation to be grammatically correct: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

[midnight mortar]

English is 5 languages in a trenchcoat that bullies other countries for their spare grammar and words

[turbid scaffold]

it's always slightly amusing to me that the word 'calque' is an loan word, and the term 'loan word' is a calque

[midnight mortar]

Again, 5 languages in a trenchcoat lmao

[midnight mortar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9CcqJFrBoI then you have t h i s

[midnight mortar]

Back at it again with learning lol

[turbid scaffold]

what language is this? my first guess is Esperanto, second guess Romanian

[cobalt temple]

almost certainly esperanto; ĉu is a giveaway

[wheat sinew]

I still can't get over the stupidity of using diacritics in a made-up language.

[cobalt temple]

and not just diacritics, but diacritics used in almost no other languages

[midnight mortar]

Yep

[midnight mortar]

I’m not the one who made the language, and it gets weirder from here. Another way to spell “ĉu" is “cxu”

[cobalt temple]

that's as bad as kunreishiki

[midnight mortar]

It’s common enough to where google translate insta-flags the language as Esperanto

[midnight mortar]

How bad is it…?

[cobalt temple]

kunreishiki is a logical mapping for the kana systems, but sucks for those who aren't familiar with it - eg shinjuku in kunreishiki is sinzyuku

it is almost a literal romanization-only system

(much like how pinyin is not at all obvious in some ways for those unfamiliar)

viz https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=62827 for some other examples and links and whatnot

[midnight mortar]

@cobalt temple Toki Pona exists too, and it can look like T H I S

And the language only having 200 words makes ambiguity go brrrt

[cobalt temple]

that conlang makes me want to force its makers to play The Ball Game, old-school rules

[midnight mortar]

That sounds like a threat, even thouhg i have zero context on "The Ball Game" lol.

[cobalt temple]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame

(the ballgame is one of the more common scenes depicted in maya reliefs)

[midnight mortar]

Oh fuck

So that is a T H R E A T threat.

[midnight mortar]

Thank you for the context!

[cobalt temple]

now, now; sacrifice was relatively uncommon. but seriously, them forklifting out an iconography and style and just arbitrarily doing stuff with it and ignoring almost all context and culture bugs me

[midnight mortar]

Fair, and even then

having to play with that ball is insane

[narrow hinge]

thats not cause its common enough brother thats cause its barely used in other languages

always surprised me gt seriously kept that over time tho

[midnight mortar]

Still find it funny how I can type THREE DANG LETTERS and Google Translate catches my ass

[wheat sinew]

I can get it to recognise Dutch with two letters.

[midnight mortar]

At thr same time I love how that one Project Owl bot sees any of the following letters and immediately beats the message dead, claiming Zalgo: ŝ ĝ ŭ ĉ ĥ ĵ

[midnight mortar]

I wonder if I can bully Google by using Toki Pona, brb

Knew it lol

[cobalt temple]

not to cross the streams or anything, but I had never seen korean handwriting before: https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3lee4gr5rus22

WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social)

Ukrainians have released the third translated letter of a deceased North Korean special forces operative. In it, he laments betraying his Supreme Commander, who granted him the "favour" of atoning for his sins by dying on the European battlefields of Ukraine.

Likes

481

Bluesky · Dec 28, 2024, 8:45 AM

[grizzled escarp]

The title is meta https://youtu.be/fwutOQyRymU

[midnight mortar]

Considering the topic, i think its deliberate and ironic

[grizzled escarp]

He states it as much

[narrow hinge]

Pretty decent video but he seems to have done very cursory research to inform his understanding here. He speaks very little to actual neuroscience and far more to psychology. He uses terms like "audience design" incorrectly, which is a theory oriented around literal speeches - there are various related terms when it comes to the influence he's speaking of like "behavioral design" (designing pathways to induce X behavior within an audience).

"Keyword optimization" he means "Search Engine Optimization" - these are two very different things, SEO seeks to leverage keywords to alter presentation within Search Engines. Simple "keyword optimization" is much more basic - if I know you as a TA prefer certain verbiage, and I create a flyer using these linguistic preferences of your audience - I will likely seek specific keywords to add within "lines of persuasion" - this would be keyword optimization but not SEO.

The neuroscience points given frequently run into the neuroscience-influence crosswalk issues you see. Simple activations do not correlate to influencing behavior or beliefs - the strongest correlations you will find are going to be with emotion and attitudinal factors. Having outsized arousal in a neuroscientific sense does not inherently mean your behavior or beliefs will be influenced (that would include giving attention - a behavior).

[midnight mortar]

Might as well share a joke to keep this thread lighthearted:

How many esperantists does it take to change the lightbulb? One to change the lightbulb and another to correct them that it's “ampolo” and not “lumbulbo”

[midnight mortar]

Too curious to not ask: do meme translations count for here or is it a firm “no memes in the server at all”?

Wanna see where the blue/green names stand on things before I share some stuff

[wheat sinew]

No, don’t do that, thanks.

[midnight mortar]

Makes sense, figured it was better to ask first

🙂

[grizzled escarp]

Review of a language learning book from a PhD in linguistics https://youtube.com/watch?v=29tITqtnJU4

TL;DR - it's actually pretty good and seems to mostly line up with the current academic research on the topic

[midnight mortar]

Sweet!

[midnight mortar]

The "-uj-" at the end half of a word have two meanings:

-uj-: something that is intended to contain something specific

-uj-, with the name of a people : -uj- always means "the country of that people"

Its the equivalent of "Ukraine" and "Ukranians", or Latvia and Latvians

[wheat sinew]

When you speak another language, sometimes it makes you think: "How can they even survive without a word for this?!"

For example the Dutch word 'kloek'. Nice, short, clear.
In English I have to say 'a female chicken who has chicks'. Such a circuitous way of saying it.

[grizzled escarp]

im always curious about that - what are the unique short-hand words certain languages have

[drowsy sable]

In this case it's apparently some form of clever ?? https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/klōkaz

I wonder why in english they say chicken "cluck"

[wheat sinew]

You are looking at the other meaning of kloek. I'm talking about the second one here. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kloek

[wheat sinew]

They are both onomatopoeic.

[drowsy sable]

They're both from the same root term though

[midnight mortar]

Don’t most languages have some form of this?

[wheat sinew]

Can you point me to that?

The link you provided conforms with what I thought:
Kloek meaning stout or clever: From Middle Dutch cloec, from Old Dutch *cluoc, from Proto-Germanic *klōkaz
Kloek meaning mother hen: onomatopoeia

(And yes, I know mother hennis a shorter way of saying it than what I used above. 😈)

[drowsy sable]

"[..], from Proto-Germanic klōkaz" <-- which is the link I provided

Maybe I misread it

Ah nevermind then, I didn't read far enough down. What an annoying layout

[wheat sinew]

@turbid scaffold Except of course in cricket, which has laws, not rules.

[turbid scaffold]

if you're not getting fines or going to jail, they're rules

anyway cricket is basically just standardized calvinball

[analog hornet]

Rugby Union too!

Of course the breach of law (or etiquette) in Cricket, has given the most sharp rebuke in English - "That's not cricket"

There's a wonderful (if you can say that) history of the dark side of Cricket. Not just the bodyline tour of Australia, there was all sorts of stuff going on!

https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571298457-its-not-cricket/

[wheat sinew]

You could say cricket was born from the dark side, or at least raised in it - rich lords wanting something to bet on and getting commoners to bowl to them etc.

[frigid jungle]

Oh I’m glad I found this! I studied Hindi and Urdu in grad school and have been slowly working on Arabic and Swedish on my own

Swedish has been really interesting with the parts that are so close to English…but then VERY not

[turbid scaffold]

Swedish seems to be in a strange company with Hindi, Urdu and Arabic

[frigid jungle]

I contain multitudes 😂

But also a couple years ago I started researching the Swedish side of my family and actually found a bunch of distant cousins still living in the village where my great great grandparents were born

Turns out one cousin is a big nerd like me and had also been trying to find the side of the family that moved to Minnesota

[turbid scaffold]

here in Finland, Swedish is compulsory in schools, for mostly historical reasons

[frigid jungle]

Anyway, I actually went to visit for a couple weeks last year and decided to start learning

Oh yeah! There’s a decent size community of Swedish speakers right?

Finnish is really interesting too

[turbid scaffold]

it's like 5%, mostly on the coastline

[frigid jungle]

my peeps are from a village in the mountains pretty close to the Norwegian border. They actually speak a dialect called Limamål which I guess only about 2000 people know

Supposedly it’s closer to old Norse than standard Swedish

Is Finnish the language that has some distant connection to Hungarian?

