#(using they plural not singluar)

[psalm22-6]

Okay so looking at the word frequency list for Les Miserables available on intratext dot com, here are some words that stood out to me (although everyone could look at this list and would find something different and interesting):

9589 il (he)

2556 elle (she)

2089 je (I)

1182 homme (man)

906 Marius (more than any other character but to be fair, other characters are frequently referred to by aliases)

727 Jean

685 Cosette

680 Valjean (There are 47 more Jeans than Valjeans!)

520 Père (Father, or in some cases, something like "old man")

508 Thénardier

454 Enfant (child) (plus there's 193 uses of children)

384 yeux (eyes) (157 instances of eye singluar)

364 femme (woman, wife)

349 mère (mother)

346 main (hand)

340 voix (voice)

338 dieu (god)

337 vieux (old, masc.) (194 old, fem.)

334 Paris

321 Hugo (actually this is a huge outlier. Hugo doesn't appear many times in the text at all, but it's in a lot of footnotes and the footnotes also get counted)

315 Javert

313 évêque (bishop)

283 Gavroche

270 maison (house)

267 Madeleine

251 mort (dead)

227 jardin (garden)

226 Fauchelevent

224 ombre (shadow)

221 Fantine

189 coeur (heart)

184 matin (morning)

176 lumière (light)

170 amour (love)

161 Courfeyrac

157 France

153 Napoléon

144 Révolution

133 Enjolras

129 eh

117 waterloo

116 barricade

83 dents (teeth)

81 Eponine (I was surprised there was more Courfeyrac and Montparnasse than Eponine!)

79 Grantaire

79 terrible (This is about where I got bored of scrolling but there were a couple words that I think of as quintessential Hugo that I had to look up also)

46 lugubre (lugubrious)

24 sépulcre (sepulchre)

20 lugubres (lugubrious make it plural)

19 spectre (Dumas complained that Hugo used "spectral" every ten pages, although spectral actually only appears twice but I see his point)

13 spectres

7 lugubrement (lugubriously)

4 sépulcral (sepulchral, plus three more instances but feminine)

3 spectrale

2 spectral

[mochinomnoms]

Hey! Anon who said about the economy of the Inca and stuff!

Sorry if the message came out wrong, I didn’t mean to dismiss the pre-Inca cultures, really sorry about that :(. I meant the last one when the conquistadores came and conquered the land. I always forget the names, sorry :/. I’ll look into that further.

Also, I didn’t know Inca was used for both singular and plural. I always heard the S being included when talked about them in plural, at least in Lima-Peru Spanish, that or I just heard it wrong my entire life holy fuck.

Oh! Almost forgot to ask, are there languages like Quechua in Mexico to this day? Like, are they still taught and talked or?

Oh it's okay! I don't think it's common knowledge? I didn't get taught about it in school at least and I'm in the US. It learned about it for my anthro/archaeology classes.

For the singluar vs plural thing, it might depend on region? I was taught that it was Inca, but it can also be spelled as Inka as well. It might be Incas in Lima, Peru, but I wouldn't know myself. It might be case of referring to the empire equals Inca but the peoples are Incas.

For the language, Quechua is an indigenous language family that originated in South America in Peru and the surrounding countries. It gets confused with the Quechan/Yuma tribe of Arizona, but they are different! I don't know much about it, but it's also referred to as Runasimi and is either one of or the most spoken pre-Columbian language family in the Americas. Technically there are a few different languages within Quechua, think of Quechua like this: Quechua languages equals Romance languages, and it's variates such as Lima equals Spanish or Italian.

From what I could gather, it mostly remains a spoken language, but is one of Peru's, Bolivia's, and Ecuador's official languages, as well as intergraded with bilingual education. In the Andean region, as with other indigenous languages, it has been intermixed with Spanish and Spanish as a dialact is distinct there because of this! These are called loanwords, where words from one language are adopted into another. For Quechua, wawa (infant), misi (cat), waska (strap or thrashing) are common words used instead of their Spanish counterparts bebe, gato, paliza. This is a common thing with most languages, but it's very cool.

For Mexico, the family of languages is entirely different as they're made of up completely different indigenous people! In Western United States and Mexico, most people are familiar with Uto-Aztecan languages and the Mayan languages in Southern Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan languages include over 30 languages such as Hopi, Nahuan, Cupan, Piman, and I couldn't possibly name them all! There are so many of them! For the Mayan languages, it's smaller but one of the best documented ones! They include the Yucatecan branch and the Huastecan branch in Mexico, but there are more in Guatemala, which is also where the Maya empire resided.

