I think lemmy.ml mods/admins often wipe entire comment histories in the community/instance when they remove specific comments. Say something about Taiwan and boom, your comments talking about toilet paper patents are gone
Don’t quote me on that though
Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn’t used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use “Y” as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. “ye olde” instead of “the olde”). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using “th”. A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by “Z” (With e.g. “MacKenȝie” yielding “MacKenzie” instead of “MacKenyie”) until it disappeared and spellings using “y”/“gh” (or “j”/“ch” when appropriate) replaced spellings using “ȝ”.
Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn’t get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by “uu”/“w”/“u” by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn’t die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace “ae” in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).
You would HATE being a person who could read in the Middle English era. There was no standardized spelling, people used many different conventions/regional spellings, and it was mostly either phonetic spelling or random French bullshit. Also some earlier writers used really conservative spelling to emulate Old English. It was the wild west out there.
For example, here’s a (not comprensive) list of the variant spellings you may see for each second person pronoun:
Singular Nominative 2P:
thou, thoue, thow, thowe, thu, thue, þeu, þeou, thouȝ, thugh, thogh, ðhu; þou, þoue, þow, þowe, þu, þue, þouȝ, þugh, þogh, þo
(after alveolars and in contractions): tou, towe, touȝ, tu, to, te
Singular Objective 2P:
the, thee, thei, thi, thie, thy, ðe, de, þeo, þhe, yhe, ye, þe, þee, þi, þy
(after alveolars and in contractions): te
Singular Genitive, Dative, and Possessive 2P:
(usually before consonants): thi, thy, thei, they, yhi, yi, þhi; þei, þey, þy
(usually before vowels and “h”): thin, thyn, thine, thyne, thien, thyen, thein, theyn, thinne, yin; þin, þyn, þine, þyne, þinne; þines
(female referent): þinre, þire, þinen
(after “t” or “d”): ti, ty, tin, tyn, tine, tines
Plural Nominative 2P:
ye, yee, yeȝ, yhe, yie, iye, iȝe, hye, hie; ȝe, ȝee, ȝhe, ȝie, ȝeo; ge, gie, geo
Plural Objective 2P:
you, yow, youe, yowe, yo, yoe, yogh, yau, yaw, yeu, yew, yhu, yu, yw, yhow, yhou; ȝou, ȝow, ȝouȝ, ȝowȝ, ȝowe, ȝo, ȝu, ȝw, ȝuw, ȝue, ȝiou, ȝeu, ȝew, ȝewe, ȝau, ȝaw, ȝhou, ȝiu, ȝeou, ȝehw, ȝhowe; gou, gu, giu, geu, geau; ou, owe, eou, eow, eow, eo, eu, euwȝ, æu, hou, heou, heu
Plural Genitive & Dative 2P:
your, youre, yowr, yowre, ȝour, ȝoure yowyr, yowur, yor, yur, yure, yeur, yhure, yhour, yhoure; ȝowyr, ȝowur, ȝor, ȝore, ȝur, ȝure, ȝiore, ȝhour, ȝhoure, ȝaure, ȝiure, ȝiwer, ȝeur, ȝeure, ȝeuer, ȝeuwer, ȝewer, ȝewere; gur, gure, giur, giure, giuor, giuer, giuwer, giwer; ihore, ihoire, iure, eour, eoure, eouer, eouwer, eouwere, eower, eowwer, eore, eur, eure, euwer, euwere, eowrum, æure, our, oure, or, ore, ouer, ouwer, ouwere, ower, owur, hour
(early ME): þinen (genitive), þinum (dative), þirum (dative fem.)
Plural Possessive 2P:
youres, yourez, yours, youris, yurs, yowres, yowris, yowrys, yourn, youren; ȝours, ȝoures, ȝouris, ȝourys, ȝowers, ȝores, ȝures, ȝuris, ȝhurs, ȝourn, ȝouren; eowræs
You can find a lot more about Middle English spellings in LALME (A Linguistics Atlas of Late Mediæval English) (electronic version here)
Some of the more innovative spellings come from Northern Middle English/Northumbria (northern England and southern Scotland, though the dialects of the latter would largely split off and develop mostly on its own in the early stages of Middle English and become Scots) and to a lesser extent Midlands Middle English/Mercian, in large part due to significant past influence of North Germanic/Scandinavian languages; i.e., Old Norse, which was somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English and caused/progressed both the loss of inflections and the formation & solidification of Modern English syntax (in particular, Old English syntax shifted to become near-identical to Old Norse syntax; Old English also entirely lost inflection of grammatical gender, grammarical case, etc. and adopted many core vocabulary of Old Norse). Those changes happened primarily to facilitate communication with vikings in the Danelaw, since Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were very eager to communicate with each other; things like declensions were very different in the two languages (the 12 different declensions of “the” probably weren’t fun to deal with for Scandinavians), so Old English speakers started omitting or simplifying them, and they mostly died off in (early) Middle English. English also completely lost dual pronouns (pronouns with exactly 2 referents). Word order was primarily SVO in Old Norse, so Old English’s relatively liberal word order (or lack of consistent word order) was simplified/regularized significantly to be more SVO.
Southern Middle English – the dialects of West Saxon and Kent – were significantly more conservative (partly due to having next to no influence from Norse). Those are where many more conservative spellings are from. The West Saxon dialects were the most influential/dominant (especially due to the Kingdom of Wessex’ great power) until the Norman Conquest, when East Midlands English (especially around London) took over that role.