[turbid scaffold]

yes, there's more similarities with the grammar, rather than the vocabulary so it doesn't sound similar at all, but there is a connection

and interestingly, while there is a relation between the languages, there seems to be no genetic relation with the Finnish and the Hungarian people

[frigid jungle]

Wow!

Is Finnish technically a language isolate?

[turbid scaffold]

Not really, Estonian is quite closely related to Finnish, and there's some minority languages in Russia as well

[frigid jungle]

Oh interesting

…maybe I’m thinking of Basque 😅

[turbid scaffold]

Basque is the one true language isolate in Europe, yeah

[frigid jungle]

I was also reminded of Burushaski, spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

[wheat sinew]

I just heard someone refer to king Henry VIII of England's first wife as Catherine of Aragorn and I needed a moment to compose myself.
cc: @vagrant lance

[vagrant lance]

That would have been me with my saved words in my auto-correct acting up

[cerulean wind]

Hey there! I wanna learn more about the concepts you mentioned here, so is there any book or articles I can read for this? Preferable free, because... My finances really aren't financing, haha.

Thanks in advance! 🌼

[bold prairie]

I will be in Czechia for two and a half weeks this July - are there any particular language learning resources I should look into?

[midnight mortar]

Duolingo, to learn the basics, and there should be webpages with basic phrases for you

[turbid scaffold]

In a restaurant, you can say "czech, please"

[wheat sinew]

#bellingcook message
Yesterday I learned that the word mango entered English language as a dish, not the fresh fruit, that was pickled - because the fresh fruit would rot long before reaching England from India. Thus we ended up with lots of pickles (and even some of the ingredients people often used) being called 'mango'.
Eventually, when fresh mangoes finally reached the English-speaking world, there was confusion over which was truly supposed to be called mango: the pickling process or the fruit?

[frigid jungle]

Oh that’s interesting

In Hindi it’s called aam, so definitely doesn’t come from there

South Asian mango (aam) pickle is so good though

Where did that term for pickling come from though? Pickle in Hindi is achar

So I’m looking it up, and what I’m seeing is that it comes from Tamil/Dravidian languages

In Tamil is makay

And then that made its way into Portuguese as “manga”

With Malay “mangga” in between. I’d like to see the source for what you heard though @wheat sinew I’m wondering if there’s a false cognate situation happening there

[wheat sinew]

It was told on The History of English podcast.

And the thing is that the only way to send mangoes to England was as a pickle. So a mango pickle would arrive and people would be to,d "this is mango" and over time the word mango came to be applied to anything pickled. (Very simplified story, obviously.)

[frigid jungle]

Oh I see. So the word originally meant the fruit but was misinterpreted by the British

[pallid hound]

#bellingcook
The English word "Welsh" is of Saxon origin and originally meant foreigner. As Anglo Saxons displaced Celts in the British Isles, the Western Celtic areas gradually became known as Wales. (Note: Welsh name for Wales is Cymru not Wales.)
However the tradition of refering to non English things as Welsh seems to have continued in botanical circles beyond the point at which Wales became known as Wales. Welsh Onions for example have no connection to Wales, they originate from China. The Welsh (Cymru) are however very fond of leeks.

[frigid jungle]

Okay I have an interesting English thing I just realized. (Yes I am a native speaker)

So, saw is the past tense of to see. But I just realized that you almost never use it with a negative

I saw the thing, I didn’t see the thing

But you can say I never saw the thing

[frigid jungle]

I don’t know what my question is. I’m assuming there’s some rule there…

[narrow hinge]

That may get more into like proper english

Esp among younger generations I see both used pretty interchangably unless it actually sounds weird (usually doesnt)

I am also at fault in that 😛

[cobalt temple]

etymonline says "past tense of see; from Old English plural sawon"; not sure if the plural bit matters, or if there's something else at work. good question for tolkien, heh

[wheat sinew]

It’s actually quite simple. In the negative example English always takes the infinitive. You can try it on other verbs:

I walked there.
I didn’t walk there.

[frigid jungle]

oh my god you’re right

Except for like never

but I guess that’s more of a…uh… frequency word?

I really wish I had studied more actual linguistics in addition to languages

[unborn turret]

That word for foreigner has Celtic origins and it's also the origin for Gaul, Galatea, Wlochy (the Polish word for Italy) and Galicia (the Spanish one, the Ukrainian and Polish one has a different origin) 😉

[pallid hound]

The sources I could find point to the word origin for Welsh (foreigner) and related words being Germanic and not Celtic. I.e words used by Germanic peoples to refer to Celts although references to Gaul and it's derivatives point to a Celtic origin. Maybe theres a convergence of words from different origin, or the original proto Germanic word (walhaz) was itself a corruption of a Celtic word which seems to be the case with the Latin word Volcae.
Getting to know your onions is harder than I first thought.

[unborn turret]

It is indeed a proto-Germanic word that comes from Celtic origin. Other related toponyms on top of the ones I mention are Cornwall and Wallonia.

Another example is Vlach, which has the same origin but via proto-slavic and led to Wallachia today.

[wheat sinew]

This one from twitter is slightly funnier, but I don't post there anymore. On Bluesky I replied to someone that it really did say "anger parade" in my calendar...

It's a really funny thread. He does it every year: https://bsky.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3llqhyzpb5s2x

Adam Sharp (@adamcsharp.bsky.social)

This is a thread of my favourite ever literal translations, starting with this one…

In Greek, the word for a protest, εύπιστος, translates literally to “anger parade”

Likes

262

Bluesky · Apr 1, 2025, 8:40 AM

[grizzled escarp]

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-04-conversation-catalysts-english-robots-parent.html

[turbid scaffold]

it's interesting (to me) how some languages have a dedicated word for chili heat, and some don't

like English really doesn't, you can say pungent but firstly that isn't really used in normal spoken language and second it has other meaning as well, like "pungent smell"

German also doesn't and neither does Swedish

but Spanish and Finnish do

[narrow hinge]

if we're thinking of the same thing you could use "spice"/"spicey" or just "hot", gets super context dependent since they can ref temp and the like hot-spicy reaction (hilarious point in that it's not actually hot our brain and receptors just become more sensitive) though

[turbid scaffold]

yeah my point is that "hot" can refer to temperature, and "spicy" can mean that there's a lot of turmeric and cumin in it or whatever

and in German it's scharf (sharp), though when you're talking about food, food isn't typically sharp in the conventional meaning

you're not going to cut yourself on it

in Spanish you have picante, which to my knowledge has no other meaning

[drowsy sable]

hot can also mean you live on a 'spicy' block 😉

[midnight mortar]

Lmao

[midnight mortar]

Idk why Duolingo be mildly threatening at night but, lol let’s ball lmao

[midnight mortar]

Really find it hilarious and fascinating how a language with like 200 words has a writing style like this. Toki Pona (the language) calls it “Sitelen Sitelen”

@lament bane here’s the language section, in case you are interested in hopping in

[lament bane]

[lament bane]

ah, now i remember it, i did watch a video regarding the language once many many years ago. but tbh, bot then and now, just looking at it, i found the writing style to be too focused on the visual and not as much being practical

well......i am sure if it got into more wide spread use with big adoption, the hand writing style would with time get very much simplified i would believe.

Like with how some characters within language japanese get simplified in handwriting to the point more then 50% of the original character is omitted but people still understand what it means cause they so used to see it

[midnight mortar]

True, hence why this is so fascinating. A small group of people stubbornly writing like this, although Latin/English characters are most commonly used in Toki Pona

[lament bane]

tbh, it looks like some ancient tropical version of Egyptian hieroglyphics which was designed for mostly formal usage but not for daily usage where shorthand versions was more commonly used(like with how hieratic and demotic writing was more common in daily life in ancient Egypt instead of the more formal Hieroglyphs)

[midnight mortar]

Huh, TIL

[icy fog]

The more standard system (sitelen pona) for writing toki pona in symbols is much simpler.

[midnight mortar]

There’s also the Latin/English characters which I also find fascinating

[midnight mortar]

It is, although Sitelen Sitelen is far more interesting to look at imo

[icy fog]

Yeah.

[turbid scaffold]

there's the classic example of A originally being an ox head and O being an eye

[midnight mortar]

Languages are wild, and fascinating

[turbid scaffold]

also, took me embarrassingly long to realize that omega and omicron just mean big o and little o, respectively

[midnight mortar]

lol

[turbid scaffold]

Greek didn't have the sound that the eye-symbol originally made, so they just used it for omicron

[midnight mortar]

Again, languages are wild and fascinating lol

[narrow hinge]

@midnight mortar You might find this interesting. I'm not sure if it has a standardized name in Arabic but you can find it across quite a few different muslim cultural groups under different names in their languages.
Basically there is a style of Arabic language caligraphy that is written in circles, looks really cool let me get you an example

Here's an example on some headstones from Chechnya

This ones from northern georgia, bottom part is in Georgian but the top part is the caligraphy thing too

These are largely the two variations I've seen also. Some get more stylistic and connect the letters together (like in the top), some others do it in a more literal circle (like the georgian one). Not sure if there is a literal difference between the styles though, I know for the top one Chechens early Islam introduction was heavily influenced by the Qadiriyya so could've come from something related to that.