Quite a few of these languages are still alive and mostly well, they obviously suffered due to conquest, but are efforts to preserve the language and teach it, though I believe it's mostly at a local level and not national. Mexico isn't very nice to their indigenous peoples from what I'm aware, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak on the subject unfortunately, so I don't want to say too much about it without more research.

[xylophonetangerine]

Native Finnish speakers tend to be bad at using the English courtesy-word please which probably contributes to the Anglosphere stereotype of Finns as sullen and rude. The reason is obviously because Finnish does not have an equivalent of the English please. There is kiitos which means "thank you" and is said when someone does something for you or wishes you well and there is olkaa hyvä¹ whose English equivalents are "you're welcome" and "here you are". And "please"!

Yes, I tricked you Finnish does have a please equivalent, but it is considered somewhat clunky and formal. You might say Istukaa odottamaan, olkaa hyvä ("Sit down to wait, please") but that is very formal. Finns prefer to express politeness with syntactic devices, mainly indirectness. So instead of the above you might say Voitte istua odottamaan ("You can sit to wait") or with the verb in the conditional mood: Istuisitteko odottamaan? ("Would you sit to wait?"). I would consider these more common forms in everyday use than Istukaa odottamaan, olkaa hyvä which has the verb in the imperative mood. It's a command followed by a formal exhortation. It's not rude but it is very formal. More appropriate to be said by a receptionist at a tax office than by a shopkeeper.

Here in the formal singular form. The familiar singular form is ole hyvä and the plural (familiar or singluar) form is olkaa hyvät. Some, mostly young, people don't know of the differences between the formal singular and the plular forms of address.

[axolotluv]

I understand when someone uses they/them but not when they use it/its. Like... why do they speak of themselves like objects....... no....... can an object be my frien.........

So! BIG misconception! It/Its users are NOT objects :D Please never refer to us as such! Referring to yourself as an object is a completely different thing and totally unrelated to it/its pronouns! The only difference between an it/its user and a they/them user is their pronouns, nothing is different in relation to the persons identity as a human being!

Yes, an it/its user CAN view themselves as an object, but don't assume we all do. That is a completely different part of our identity which pronouns do not affect :)

'It' is a pronoun just as any other. It/Its users are comfortable being called 'it' in a non-derogatory and non-objectifying way! You can call a person 'it' without dehumanizing/depersonalizing it!

Use it/its pronouns just like any other pronoun! Objectification is not implied in the slightest. It's just a pronoun. He doesn't mean male, she doesn't mean female, and it doesn't mean object.

It's kind of similar to how we give objects their own pronouns. An example would be using "she" or "he" for say, a vehicle, but that does NOT mean that person views their vehicle as a human being.

TLDR: It/its users are not fucking objects. :)

[kajaono]

In germany we do not really have gender neutral pronouns.

In ODAAT they just translated “They/Them” into the german plural “Sie/ihren” which worked really well. The problem is that plural “Sie” (they) is also singular she “sie”. ODAAT solved that by allways using “sie” with the plural verb

Disco found another solution. They use “Deren” which exists in german, but as a singluar pronoun (you know instead of he or she) they use “Dey”... which is really made up and I have not heared anywhere else yet.... I would have prefered the ODAAT way but it works

What does your non-english speaking country uses? Hit me up!

[kivablog3]

Our Third Pride Together

Brooklyn, New York / June 2018 / Anno Muris 49 (Year of the Stone-Wall)

Happy Pride, it’s a beautiful day in Park Slope. And the noise from the infernal building site on 22nd St, the lot catty-corner-plus-two to our backyard, the workers and the power tools and the yelling and banging drowning out the normal neighborhood noise, it’s gone for now, thanks to the rain. Seven days a week, starting at 8 am. Rain’s the only thing that even slows them down. 

It’s five tall stories of framework now, I think they’ve finally topped it off. I just want this nuisance to abate for a while, long enough to think, because I do want to keep the balcony doors open to the breeze. I want them to finish that fucking building, too, and I realize these two desires could be said to be directly at odds, but I want everything. I want them to finish quietly. As long as I’m wanting things I can’t have, I might as well want things I really really want, or really really can’t have. 

