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No nuance. Would you join?

I saw a post expressing interest in learning linguistics a few weeks back and it had quite a few reblogs. I'm about to teach a university 101 course on the topic. I can put most of the content into a closed community, if there are people interested in it. Let me know!

To be clear: Linguistics is the study of language as a human phenomenon. It does not have to do with becoming a polyglot or buffing up your vocabulary.

Due to where I'm teaching / going to school, this course has a heavier focus on language endangerment than you may find elsewhere.

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No nuance. Would you join?

I saw a post expressing interest in learning linguistics a few weeks back and it had quite a few reblogs. I'm about to teach a university 101 course on the topic. I can put most of the content into a closed community, if there are people interested in it. Let me know!

To be clear: Linguistics is the study of language as a human phenomenon. It does not have to do with becoming a polyglot or buffing up your vocabulary.

Due to where I'm teaching / going to school, this course has a heavier focus on language endangerment than you may find elsewhere.

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Americans: you can also just lie and say you’re not from America, it’s perfectly legal.

We all know this site is US-user heavy, but I wanna know how many are vs aren't from the land of capitalism.

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as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine

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It’s not just Russia that has obscured Uralic culture, it’s also these alleged bastions of Uralic culture and language that have crushed non-dominant Uralic cultures and languages in their borders (to say nothing of other minorities, like Roma) Finland’s crimes against the Sámi are legendary and on-going, but worth mentioning is terrible treatment of Karelians. These cultures are not just suppressed via the state apparatus in Finland, but also appropriated and exploited in the cultural and tourism industries.

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Ingrian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

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We Are The Ocean

Ursala Hudson (Tlingit/Filipino/German)

collar: merino wool, silk, steel cones, leather. ravenstail patterns, crochet, basketry twining technique. Woman as a Wave shawl: merino wool, silk, cedar bark. chilkat and ravenstail patterns, crochet, basketry twining technique. Tidal apron: merino wool, silk, leather, steel cones. chilkat and ravenstail patterns.

“We Are the Ocean is an ensemble comprised of a collar, apron (entitled Tidal), and shawl (entitled Woman as a Wave). The collar and bottom edge of the shawl are twined using a basketry technique to bring delicacy to the regalia, made specifically to emphasize the wearer’s feminine essence. In place of the sea otter fur that traditionally lines the top of Chilkat and Ravenstail weavings, the merino weft yarns were used to crochet the collar and shawl’s neck lines, bringing forward and incorporating a European craft practiced by both my maternal (Tlingit/Filipino) and paternal (German) grandmothers. The high neck of the collar gives tribute to the Western aesthetics that have forever influenced the Indigenous cultures of our lands; with grace, we embrace that which cannot be undone, and use our new form to be better. The apron’s pattern was studied and graphed from an old Tlingit cedar bark basket, and represents the tides of our lives, as our lessons continue to arise in a revolving cycle, yet made of new debris. The repetitive pattern of the shawl represents the infinite connectedness of our sisters, mothers, aunties, and daughters. Blue lines break up inverted rows, representing the “past,” “present,” and “future,” acknowledging these concepts as irrelevant constructs that fall away when we commune with the Divine. The entire ensemble is worn to evoke the innate spirit of the Woman as an ethereal deity, that resides within us all.”

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I got ‘jurisdiction’, which means I’m about to wreak havoc on the Anglophone legal system.

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I once told someone I didn’t like Percy Jackson and they ended up crying. There are definitely a certain breed of people for whom any criticism of their favourite corporate media franchises is a personal attack. I personally tend not to keep those kinds of people as friends, though.

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I currently sleep in the kitchen like a peasant from the 1700’s, but I remember being told very clearly by a firefighter that it is much safer (from a fire safety standpoint) to sleep with the door closed, so I’ve been closing my bedroom door for about 20 years.

Ok, so that poll about sleeping with the door closed because of The Killer had one obvious flaw. So, I present an alternate poll:

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I have the zoomies.

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I would understand that I, as an non-binary autistic person with a different, non-Anglophone culture, am physically unsafe in that doctor’s office: that any display of mildly heightened emotion, any level of direct communication or any attempt to address discriminatory conduct by the staff, will be met with accusations of assault, mistreatment and police involvement.

ID: image of a tall sign in a medical waiting area. The text is red and black on white, and at the top is a stylized drawing of a person "yelling". The drawing is crossed out. The original poster has covered phone numbers and the clinic name. The sign reads:

Aggressive behavior will not be tolerated.

There is zero tolerance for all forms of aggression and incidents may result in removal from this facility. Our administration supports our medical professionals in pressing charges for aggressive or abusive behavior they encounter while caring for patients.

Aggressive behavior includes:

• Abusive language

• Failure to respond to staff instructions

• Physical assault

• Sexual harassment

• Sexual language directed at others

• Threats

• Verbal assault

WARNING: Assaulting a medical professional who is engaged in the performance of his or her official duties is a serious crime.

/End ID

So these signs have gone up in all the clinics in this system. They're big. Almost as tall as I am.

I have a lot to say, but first I really want to know how this sign would make you feel as a patient.

How would you feel seeing this sign immediately upon walking into your provider's office? (And if it would make you uncomfortable, why?)

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I feel just a bit like a beloved relative has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. @zingring please tell me this isn't true - or at least how long we have together.

Hey friends 🫂

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"ukraine invasion" vs "israel-hamas war" hm. something something wording and western media bias and propaganda

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The discourse on terrorism is generally devoid of historical perspectives (‘terrorists are pure evil’ is one popular trope) and lacks any positionality because, it is assumed, terrorists simply live outside of morality and social norms. But such ahistorical and essentialist attitudes came to haunt this discourse when a former terrorist, Nelson Mandela, became a Nobel Peace Prize winner, or, more recently, when Osama bin Laden, a former American ally, ‘turned’ terrorist. The discourse on terrorism also does not account for state terrorism, whereby state institutions such as the army or police inflict violence on civilian populations, as was the case in Nicaragua and Chechnya (and by the US via the Contras). This last point is particularly missing from the discourse on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. All attacks on Israelis, whether inside the 1967 border or outside, whether targeting soldiers or civilians, are dubbed terrorist attacks. But dropping a one-ton bomb from an Israeli airplane on a five-story Palestinian house, in which a militant may be present, knowing full well that dozens of civilians will be killed, is hardly ever described in Western media as terrorism.

Dorit Naaman, 2007

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