[midnight mortar]

I suppose that’s where Circular Gallifreyan got its inspiration!

[wheat sinew]

Ooh! I was pretty good at that at some point... I may have to do a refresher.

[midnight mortar]

Best of luck! Some people out there are INSANELY good at that language

[wheat sinew]

https://digventures.com/2020/05/amazing-artefacts-king-offas-gold-dinar/

Just reminded me.

[midnight mortar]

Oh hell yea

[narrow hinge]

be super cool to have that bad boy in a collection 😭

[turbid scaffold]

There's also Ming ceramics with Persian and / or Arabic inscriptions

like this that I've seen in the British museum, with a passage from Quran

[drowsy sable]

Wow, it's fascinating. Any idea from when?

[turbid scaffold]

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_PDF-B-687 this says between 1506-1521

This is the tile as photographed by yours truly, in 2013 I think

[wheat sinew]

They made things to order, with either copied or imagined Western scenes. No reason they wouldn't have done the same for the Islamic world - but I had never thought about it.

[drowsy sable]

I guess the bit that surprises me is that the Islamic world have such a strong tile culture of their own. But also of course there was lots of trade for centuries already along the silk road before that so makes sense

[narrow hinge]

The blue in that has stood up remarkably well over the centuries damn

Comes out way more vibrant in the second pic

[cobalt raven]

Noting the distinctly non-Arabic script at the bottom of the tile. Is that from the crafter?

[cobalt temple]

probably; it's in chinese, although I can't make out the first couple of characters; looks like it's something along the lines of 大明正德年 (in reverse order)

if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the bracket at the bottom was from the tile manufacturer to show off a sample

[cobalt raven]

Found a photo with the info card

[cobalt temple]

ah, 正德 is "zhengde"

[meager prairie]

Under Emperor Wuzong of Ming (Zhengde Emperor), a lot of the early Ming dynasty trade restrictions were relaxed, including bans on the export of silk and ceramics. This lead to a resurgence in the export industry targeted at the Arab world, that already existed in during the Tang dynasty centuries before. (The two cultures have been in direct contact since the battle of Talas(?) in 751, so trade was otherwise well established by the time of the Ming)

[drowsy sable]

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-replace-contract-workers

[grizzled escarp]

https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3loblia7ii22d

Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com)

Absolutely not.

Every time someone tries this, I point out how it biases against Black speech. Every. Time. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Also from the launch of the Perspective API and its "toxicity" score.

Police don't kill too many Black kids."
Score: Not toxic.🤦🏿‍♂️

"Police kill too many Black kids.
Score: 80.28% toxic.😮

New_ Public (@wearenewpublic.bsky.social)
This is cool: someone built an interface enhancement for Bluesky that tells you how civil you’re being, from a range of “sunny” to “stormy.”

The only problem? You have to opt into it. Seems like a promising pattern for digital builders to look closely at incorporating as a default.

www.clrsky.ai

Reposts

1072

Likes

2733

Bluesky · May 3, 2025, 2:48 PM

[narrow hinge]

This honestly might just be a fancily branded semantic scoring rather than something uniquely based around "toxicity" or however they term it. Mekkas examples there don't really show bias against "black speech".

[turbid scaffold]

It's less about this thing's bias against black speech and more a reflection of the society's bias against black people.

[narrow hinge]

I would offer that, if this is just a fancily worded semantic tool, this would be a very poor case of bias against black people (or anyone for that matter, with the specific examples given).

It'd be focusing on references like "racist" being negative semantically (which it is), when set aside with "extremely" skewing it more negative in semantic scoring. Branding that as "toxicity" though if this is actually just a semantic scoring tool is really stupid on bsky's part.

If Mekkas images are sourcing the perplexity one, here's their own documentation, it's in fact just a fancy semantic tool.
https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-attributes-and-languages?language=en_US

In contradiction to Mekkas claim, this is not a "toxicity" tool, "Toxicity" and "Severe Toxicity" are simply 2 of 8 categories they have. They even have an entire tag, "Identity Attack" that is wholly trained and informed on attacks against identities based off marginalized identities and communities.

The documentation also explains how their tool works largely just like a semantic tool with some tiny distinctions because of the categories they have. It appears it would actually pick up all that just fine, especially because of the catered category for it that most semantic tools entirely lack.

It instead would have an issue if say, someone said something like "you're a bitch" but it was meant in jest rather than an actual offensive statement. The tool has no capability to actually recognize the interactors race/ethnicity/etc, it's simply scoring based off the wording used and its predominate societal positioning.

[north hazel]

the tool has no capability to actually recognize the interactors race/ethnicity etc.

Not true. AAVE could be easily identified by an LLM. So can Indian English phrases. I can think of a a few ways to identify people whose first language is Arabic from how they type English too.

[narrow hinge]

There are tools that do this yes, there is no documentation that their tool does this.

And yah as a human probably could with the output from it however its set up but diff point entirely

That link above is to the specific attributes but the little subsection of the site its in contains all their (public) documentation too

One thing they do, do on the other hand, I'm not sure how they structure it team wise but they do include (some) foreign langauges in their training, and they bring on a group of speakers to rate words and their context to add/remove as attributes.
Their documentation does not state nor insinuate though that the tool has the ability or seeks to discern anything about the comments author in this regard, just enables it to also assess foreign words the same as English words and with as close as possible parity.
https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-training-data?language=en_US

They also have a thing baked into it called SuggestCommentScore that allows any user to make suggestions based upon the scores they see, which adds yet another somewhat unique layer that enables diverse viewpoints to have input onto the gradings for more holistic objectivity. They openly state too their scores do not mean "X is toxic", their branding is pretty explicitly clear it means "X amount of people could perceive this negatively/neutrally/positively".

[drowsy sable]

The reality is that if it scores words like "is racist" as a negative, and "is not racist" as a positive, then the tool will influence the group calling out racism more as 'uncivil'. The same might happen for 'is transphobic' or 'is sexist', etc. Does what that tool is under the hood (semantic or other) matter in practise if it upholds structuraal inequalities like that?

[narrow hinge]

I agree with you that, that's an issue but a distinct one that's exactly why they have SuggestCommentScore. This would equally grade all comments as such the same. The tool isn't assessing peoples race to score them lower for making the same comment about racism.
My only point here was that Mekka was inaccurate in claiming perplexity is biased against "black speech", in which her example had nothing to do with "black speech", but rather a comment by someone who is black and/or referencing black folks as a group. In which case, yes, referencing people being killed is negative semantically - no, that does not mean the poster is toxic (hence why them using the term toxic for that category is stupid in its own right) or that they have negative intent (the tool does not reflect intent but rather perception from those reading).
It's also not just a toxicity score, the 8 categories are in the documentation above.
And in terms of semantic analysis like that, yes, calling something racist is negative, unless you actually mean it positively which uhh yeah that's a problem of its own too.

I would instead say the specific debate around that, and like I said above, them using "toxicity" for what they're doing is a really stupid word to use to reflect what it is. They are very explicit in their branding and documentation that the score isn't even reflective of "toxicity" - it's reflective of how people will perceive the comment based off group input assessments and the SuggestCommentScore recommendations.

[wheat sinew]

I think you are focusing one one leaf and ignoring the forest. I know you like to be precise and point out details that are wrong. I too like to pick at loose threads, but I try to make sure to only leave a short side-note and not distract from the main argument. And sometimes, to avoid that, I don’t post it at all.

No, the example is not of black speech, but the results are clearly not correct. It seems rather questionable to say the least to knowingly launch a faulty tool, especially one that is used to judge people’s speech - irrespective of what it is judging exactly.

This is not the first time someone has tried to regulate minority groups’ speech, nor is it the first time someone tried to regulate speech in general and ended up excessively policing minority groups’ speech. People are justified in pointing out the flaws.

Finally, if how people will perceive the comment is prejudiced against certain groups and ai copies that perfectly, this is still a problem, isn’t it?

[narrow hinge]

The tool is saying how people perceive the terms. Would you debate that most people see refering to something as racist as a positive reference? I do not believe this is true, and I believe in the exact context we are speaking of calling things racist is in fact negative. < Also why "toxicity" to reference this is dumb on Perplexitys part, because while negative, I think we could debate this context is positively INTENDED but the tool is not considering that nor are most readers. "Toxicity" imo at least is more of an intent thing than how you word something, accidentally doing something "toxic" is a different beast that has to be focused on but I wouldn't pair those two like that.
This would be just as helpful for people calling out racists, trying to word sentences in a way that limits how negatively they are perceived by surrounding words (this tool doesn't just grade single words it considers the sentence they're in).