Kathleen’s on the loveseat, reading something on her ipad, looking concerned, going, Hm. She is the greatest gift in my life, a gift from the Goddesses, just a few feet away. She is a shining rainbow every day, and she shines into my heart. When she came into my life and added her light to mine, the two burned so much brighter together, perhaps mine more so because it had been so dim for so long. 

It’s our 27th Pride together, if you count the intervening years when the whole Pride thing just depressed me and I tried to ignore it when it came up in the news or in conversation. Oh, look, purple stripes down Broadway, that’s great. Everything gradually changed, then not so gradually. Windsor v. U.S., wow, that’s great! 

Because my superpower is proofreading, friends started asking me odd questions about pronoun usage, odd primarily in that people don’t ask me  very often about grammar. But also, pronouns? I you he she it we they? (My sixth grade English teacher would’ve been so proud just now, she was determined we learn them.) Odd hypotheticals involving people who wished to be referred to in the plural but were single individuals: singluar plurals, accusatives and reflexives, although they didn’t call them that of course, off deep in the weeds: “They want to be referred to as ‘they’? So, then, would it make sense to address them as ‘y’all?’ Instead of ‘you’? … okeee, jeez, just asking. What about, is it, ‘themselves’ or ‘themself’?…”  

More and more lesbians were appearing in television shows, I did read about that, and some of these apparitions survived for more than a few episodes. And there was L Word, that happened, although we stopped watching after that awful ski resort trip to BC at the end of S2 (or S3, I forget.) It’s a real good thing I didn’t see what the writers eventually did to Jenny before the show finally ended. Yeesh...I identified with Jenny, ffs. 

Oh, really, a TV show starring a Black trans woman? An actual trans woman playing a trans woman, that’s great, but does she…no, I don’t watch prison shows. They give me claustrophobia. Does she die?… 

…What? — “Transparent,” that’s funny, is that like a joke?…Does she die?…Oh…Because we always die, Jen, trannies and dykes always die by the end of the show, that’s why!!

And, not that many of them ever hated me personally, not women who actually knew me, but I learned that things were really truly different now: lesbians, cis lesbians, especially younger queer cis women and gay and bi cis women, they mostly didn’t hate trans women anymore. It wasn’t acceptable. I watched gender language gradually change for parties I wanted to go to, sounding more like places where someone like me would actually be allowed to attend. 

Yes, I was told, you’d be welcome now at [fill in any really cool all-women event other than Michigan or an Olivia cruise, and btw, how the fuck did a women’s record company turn into a cruise line? I don’t actually want to go on one, well, okay, I sorta do but I know even though they deny it strenuously, or at least it was true last I checked, that it gives them the willies if a trans woman turns up at the dock and their usual cruising clientele still sneer at us, so, I just wanna know, what the fuck??]. 

I go online looking in earnest for my people: What’s an…autostraddle? 

So, it’s really our third Pride together, after 2016 and 2017. The 28th of June is my birthday and marks two years of hormone replacement therapy. I’ve gone far enough that I can look back and see footsteps in the sand and tell how far it really is. It turned out in the end that they’re* right: you can’t suppress your innermost self, you can’t hide what you know is the brightest part of your soul, without making yourself profoundly sad and causing yourself endless pain. And when you stop doing that, you feel so much happier. It may be sappy, but it’s true. All the sappy stuff turns out to be true. 

* - There’s “they” as aux. for person(s) of unknown gender(s). We do use it already.

{ Coming Soon: Part Two }

[haxyr3]

Hi there. If it's not a problem, I'd like to ask you for help. I can't find anywhere difference between интересует and интересуют. Could you explain me when I should use each of those words?

Hi! These are the two different forms of the verb интересоват��. 

Интересовать - to interest, to be one’s concern. 

Интересует -it, he, she ... interestsИнтересуют - they interest 

I believe you are a bit confused because, in Russian, this verb often takes a reverse word order. In English, it is Noun/ Pronoun + to be interested + in Object. In Russian, it is usually Noun/ Pronoun + интересует (for Obj. in singular singular) интересуют (for Obj in Plural) + Object. Меня интересует аcтрономия. I’m interested in astronomy. Astronomy is singluar --> интересуетПолицию интересуют доказательства. Police are interested in evidences. Evidences are plural --> интересуют.