Southern American English & Maritime Canadian English varieties were both primarily based on more southern English varieties – specifically, the time’s London English and West Country English. Appalachian English was also heavily influenced by Scottish English and the English of northern England. Canadian English in general was based on both Southern and Midlands English. Meanwhile, New England’s English was primarily derived from East Midlands dialects. Generally, dialects derived from the time’s West Country English are significantly more conservative and more similar to the general speech of ~15th century England, while more Midlands (of the time) influenced American and Canadian varieties are similar to standard ~17-18th century English. Dialects influenced by the time’s Scottish English and Northern English also generally contain a lot more conservative Anglic constructions – modern Appalachian/Southern American English varieties and modern Scottish/Northern varieties share a large amount of vocabulary and other features which were lost in other dialects.
Standard varieties of Modern British English are comparatively generally significantly more innovative and don’t share many features with Middle & Early Modern English varieties – general British English started diverging greatly from most other English dialects around the mid-to-late 18th century and early 19th century. This is also a reason why Australia and New Zealand English have a lot of features which seem to only partially agree with other English varieties. For example, the trap-bath vowel split, which was partially completed in Australia and is present in certain words, but not all words, and has variation in some words. When Australia was being colonized, Southern English varieties had recently begun undergoing the split, and it was considered a “Cockneyism” until Received Pronunciation was formed in the late 19th century and embraced it; it wasn’t fully progressed until around that time, which is why New Zealand English (which came from immigrants in the mid 19th century) mostly agrees with Southern English on those vowels.
Maybe access to connected devices (e.g. your computer components or the phone you have plugged in to your computer)
Elixir? Is that the weird older cousin of Gleam?
mfw non-commutativeness
Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.
For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…
For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.
For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…
I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.
I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.
I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.
Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.
After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.
I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.
I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.
On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.
on y office maybe? that could be interpreted as “we work there” with very poor grammar
Chimpanzees are likely going to be extinct 2-3 decades from now. Bonobos will be extinct in 4-6 decades. Orangutans will go extinct within 10 to 20 years. Most animals closely related to humans (including most apes & monkeys) are projected to become extinct within a few decades. I do not want to be alive when gorillas go extinct
This is mostly due to the meat trade (apes and monkeys are often killed for meat which is eaten by locals or traded), being affected by the wars in the Congo/Africa, being kidnapped & sold as exotic pets, and habitat loss from human resource harvesting/logging & development. Humans are effectively displacing, enslaving, slaughtering, and cannibalizing their distant cousins
Tech is pretty relevant to climate change. Technology experts are definitely not the only relevant people to it though, of course social/political experts are generally more important, considering the current state of capitalists’ handling of impending environmental catastrophe…
i remember watching this guy every day for like 6 years straight. i was pretty sad when he died, i remember being at work seeing the notification “so long nerds” with a black screen and i was immediately like oh it’s so over
Paywalled article
Vintage clarinets can be very beautiful, but modern more standardized clarinets are also often beautiful (I’m quite partial to a lot of the Backun designs, but I have an old Selmer I really like too)
I can’t think of any instruments that aren’t made as “beautiful” as before. The only differences are that modern ones are just made… better, like way better. A $200-400 guitar now surpasses the quality of a guitar costing thousands of dollars from a few decades ago, and there’s way more diversity in the designs.
That being said, I don’t see what the point of musical instruments that aren’t “utilitarian” would be. It’s not a sculpture, it exists to make sound, there’s no reason for an instrument that sacrifices sound or design quality to have fancy aesthetics, unless it’s for a movie/play or something and the sound doesn’t actually matter.
Do people in cities have planes circling them 24/7 or something? I see like a few planes every month maybe and I live not far from a city with an international airport.
If people stop arguing with Zionists, the only voice that will be heard is their voice. The average person tends to lean into popular opinions which have no opposition to them, and they take it as fact
Yeah I think it’s especially construction by analogy with similar words (phonologically or semantically), people tend to say words in a way similar to other words when their mind sees a possible pattern, e.g. if you know it’s mug->mugs, hug->hugs, rug->rugs, pug->pugs, tug->tugs, nug->nugs, you think “obviously it’s wug->wugs” for -/ʌɡ/ words, especially monosyllabic ones, but also maybe polysyllabic words or words that sound similar in some way but not the same, like -/ɔɡ/, -/ʌk/, -/gʌ/, etc. This also goes for words with somewhat different phonologies but similar semantics, e.g. if you know child(er)->children and broth(er)-> brethren, you’ll probably think it would look something like sister->sistren (which is a less common dialectal variant actually). If you know goose->geese, foot->feet, tooth->teeth, you’ll probably think it’s moose->meese and noose->neece and shoop<-sheep and hoof->heef unless you have a reason to expect irregularity. Or mouse->mice and louse->lice, you’ll probably think house->hice and spouse<-spice and blouse->blice.
But if you haven’t processed enough words that pluralize in a way other than just appending /s/~/(ə)z/ to the end, you’ll of course just think “gooses” and “tooths” and “fishes” and “foots” and stuff. Like what children do. Also common for children to say is “fishies” and “goosies” and anything else with /iz/ added at the end, since singular /i/ and plural /iz/ are common for adults to use as a diminuative/cutesy way of saying them, and the kids pick it up of course.
All these sound cursed, so I’d rather not think about it too much.
Is this the r/linguistics logo bird
I uninstalled one drive immediately, it’s so annoying. It’s also really fucky with when it updates files. If I need to use it, I’ll go on my browser
French: single-handedly turn the US into an independent country
Washington and Webster: “fuck you you pricks”
French: :( obliterates half of Europe
This is why Napoleon was so anggey bros. Trust me on this it has to be true. Why else would he have created an Italian national identity than to cast upon us pain and suffering as revenge?