The issue here is them using the term "toxicity" to reflect this. I wholly agree with the flaw there, I just do not think we've shown anything to reflect this specific tool having an issue that is unique to minority groups and not any potential user.

[wheat sinew]

Aaargh! I rewound three times and she says it correctly, but the subtitle is wrong.

[drowsy sable]

Since this is the linguistics channel, can we make an effort to capitalize the word Black please? Afaik that's the broadly accepted norm now.

[midnight mortar]

….why? I’m curious

[narrow hinge]

The actual reason for it differs depending on what you look at. The reason it was added to style guides originally was for when it was being referenced as a shared identity, rather than as the color of person(s) skin. Eg if we are talking about people with darker skin tones we'd consider black overall, that'd just be black, where if we were talking about Black Americans, Black would be capitalized since we are talking about it as a specific group and their identity. In the past few years it became more of a commonality to capitalize it overall.

The above context was not speaking about the identity angle, so per linguistic "norms" would've been properly spelled. With that said there is a fair linguistic standard debate about whether or not that makes sense but isn't harmful to use (can be more beneficial) it unless we selectively apply the standard based off racial prejudice.

Here's APAs standard which is probably the most reasonable and well explained imo - https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/racial-ethnic-minorities
some of the style guides from media outlets get more debatable and differ a lot from one another in specifics.

Total side point too but APA has a style guideline for "Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions of Indigenous Peoples" which is pretty cool, the other few guidelines that add stuff like that it tends to be pretty short, APA put quite a lot of thought into it.

[drowsy sable]

'Black speech' is identity related, so this is absolutely false. Either way, it doesn't invalidate my request. Happy to put in a modmail though if required to get clarity on this

[icy fog]

(Here's Minna Salami making a case against mandating it should be capitalized: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/03/word-black-capital-letter-blackness)

[wheat sinew]

Ohh, it's an American thing. It's interesting how different cultures treat the same language. I once accidentally - I was thinking in English and had to quickly switch to Dutch - referred to someone as 'die zwarte man', 'that black guy' - and the filthy/confused looks I got!

[icy fog]

Not the first time I get the feeling that a lot of the problems of "race" and solutions to those problems are distinctly American, and feel uneasy when they are imported overseas as is. (And the same with politics.)

[timber wigeon]

I don't think there is anything to contact ModMail about here.

[turbid scaffold]

what word does Dutch use?

[narrow hinge]

This is where the debate comes in, some style guides do not recognize that form of it, some do. Some people consider this, some don't. I personally disagree with the idea every black person across the globe has/shares that factor, nor was Mekka actually reflecting "black speech" - they were referencing everyday English that was rather ambigious how it is "black speech". I would agree if it was using slang words that exist predomintely with Black Americans for example.

[narrow hinge]

The glories of translations 😭

[drowsy sable]

There is if people want to argue over whether the term should be capitalised or not.

[narrow hinge]

What would be the "proper" reference in Dutch?

[drowsy sable]

In the Netherlands Black is also often capitalised. It's not as common (yet) as in the USA, but the Netherlands is quite behind in this topic.

But more often people are referred to as the nationality they are associated with

[wheat sinew]

The best thing would have been to refer to his Surinamese or Antillian heritage - except I couldn't remember which it was.

[drowsy sable]

Or their region

In the NEtherlands more of the discussion is about an outdated word for white, the one tha Afrikaners use.

[timber wigeon]

We do not mandate specific writing styles. Especially considering that we have a large number of non-native English speakers here.

[drowsy sable]

That's a very specific political choice

[narrow hinge]

I would offer we have to be very specific about ingroup framing here. The specifics are very much debated with everyone, the professionals that hold it up as a fact are doing so for political reasons. That's not aa bad thing but it doesn't make it a political choice not to take up some specific variation - there are at least 4 distinct frames of this. For example, most media style guides differ heavily from those from associations like APA which aren't media related.

They all fairly reason their distinct angles and the whys pretty decently too, just folks differ on the exact angles and extent of it (that part itself usually isn't political from what I've seen anyways).

[timber wigeon]

That might be your opinion. But we have never mandated specific words to be written in specific ways. Fwiw, mandating a specific variation of the word seems to be a lot more political than not having a mandate at all.

[cobalt raven]

Prescriptivism earned its bad reputation within linguistics because it has been used as a tool of oppression. Linguists aren't immune from having language peeves, but they're more likely to understand it as a "me" problem and not a "you" problem.

[frigid jungle]

Delayed, but man...most of my friends (and myself) have ended up completely getting rid of Duolingo because of this move

It's really frustrating as a language learner. I've gone back to just using books haha

[midnight mortar]

Another sad thing: I’m not sure if there’s anything similar to Duolingo without getting language specific stuff

[turbid scaffold]

Babbel exists but I have zero experience of it

[frigid jungle]

of course the big pitfall of Duolingo in general is that it doesn't really explain rules. Like I've been studying Swedish. I've gotten a decent idea of how things work. But I'm kind of guessing by context

ideally people use duolingo alongside some type of more formal learning, but I don't think that's the case a lot of the time

[midnight mortar]

Yea true

Sites like lernu(dot)net worked well for explaining context and the rules alongside teaching words and phrases

Huge upside on Duo

[midnight mortar]

Can attest. Little bro had like a 300+ day streak on Swedish and can’t translate a couple sentences at all. Hence why I’ve been pressing dude on reading books and translating memes

[frigid jungle]

1200 for me! Though that also included Arabic and Hindi review

I started watching Love is Blind Swedish and also White Lotus with Swedish subtitles

[midnight mortar]

Shit, this is why I got my little bro a book on “short stories for new Swedish learners” too

Duolingo is good for learning the V E R Y basics and that’s it

[frigid jungle]

It’s helpful for hearing pronunciation repeatedly too

[midnight mortar]

….actually yea you right

Sometimes they talk super fast too so I’m like “ayo bro run that back?” a good couple times

Really helps

[frigid jungle]

ALAS

haha

[midnight mortar]

Forced me to actually LISTEN, not just hear

[frigid jungle]

I know the Swedish Institute out of Minnesota does virtual classes

So I’ve thought of taking one of those

[midnight mortar]

Luckily there’s audio apps for the language I’m learning so yay

[midnight mortar]

Full send

[frigid jungle]

Oh my partner is learning Esperanto! I should tell him about that

[midnight mortar]

I assume your partner knows about the Esperanto discord server too?

[midnight mortar]

Here’s the full app in cast partner asks

[frigid jungle]

Oh shit I don’t know

[midnight mortar]

that server is basically 100% Esperanto barring any language specific channels

[turbid scaffold]

https://www.svtplay.se/pippi-langstrump I assumed these would be geolocked to Sweden but they work for me at least

they're also subtitled, which is handy for learning

[frigid jungle]

Cool!

[midnight mortar]

Hype

[drowsy sable]

Anki is the shit. I am fully on Anki now and am actually learning much faster

[turbid scaffold]

I've only ever heard of Anki in the context of learning kanji, but I gues you could use it for whatever

[meager prairie]

It’s great for anything flashcard. I love it and use pretty much exclusively anki by now, but I do miss the interactivity that apps like duolingo have

[midnight mortar]

Screw it, might as well take a peek and see if they have any options for Esperanto

[icy fog]

Hah, I've got Pippi Långstrump in Swedish in my bookshelf, waiting to be tackled.

Ie. waiting for me to retire.

[wheat sinew]

True. I turned off notifications as a result.

[icy fog]

Looks like people use "mud" in a range of meanings, but seems to be common to think that it contains organic material whereas clay is all mineral, below certain particle size. (ref. #maritime )

[drowsy sable]

yes, clay, silt, etc all refer to size distributions in minerals (which all have certain properties as a result, like adsorption with clays). At least to a geologist and/or an oceanographer.

Mud's a mixture of things.

Like, you can have mud that's soil and water (where the soil is a composite of multiple materials). You can have 'mudflats' which are usually (associated with) quite ecologically productive areas along coasts that also are a mixture of materials, just different ones from those inland.

[midnight mortar]

https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signuno huh TIL there’s sign language for Esperanto

[turbid scaffold]

One spelling that I haven't seen before, and don't really see by google results is the one that you've used, Madaleen

Madleen is the spelling that Freedom Flotilla uses

[north hazel]

Lol, it's transliteration from Al Jazeera mubasher i think. I thought Middle East Eye used is similer, Medalyn but they seem to have changed it to Madleen now.

[cobalt raven]

Trying to find the name in Arabic and I think I'll have better luck transliterating it back into Arabic and searching for that.

(مادلين كولاب)

So, yeah, Arabic "Madeline"

[turbid scaffold]

Those who operate the ship (Freedom Flotilla) transliterate it as Madleen

[cobalt raven]

Yes, and I'm curious how they came to that transliteration. In Modern Standard Arabic the name has three syllables. Levantine Arabic might sounds like two syllables when spoken quickly, but there's something happening between the /d/ and /l/.

[north hazel]

Fatha sometimes, sukoon others. This is the issue of not using diacritics in the arabic. People pronounce it differently.

[turbid scaffold]

the namesake's name has had some different spellings too

(from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/5/a-ship-called-madleen-gazas-first-fisherwoman-inspires-solidarity-mission)

[cobalt raven]

I've been looking around at how other languages translate her name to see if they're any more consistent and, if anything, it's a sample size issue. The only consistent ones don't have a lot of text online about her.

[turbid scaffold]

This reminds me of how the language(s) we speak shape how we think

like, how in Finnish, we don't have a word that's equivalent to "drug"

we have a word that's routinely translated to "drug", or what "drug" translates to in Finnish, but the meaning is a bit different, and it shapes what I think is and isn't a drug

in Finnish, there's a word "päihde" that directly translates to "toxicant", and "huume" that explicitly means "illegal toxicant"

and neither of those words would be used for medicine, unless used for toxicating purposes

so cannabis for example, is explicitly a "huume" and there's no two ways about it

but a lot of people don't consider it a drug

[narrow hinge]

Yeah it's a really weird debate here in the US at least, I figure elsewhere too (dunno enough about other environments eg UK to say for sure). The "drug" reference tends to be made wholly subjective, objectively "drug" is correct for most of our legal medications also, but, using "drug" is generally avoided there because of negative connotations.

Since most folks use that negative connotated subjective form also, it's heavily prone to more inorganic issues. For example, why "weed" is considered a "drug" (in the negative connotated form rather than literal definition), is because of racist oriented enforcement against crime in inner-city black communities.

This unfortunately creates issues of its own, as we recently saw during the election for example, some people treated the cannabis community as a "black persons" thing, but this in itself is a perception that was created through those racial enforcement policies targeting black communities, who'd largely get it from the white hippies traveling along the "hippie trail" and bringing seeds back to the US and breeding them here (who faced far less targeted enforcement).

[wheat sinew]

I've been thinking about this all day. 'Drug' has been borrowed into Dutch solely for illegal drugs. We have 'verdovend middel' ('downers') or 'stimulerend middel' ('uppers') for the illegal variant, but they have become less common in recent decades, I feel.

[narrow hinge]

I don't see "uppers" or "downers" referenced much either anymore tbh, pretty much the only context I hear it in now here is within er like 25-30+s in the more devout party scenes

Definitely was more common with generations pre-2010s or pre-2000s (not sure when the phase over happened)

With that said, at least here in the US, I also feel like that may be a result of widened access at the consumer level to a more known diversity of products

Back in the 80s you might ask for an upper because you don't know about any of that. Nowadays you can hit up the net and get a pick-your-favorite selection of 200 different research chemicals from China and it's unlikely you randomly get just that one if you ask someone for "uppers".
Obv not just research chemicals just a throw reference, illicit manufacturing capabilities have maaajorly grown the past 10-20 years so pretty much anything is of more availability to the consumer by request/light searching.

This is the really fun part of linguistics since we can debate how we use these being linguistically inaccurate so much, but it gets used in this manner so much it'll inevitably become the actual proper form of reference 😭

In a sociocognitive aspect though, kinda removed from language so not trying to start a convo in it just an interesting related reference. I do think this interestingly works in a rotating way too, where now that the diversity is known, it actually makes people more interested (in re already-using).

We saw this with cannabis legalization. People actually love knowing exactly what they're getting, a lot of people switch to dispos entirely despite them costing more explicitly because they can learn the name of what they're getting, what parent strains are in it, etc. To great annoyance to the average illicit dealer, they usually cannot offer this to customers so it leaves them less fulfilled. This is no-joke an actual major driving factor behind continual customer relations in that industry.

[midnight mortar]

Oh dang this hasn’t been used in a WHILE

[midnight mortar]

Fairly close to done with this book, yay

[placid coral]

People of this forum post, how accurate does this info sound? Seems to make a lot of sense from what he's saying?
https://bsky.app/profile/couts.bsky.social/post/3lx4at75mns2i

Andrew Couts (@couts.bsky.social)

OSINT folks, the bar has been raised

Reposts

152

Likes

676

▶ Play video

Bluesky · Aug 24, 2025, 12:41 AM

[midnight mortar]

Yep, and it’s impressive how people can figure out speech patterns

[cobalt raven]

It's also fun and something best not to do unprompted because people get weirded out when you do it just from a conversation.

[midnight mortar]

https://www.ece.gov.nt.ca/en/inuktitut today I learned something

[placid fable]

There's a whole forensic discipline focused on this kind of thing: sound patterns across dialects of languages. Fascinating.
Like bjmacke suggests, it's important to get people to speak in an unprpted way:as free as possible.
This will broadly work in US and UK English varieties,
But not as robust in Australian or NewZealand english. Rather than being designated by 'area', those country's dialect varieties tend to be influenced by socioeconomic factors or city vs country varieties.
There's some instances of vowel shifts (Auckland and Melbourne) but less robuat in data fromnother areas. Mostly, the analysis is hugely underfunded in those countries.

[wheat sinew]

https://bskye.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3lyczyc3ays2t

[wheat sinew]

Inter-Slavic was created by a Dutchman. https://youtu.be/9vfmprWtYj0?si=i7yqJ3cA7mAArZwz

[cobalt raven]

That hurt my brain. Maybe in a good way?

[analog hornet]

That is marvellous.

[north hazel]

Hmm, I wonder what the origin of the word Islam is

https://spiritualculture.org/what-does-it-mean-to-submit-in-islam/

[cobalt raven]

The extra nerdy thing is that the S-L-M root in Arabic is also where we get peace, to give and recieve, and to preserve. It's so old that it's the same root in Hebrew that we get "shalom".

[north hazel]

Yes! Also the letter for s and sh in hebrew and arabic look similar!
س/ش
ש
So
سلم
שלם
I didn't see similarities when i first started learning Hebrew but i do now

[cobalt raven]

There's a Wikipedia page that covers all of the cross-linguistic connections for this root:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Š-L-M#Arabic
Considering the numerous languages that have the root, it likely arose after the East/West Semitic split but before the West/Central split.

[turbid scaffold]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NcxXZ-scR7Q

[wheat sinew]

https://youtu.be/0hVdz9gyGX4?si=W-pLR7K5oBt6CIcD

Old Dutch is still pretty understandable.

[wheat sinew]

Bring back overmorrow and ereyesterday.
https://youtu.be/TK-8gfqmFNo?si=1gA1AuKhkfgWmtT7

[meager prairie]

And get rid of biweekly

[wheat sinew]

I also quite like sennight, but probably harder to get it to replace an existing word.

[turbid scaffold]

my first language (finnish) has those words in normal use

the first on is a calque of overmorrow, or the swedish övermorgon

I do like biweekly (monthly, yearly) and also semi-, but people don't know how to use them and use them wrong

instead of ereyesterday, we have the prefix toissa- that means the one before last, that you can attach to a lot of things

you can say "toissapäivänä" which is day befor yesterday, but also you can say toissaviikolla, which is "in the week before last week", or toissavuonna, which is the same for years, or even toissakerralla, which is "the time before last time"

there isn't a similar word looking forward

[meager prairie]

My problem with biweekly is the ambiguity. I have nothing against fortnightly

[turbid scaffold]

the ambiguity is modern and stems from people using it, I'm going to say wrong, even though language is an evolving thing

if biweekly didn't mean every two weeks, we wouldn't need semiweekly which means halfweekly, or twice a week

[meager prairie]

It’s just a bit odd, because at least according the Merriam-Webster, semiweekly and fortnightly are both older than biweekly, by about 100 and 90 years respectively

[turbid scaffold]

I'm only assuming but I would guess that the decline of the use of the word fortnightly corresponds with the decline of just fortnight in general

[meager prairie]

Would make sense

[cobalt raven]

Sorta?
~~https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Fortnight%2Cfortnightly&year_start=1825&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3~~
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fortnight%2Cfortnightly&year_start=1825&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3

(Case insensitive looks a bit better)

[midnight mortar]

Eĥoŝanĝo ĉiuĵaŭde letter accents are wild sometimes

[narrow urchin]

Hello all! Does anyone have a recommendation on material for beginning to learn to read and understand Russian?

[placid coral]

It's quite the undertaking for self-taught (imo). But here's a list of good resources and a breakdown of what you'd want to do in parts from reddits Russian learning wiki.

https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/wiki/full_course/

Also, getting a university Russian textbook and workbook (usually sold together) to read and practice with would be really useful.

[deft mulch]

On a maybe more controversial note, I don’t recommend classical textbooks if you can avoid them

You’ll probably need some kind of “classical” education for the basics. But move away from that as quickly as you can

The reddit info is pretty solid though

[midnight mortar]

“Learn basics then learn from fluent speakers” type shit, right?

[deft mulch]

Personally (aside from the reddit info) i’d say that you should start to learn the most common words in a language (however many you feel comfortable with memorising) and then get a grammar and get a rough understanding of the basics. Get to like A0.5-A1 and then try to start reading simple books (children stuff), listen to music, watch movies with subtitles, read russian social media stuff/memes, and when you feel comfortable start talking with native speakers (there are apps for this that match learners with native speakers, they’re a bit of a hit or a miss but maybe an option)

Don’t throw away the textbook, keep going through it and make sure you at the very least roughly understand everything (this makes the “learning by doing” part a lot easier), but it’s secondary

If you can, try to sometimes force yourself to think in a language. You’ll suck, but it’s the easiest way to force yourself to remember what you know and have to look up things when you don’t know them (this also makes it easier to remember specific things that are actually important)

[deft mulch]

Yeah pretty much. I don’t think the “classical” way is fully flawed, but it’s not great

[cobalt raven]

If by "classical" you mean textbooks written more than 20 years ago, I might agree. Just looking at the textbooks I have on hand there's a gulf of difference between the Latin textbook published in 1981 and my Russian and Arabic textbooks, both published in 2010. And even those look ancient compared to the stuff that's coming out now.

[deft mulch]

Yeah, newer ones are better. But for most languages I’m still not a fan, although exceptions exist. They may be out there for Russian but I haven’t heard of them

Latin actually has the LLPSI series which from what I’ve seen is a pretty solid way for learning latin (at least to read), takes a very different approach than the usual well known textbooks, although I haven’t seen it in the Netherlands (mostly heard of A level latin students using it). It’s probably the only textbook I’d be able to recommend to anyone who wants to learn Latin on their own.

Doesn’t mean they’re not useful. I just think they usually function better as a support to immersion than as your primary tool of learning

If you see the conjugations in a grammar and roughly understand them (or even memorised them) you’ll obviously have a much better time recognising conjugations and their meanings when listening to actual Russian than if you had to try and figure it out on your own

[midnight mortar]

That’s basically how I learned Russian anyway. Being with a family that spoke the language forced me to learn hard and fast, and even pick up the accent

[deft mulch]

LLPSI funnily enough has been around forever. But for some reason teachers are hard to change their ways

In high school most of my latin teachers actually spoke it themselves, and had a section vote to switch to teaching latin by speaking latin. But the spoken latin faction narrowly lost to the read latin faction

Even though test pilots at other schools pretty clearly showed that the spoken latin method (immersion) led to far superior results in the national exams

[cobalt raven]

All fair points, and don't disagree. Between the two I felt the Arabic textbook was loads better than the Russian one because it's clear the authors of the Arabic textbook had incremental goals underlying the chapter topics. The Russian one is structured like a more traditional textbook but at least makes sure that learners are aware of the spoken/written distinction.

(The irony being that the Arabic was MSA, a language used by no one in a casual setting)

[midnight mortar]

Another thing about it, is that you are forced to learn how to speak like em too

[turbid scaffold]

Learned an interesting piece of etymology

The word "miniature" is etymologically unrelated to mini- meaning small

it ultimately comes from the word "minium" for red lead (color), which is named after the river Minho / Miño in modern day Spain and Portugal, where it was first identified

[misty garden]

Guys I’m really interested in learning Russian. I speak native English (US) and wondering if anyone here taken the path of learning the language along with the culture

I found Unv of Pitt has a program for learning Slavic languages

[midnight mortar]

The whole “learn basics online and spend time with native speakers” is a genuine good tactic, and you learn the culture by osmosis out of it

[midnight mortar]

Ok lol

TLDR: I’m done with Esperanto, gonna start with Latvian

And subtle is helping me put on where to learn the language

[turbid scaffold]

I'm going to start learning Latverian to get ready for Doomsday

[wheat sinew]

Georgian would be nice to learn, but I don't think I can handle another alphabet at the moment.

[turbid scaffold]

Baltic languages are cool

I took a look at Lithuanian at one point

[meager prairie]

Estonian has a respectable number of cases

[turbid scaffold]

Latvian and Lithuanian are the oldest indo-european languages in Europe

[wheat sinew]

I'm currently working on my Ukrainian vocab through the medium of song lyrics.

[turbid scaffold]

As in changed the least amount from when the indo european languages came to Europe

They have some close cognates with Sanskrit, like the Lithuanian word for night is 'naktis' and Sanskrit is 'nakti'

[cobalt raven]

Have I introduced you to my old friends "father" and "brother"?

[timber wigeon]

I did learn most of it a few years back

Immediately proceeded to forget it again

[wheat sinew]

That's the problem, you have to keep it up.

[wheat sinew]

Never met her, but she’s a friend of a friend: https://www.youtube.com/@irregularLatvian

[midnight mortar]

badass, thank you!

[misty garden]

I opted to learn Norwegian over Russian instead due to having Norwegian ancestors

[midnight mortar]

found a chrome extension 😄

[ionic yacht]

also in afrikaans

where do u guys think i can get resources to learn sumerian and akkadian cuneiform i couldn't find any good courses or sites

[cobalt raven]

Forgive my preconceptions on this, but I would estimate that the number of people alive who can read cuneiform would number in the thousands. The folks I do know who can read it were, frankly, forced to learn it.

What I know of how they learned their competency was from studying the tablets in translation. Basically building a translation corpus from what's been translated already and then extending that for their research.

[wheat sinew]

Watching Dr. Irving Finkel on YouTube makes it very tempting to do the same. (My list of languages I would like to learn one day is near-endless.)

[icy fog]

This guy has an 11 video introductory course in yt, and a 22 video reading group. I haven't taken these, but I've been hanging in his discord and he seems competent. https://youtu.be/PTRyhDGCfx4

I studied using Johdatus Sumerin kieleen, which is unfortunately only in Finnish. (Or fortunately, if you're know Finnish.)

I've forgotten everything since.

[midnight mortar]

languages are wild

[meager prairie]

[midnight mortar]

Yea i get it. its Toki Pona

[cobalt raven]

Yeah, more background on it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

[meager prairie]

Ohh okay, I wasn't far off by having a hunch that the language feels logographic, even if this particular script might not be

But the runic writing vibe confused me

[cobalt raven]

Also gives off conlang vibes for a few reasons.

[midnight mortar]

…………it’s a conlang???

[cobalt raven]

(not sure if typo, but yes a conlang)

[meager prairie]

I 'member the good old days (of primary school) when I still remembered how to read Old Hungarian runic writing

The character set reminded me of that for some reason

[midnight mortar]

It was my b

[cobalt raven]

Oh, no harm at all! Conlangs are languages in their own right. I've just heard a bunch of interviews of conlang authors and they admit they "borrow" cool stuff from existing languages. The boxes around strings is something in Ancient Egyptian. Also the character set is extended ASCII but not a specific section of the standard.

[meager prairie]

I’m too daft for conlangs, so I prefer just using the wrong alphabet to phonetically approximate another. Like, Cyrillicizing Hungarian is entirely possible, and also really cursed

[wheat sinew]

Does it make more sense that way? Like Polish?

[meager prairie]

No, it’s about the same or slightly worse because we use a lot of digraphs that aren’t so straight forward to approximate

And then there is gy, which isn’t logical even in Hungarian

[midnight mortar]

Wassup folks

[meager prairie]

Following up on this discussion
#chit-chat message

[midnight mortar]

Esperanto pronouns:
Pronouns:
mi= I, speaker
ni= we: speaker + one or more persons
vi= you, person being spoken to
li= he, or person of unknown gender
sxi= she
gxi= it
ili= they
si and sia: third person pronouns

Im using the “x rule”, basically “sx” equating to “ŝ”

[meager prairie]

I struggle to properly pronounce even just a regular x most of the time

We almost always use ksz instead, where the k is often stressed

So I end up sounding like I'm sneezing in most other languages

[midnight mortar]

The x rule is mostly used for typing, when people don’t have the weird accent thing for letters like ŝ

So functionally

Sx is the exact same as ŝ

[meager prairie]

Ahh

I have loads of weird and wonderful accented letters, but they are all vowels

Namely á é í ó ö ő ó ú ü ű

The discord font is really not kind to double acute marks

[midnight mortar]

For Esperanto it’s ŝ ĝ ŭ ĥ ĵ and ĉ

[meager prairie]

Accented consonants is one of the weird things Hungarian doesn't do

[midnight mortar]

[meager prairie]

We used to have different letters of open and closed L, as well as mid-word and end-word K, but I haven't seen them for like 200 years at this point

[midnight mortar]

Dang

And because of the accents, you get fuckery like:

Ĉu Saŝa serĉas saĝan ŝercon?
Jes, ŝercon saĝan Saŝa serĉas.

Translated: Is Sasha searching for a clever joke? Yes, Sasha is searching for a clever joke.

[meager prairie]

I could almost piece that together from English and German

Although it would take a bit of massaging to do saĝan -> sagen -> saying, because the noun for saying is Spruch

[midnight mortar]

Fair

[wheat sinew]

Sorry if it looked like I was typing, I was just checking diacritics on different keyboards. 🙂

[midnight mortar]

Lol fair

Ŝĉĝĥĵŭ lol

[meager prairie]

I'm trying to translate this to Hungarian in a substantively similar way, but my lack of a present continuous tense is making it difficult

[wheat sinew]

Best allround choice on iOS is still EN GB, I believe, but those are cursed...

[meager prairie]

I have to deal with this

[midnight mortar]

Oh hell

[wheat sinew]

Hełł

😉

[meager prairie]

ł used the be our letter for open L. Not sure why it's still there, we stopped using open L waaaay before computers were even an idea

[wheat sinew]

Haha

Computers have existed for a looong time, but not the machine ones.

[meager prairie]

Our last major language reform was around the turn of the 19th century

Hungarian is a surprisingly antiquated language for how young it is

And we only have like... 26 thousand words I think? Most of which I've probably not seen yet

Oh and one fun bit of trivia is that allegedly, during the early days of the war in Ukraine, some AFU units used Hungarian speaking comms guys if they didn't have secure radios, but I haven't been able to find any actual confirmation for this

[midnight mortar]

Esperanto has ~900 root words, though its theoretical word count can be in the millions due to flexibility

You’re lucky

[meager prairie]

I have loads of conjugation to make up for it

[terse anchor]

esperanto word for wise be like:

[unborn turret]

Not sure of iOS but on Android Spanish keyboard pretty much works like an English+ since it includes all kinds of accents for letters

The only exception is that English does have ß which in Spanish you won't, so you'll struggle with giving directions in Germany

[wheat sinew]

Strasssssse.

[meager prairie]

It's very common to see ss instead of ß in German texting. Also using ae oe ue instead of umlaut letters ^^

[unborn turret]

I'm aware, but it's a show off when you actually use the right symbol

[meager prairie]

I have an ä in my name and it's only ever given me trouble

[unborn turret]

At least umlauts are relatively common, I can see it worse if you have a ñ, a å or a ł

[unborn turret]

My guilty linguistics pleasure is using Ukrainian Cyrillic for transcribing Spanish and the worst is that it works really well...

It would be a bit cursed for an Ukrainian speaker but it does the job

[wheat sinew]

Ай вуд невер до сомфінг лайк фат.

It always trips me up when Ukrainians do it.

[unborn turret]

*сомзінг :p

[meager prairie]

I have dabbled around with trying to Cyrillicise Hungarian a couple years ago, but I never really carried on with it and nowadays I can barely manage the alphabet to begin with

[wheat sinew]

Usually they go for ф. Like in марафон.

[meager prairie]

I've gotten a lot more fun out of Chinese and Japanese

[unborn turret]

Although the θ sound may be hard to transcribe, which also applies to Iberian Spanish z

[unborn turret]

I'm aware but it's phonetically closer

[wheat sinew]

I like tradition. 🤷‍♀️

[unborn turret]

Same as в for w

But that has some logic as w is в in German so... (It also was a thing in Spanish to see a w and pronounce it as v/b)

[unborn turret]

Me and my eternal struggle to find enough motivation to learn hiragana...

As in I want to but not want enough to actually go through the effort

[meager prairie]

Don't worry, Katakana is worse

[unborn turret]

Hangul is easy

But I still haven't learnt it

[meager prairie]

Everything is fun and games until you have to pronounce ぷ

[wheat sinew]

I’ll take hiragana and katakana, just don’t ask me to do kanji.

[unborn turret]

That's another beast

[meager prairie]

Kanji is a really mixed bag. I'm far from being able to provide a reliable opinion, but jukugo words are reasonable to learn the readings for, because most kanji only have one on'yomi reading. Native Japanese words can be hell

A yojijukugo words (four letter compounds)...... well let's just leave it at that they exist

[unborn turret]

There's a reason why Japanese is regarded as one of the hardest languages to learn how to write...

Although afaik the title goes to Tibetan, so if you know someone who can do that...

[meager prairie]

The keyboard autocomplete helps a lot

[unborn turret]

I guess you can just type in romaji and let it do the rest for you

[meager prairie]

Yep

You usually get a little list of options

[unborn turret]

Just like with Chinese languages you use pinyin I believe?

[meager prairie]

Yes, although the windows IME version is a bit odder, because it will immediately transliterate your input to kana, whereas on Mac you do get to see your original input

[wheat sinew]

I removed it from my phone because I wasn’t using it, but the Japanese keyboard was very useful when I was learning. Most of it’s gone now…

[meager prairie]

I have a sample sentence for that
私の日本語は上手ではありません, どうかご辛抱ください

What I really enjoy about Japanese is that, while they go about it very differently, their logic of topic prominence is surprisingly similar to Hungarian

Chinese is equally intriguing in its own way, but I haven't found a good interactive resource for it yet, and I refuse to acknowledge the owl

So I just occasionally mess around with Pleco a little bit

[unborn turret]

I'm just glad that the languages I speak are all SVO (I know German is kind of SOV and SVO depending on when, but then my German is very bad and my last class was almost 20 years ago...)

[midnight mortar]

The owl is the only halfway decent place for me to learn Esperanto, FUCK

[unborn turret]

I quit the owl because the Ukrainian course was bad

Or rather

It was very short

[midnight mortar]

Aka bad?

[meager prairie]

Sentence structure is optional, focus positions is where it's at

[wheat sinew]

Yep, it was basically some NGO’s basic introduction course and then endless cycles of revision.

[unborn turret]

And their AI policy made me not use them to derust my French

[meager prairie]

Speaking of AI, I can still bamboozle chatgpt to a decent degree with Hungarian grammar

[midnight mortar]

I can still use this site to Esperanto lol https://lernu.net/?hl=en

[wheat sinew]

O no! Don’t tell me we all need to learn Hungarian to escape ai…

[unborn turret]

Chatgpt bamboozles easy, I switched to Claude for a reason...

[unborn turret]

Time to embrace the AI overlords

[meager prairie]

[midnight mortar]

Still fun to use tho

I use it for random bullshit hypotheticals

[meager prairie]

We have a very odd system for shifting emphasis within sentences or clauses, and it can significantly alter the meaning as well

And most translators, AI or not, struggle with it a lot. English to Hungarian works very well now, but Hungarian to English is still rather mixed

[midnight mortar]

AI is shockingly good w/esperanto lol

[meager prairie]

(Also when I use a slightly funky word order in English, it's because my brain tries to use focus positions in a language that's really not meant to have them)

[unborn turret]

Although the idea of replacing my pronouns to Ő/ő is enticing, maybe I should learn Hungarian...

[meager prairie]

Yep, we don't have grammatical gender, just an in/animate distinction. Although we still use lexical gender for some things, but those take the shape of compound nouns.
Usually just sticking the word for woman to the end of a profession, or things like that

[unborn turret]

I would believe there is more Esperanto than Hungarian online so more datasets to train it, also Esperanto being built on mainly Indo-European languages

[midnight mortar]

Tru

[meager prairie]

I genuinely have no idea how I'd go about learning Hungarian as a foreign language

It's bad enough as a native language

[unborn turret]

That's the neat part, you don't!

[meager prairie]

Oh yea, we also have two different kinds of polite speech, and they use different pronouns, and you can end up sounding hella sexist if you use it wrong

[unborn turret]

Like Japanese

[midnight mortar]

…..brU

[meager prairie]

Because unlike pronouns, honorifics are gendered

[midnight mortar]

That’s cringe asf

[meager prairie]

Luckily official speech is taking the place of formal speech at a fairly quick pace, which helps the situation a bit

[unborn turret]

Tmw official speech is different from formal speech

[meager prairie]

Formal speech, especially with honorifics, is reaching Japanese levels of social context dependence

[unborn turret]

(to be fair a bit of truth on that with Spanish but because extremely formal language is just legalese and it's only used there)

[midnight mortar]

Esperanto kinda just……. Doesn’t?

Still preferable to T H I S

[meager prairie]

Yep. We have the pronoun maga for formal, and ön for official. Both of them would translate to "(your)self" in English, but they feel very different.
Formal speech is becoming archaic, and its vibe really depends on the social dynamic. For example if a much older person uses it with me, it's considered endearing, but I'm expected to respond in official speech to be polite. If I were to use formal speech with the same person, I would come across as standoffish and unpleasant

[unborn turret]

That looks like happy Mayan script

[meager prairie]

Similarly, they could use honorifics for me, but I'm expected to use either the official form pronoun, or a title if they have one

[unborn turret]

I mean, there's a bit of that in Spanish, where in Spain you is tú or usted depending on formality, whereas in Latin America many countries use vos as the informal one, while in Spain vos is seen as extremely outdated and formal

Also usted(es) in Spain is far more formal than in Latin America, in fact in many dialects there ustedes is the default form for plural you

More in depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voseo

[meager prairie]

Luckily there are only 1.5 kinds of Hungarian. Transylvanian Hungarian is very slightly different. As far as I could gather, they rely less on focus positions and more on stress for emphasis with a stricter adherence to SVO, but otherwise it's largely the same apart from some nouns. Usually plant and tool names

[midnight mortar]

It’s one of T H R E E writing systems for Toki Pona

[wheat sinew]

A lot of countries have something like that. In Dutch gij is archaic, but in Flemish it’s the informal you. And in some parts of England the same goes for thee.

[unborn turret]

I believed it was Toki Pona given your predictability but when I checked for it, I only saw one of the systems and I didn't know it has 3 lol

[wheat sinew]

(I say three is a lot, yes.)

[unborn turret]

Only Japanese has 3 systems as well I believe?

That I can think of, at least

[midnight mortar]

One uses Latin characters, the other two goes full on “good luck lmfao”

[unborn turret]

Unless you count latin transcription then they have more

[meager prairie]

Really the worst part with Hungarian pronouns is case-conjugation. You may refer to the google sheet I linked before

[unborn turret]

I can sort of imagine it because Spanish is fun and easy until you reach verb conjugations

[meager prairie]

And people are also very understanding with L2 speakers, and won't get offended if you only use direct speech regardless of social context

[midnight mortar]

L2¿

[meager prairie]

Second language

[midnight mortar]

Oh nvm

[unborn turret]

Although you can probably get away 95% of the time with learning 4-5 of the verb conjugations

But then some of the more common verbs are irregular so

Although Spanish isn't as bad as English with irregularities

[meager prairie]

I must admit, I don't know how many we have

[unborn turret]

So there's that

[meager prairie]

Too many modes

[unborn turret]

Yeah, Spanish is much like English as in it officially only has a single mode (in reality it has more but you can still argue they're not modal languages)

So modes have been my main issue learning German or Ukrainian

But Ukrainian's 7 modes feel like a kids' game compared to Finno-Ugric languages like Hungarian...

[unborn turret]

This is mostly a meme but

Spain is probably an orangy-red tho, you will get corrected :p

[meager prairie]

Yep, a classic

[unborn turret]

But my personal experience matches this map

[midnight mortar]

Can attest to Russian lmfao. My first gut reaction when a Mexican I was friends with, was “dude why??????????? I’m willing to help, sure, but WHY??????????”

[meager prairie]

I heard horror stories about Russian declensions, but I never dared to explore the question myself

[midnight mortar]

TLDR: save yourself by simply not

[meager prairie]

But! I did leave a very long discussion post on wikipedia about Hungarian, because they wrote nonsense in the article

I don't think it ever got fixed

[unborn turret]

Given that most of what I know of russian are swear words, I have a different experience 🤭

[midnight mortar]

That’s a language constant to be fair. Like “shit, you wanna learn swear words? How much time you got?”

[unborn turret]

I believe it's tied to modes, but most of my understanding of russian comes from my understanding of Ukrainan and what I have looked on other Slavic languages, and I'm far from an expert so...

[meager prairie]

I'm remarkably bad at swearing, especially when considering how rich the Hungarian vocabulary for it is

[midnight mortar]

What I’m hearing is: “I can use even more words to use as swear words”

[meager prairie]

(Also Hungarian is the most rizzless language ever. Even the idea of trying to flirt in Hungarian makes me cringe sometimes)

[unborn turret]

Some languages are tamer than others. English or Japanese are known for being bland :D

[midnight mortar]

Ok and?

[midnight mortar]

AKA: “be creative”

[unborn turret]

Not necessarily

[midnight mortar]

bru

[meager prairie]

I like swearing-free insults
"How cruel can life be to deny you wisdom in age, as it forbade you beauty in youth"

[midnight mortar]

You just proved my point

Be creative

[unborn turret]

What I mean is how strong are the insults that people use on default

And how people react to them

[wheat sinew]

https://theeasternborder.lv/podcast/mat-in-all-of-its-glory/

For Russian swears.

[unborn turret]

Like for instance in Spanish insults are a sign of affection and praising someone can lead to someone getting killed

[meager prairie]

I thought that’s what public lobbies in counter strike are for

[unborn turret]

Well. I mentioned that most of the Russian I know are swear words... I think it's a good moment to mention that I used to play a lot of Dota

[meager prairie]

But in general, online gaming does help you more with certain parts of a language's vocabulary than others

[midnight mortar]

Grew up with Russian speaking folks so I kinda HAD to learn Russian :/

They don’t swear tho

[unborn turret]

I mean that's cool

[midnight mortar]

I do agree

Still fun as hell language swapping infront of people and they noticeably get nervous

[unborn turret]

Especially russian)

[midnight mortar]

Had a former boss accuse me of being a spy when I talked in russian to my dad infront of boss

[unborn turret]

Ugh, that's very inappropriate :/

[midnight mortar]

it was at a mechanic shop so ehh

[unborn turret]

Plot twist: you accidentally dropped your cyanide pills

[midnight mortar]

...well fuck

[wheat sinew]

Whisper into the light fixture: "Comrade Major, do I take him out now, or later?"

[midnight mortar]

we are a bunch of degenerates here XD

I love it

[unborn turret]

Anyway, I hope you learn the lesson and don't speak in russian in public

Speak Arabic instead for even worse reaction

[midnight mortar]

lmao I'll swap to esperanto

[midnight mortar]

with an occasional "allah akbar" as well

[unborn turret]

Thing is that Allah akhbar is something regularly said in Arabic so....

[midnight mortar]

Hence "with"

[unborn turret]

Much like Insh'allah (which passed into Spanish as ojalá :D )

Talking about the influence of arabic in Spanish is a good segway away from the edgy jokes and getting back on track of this thread's topic, but... will we?

[analog hornet]

So....

I was once checking my Arabic slang with a friend، and one of the phrases I had heard he said "oh, yes. Don't use that one".

I asked how bad it was, and he said he used it during an argument in Egypt and someone pulled a knife.

He was fine and things calmed down, but very useful to understand how some things might be taken very, very seriously in the culture!

[midnight mortar]

Isn’t “I'dn't've't” is technically a valid cromulent contraction¿

[meager prairie]

"I don't have it"?

[wheat sinew]

"I would not even eat"?

[meager prairie]

It feels borderline unintelligible without proper context

[cobalt raven]

Going for a spoken language transcription? "I don't have it" is the likeliest.

[wheat sinew]

The apostrophes denote missing letters, so I[ ]dn[ ]t[ ]ve[ ]t.
I don't have it doesn't fit that. Unless the first apostrophe marks the omission of a space, not a letter.

[midnight mortar]

Yeee

[cobalt raven]

Contraction is messy, but follows a pattern. Voiceless consonants and short vowels don't fare well in the process. Spaces get dropped too ("do not" down to "don't" loses the space and the shorter "o") to more closely match how we actually speak.

[wheat sinew]

Mostly I'm just disappointed they conceded so early. Before I could come up with a much longer, sillier phrase.

But I'm honoured you're taking my reply seriously.

[cobalt raven]

Couple semesters with ~~phonetic ~~ phonemic (if I'm being accurate/nerdy) transcription helps with deciphering streams of spoken language.

[meager prairie]

I do agree, that going with that approach, “I would not have it” sounds more plausible than “I don’t have it”

[midnight mortar]

I asked a semi-shitpost question

And yall taking it FULLY SERIOUS

That’s why I like it here

[wheat sinew]

I object!

[midnight mortar]

At least it makes more sense then this shit

[midnight mortar]

it’s still cool that people are talking about it

Which is serious enough for me

Also

y'all'dn't've

Have fun