#Optimality Theory

[linguisticillustrations]

Optimality Theory diagram (tableau) for foot/syllable metathesis in Naijá (also known as Nigerian Pidgin) used for the "unconventional negative" (UNC.NEG) form of nouns.

Examples of this and related processes (taken from an author's post on Mastodon):

Tone metathesis in documented varieties of Naijá [fádà] “father” [fàdá] “rev. father” [màmá] “mother” [mámà] “trendy old lady” (other meanings are possible)

Truncation in the Wafi variety [bâ:g] “bag” [â:g] “inferior bag” [stô:v] “stove” [tô:v] “cheap stove”

Syllable metathesis in the Wafi variety [pòló] “polo shirt” [lòpó] “inferior polo shirt” [àʃáwó] “sex worker” [àw��ʃá] “cheap sex worker” [láptɔ̂:p] “laptop” [tóplâ:p] “cheap laptop”

From the article:

Akinbo, Samuel Kayode and Ekiugbo, Philip Oghenesuowho. 2024. "Iconicity as the motivation for morphophonological metathesis and truncation in Nigerian Pidgin" Open Linguistics 10(1): https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2024-0013

[tower-of-hana]

linguist 1: We need names for constraints that restrict codas and onsets

linguist 2: What about NoCoda and NoOnset?

linguist 1: Okay now we need constraints that restrict complex codas and onsets.

linguist 2: What about NoComplexOnset, NoComplexCoda, and NoComplex for when you need both?

linguist 1: Sure we're almost done, we just need constraints that restrict epenthesis and deletion.

linguist 2: What about Max and Dep?

linguist 1: What the fuck

linguist 2: we should use emojis to represent things in our very serious theory

[canisalbus]

hi! i am drawing a graduation composition in art school with a scene of a hound hunt. is it possible to draw machete and vasco there? :)

If you're certain that it goes well with the assignment and it won't affect your grading in any negative way, then sure!

If you end up including them, please let me know! I'd love to see the finished piece :>

[odetojupiter]

jean kevin and neil all being 19 when they officially leave the nest feels significant somehow

(kevin being 19 when he runs, jean being 19 when renee takes him, neil’s fake age being 19 when he leaves after christmas and his real age being 19 when he leaves after riko is shot and he’s officially pardoned by ichirou)

[callumxfilm]

I want to party with them so badly 😩 (parallels❤️)

[last-tarrasque]

‘‘As a materialist I know that life will end some day. What is most important to me is to be an optimist, with the conviction that others will continue the work to which I am committed, and will carry it forward until they reach our final goal, communism. Because the fear that I could have is that no one would carry on, but that fear disappears when one has faith in the masses. I think that the worst fear, in the end, is not to have faith in the masses, to believe that you’re indispensable, the centre of the world. I think that’s the worst fear and if you are forged by the Party, in proletarian ideology, in Maoism mainly, you understand that the masses are the makers of history, that the Party makes revolution, that the advance of history is certain, that revolution is the main trend, and then your fear vanishes. What remains is the satisfaction of contributing together with others to laying the foundation so that someday communism may shine and illumin ate the entire Earth.“ — Chairman Gonzalo

[liketwoswansinbalance]

Do you believe in soulmates??

Interesting query. Unfortunately, my answer is no. I'm not a mysticism-oriented person in general. Yet, I'll add that if science can't prove soulmates, philosophy has discussed them!

Do you believe in them?

I'd completely understand if you did since I doubt anyone can confirm soulmates don't exist. So, I guess the possibility exists. And if we look at the sum total of all mythology (though I can only speak on Western myths), we probably want them to exist and we are in love with the concept of them—just, look at Eros (Cupid) and Psyche. Or look at Plato's story about humans being split in half by Zeus. (This short video is a decent starting point. However, I do not believe love makes people whole. I believe love and compassion are part of what makes us human, and that we can be whole without romance.)

Or, for something beyond soulmates, look at Plato's Symposium, in which he rejects another (probably gay) man's advances, and discusses a "ladder of love," how people are hurt along the way/left behind during one to-be-enlightened individual's journey to a higher plane of being and love of the whole humanity and the world over a singular, physical body, if I'm remembering this correctly.

While I believe in/have seemingly observed near-instant connections in people, I don't believe in soulmates because the concept involves too much fate to feel plausible. I think relationships take work to maintain, which indicates that we all have some degree of agency in most if not all relationships.

In addition, I think a person can be compatible with multiple people out in the world. The person they do or do not end up with depends on many factors, and I'd say chance/proximity is at least one of them which limits the notion of "soulmates" or optimum partners ever encountering each other in practice.

(Yes, how ironic that this is based on a vague, unfounded "feeling" or sense of how the world appears to work. My knowledge is all secondhand. Thus, you should take anything I say about romance with a grain of salt since I've never dated yet. Another possibility exists: if I ever fall in love, I could change my mind by the appearance of a "soulmate." But even if something like that were to happen (I'm not actively seeking anyone now), I could just conclude that I've just found (a) love, not a soulmate, even if it felt like soulmates were real with said hypothetical person.)

If that was disappointing, I have several fun facts for you:

Optimal stopping theory proposes there is a way to choose the "best" potential partner over time, to maximize your chances of finding "the one."

A famous professor, Dr. Gottman, is able to analyze couples and determine with 94% accuracy whether a couple will divorce in the coming years of their marriage by assessing their patterns of disagreement.

(Not quite a fact, just my opinion.) About the play, Romeo and Juliet—two extreme interpretations of the play I've heard of are: they were "stupid," impetuous, infatuated adolescents vs. they were actually, truly in love. I think both of those conditions can coexist at once.

The mere-exposure effect: repeated exposure can endear you to or make you more attractive to someone. I think the same holds true for familiar traits alone and any other objects or sights in the world. This effect can also counteract enmity/prejudices.

According to psychological findings, opposites rarely attract. Similarity, especially on a core level, was more important to relationships. (I think the adage should be: "Like calls to like." Kudos to you, if you got my reference.)

I happened to see this quote somewhere a while ago, and I think it's closer to reality—even if it's dramatized and evokes Machiavellian orchestration by a bit much (and the notion of intention in relationships):

[cillyscribbles]

i'm really sorry the requests are rolling out so slowly! i promise i haven't forgotten them and am getting to them with much joy in my heart :) feel free to send in some if you've had any thoughts.

[alpineig]

Sometimes one person in your group of autistic friends has a hard time with an idiom so the whole group has to get together to figure out how to explain it.

[connecting-the-stars]

I’M EXCITED!

I’m gonna jump into the boat of choosing to believe in the writer’s vision. I do want these characters to get out alive and well and have this family be restored, but a story without struggle isn’t nearly as fulfilling. I want to believe that this squad of soldiers, constantly pulled together and apart, will end up where they always should have been - at their family’s side.

I feel a lot of us are under this storm cloud thats about to release all hell, and I cannot blame anyone. This is dark season, I thought season 2 with Crosshair’s torture was terrible but s3 has put on the pressure.

But I have prediction :D

I’m on the team that Emerie will make the leap: hand over a giant red button and thundering music behind her. There’s something different about her, that unquestionable obedience and restraint gone. Her red lenses at her feet. The looming vat of blue in front of her, a monstrous shadow stretching over her. The button beeps, an alarm booming to life as the liquid in the tank lowers, a long arm twitching to life. Cuts to a poisonous green eye snapping open.

The scene cut to black as glass cracks, a monumental growl echoing into the dark.

That’s how episode 14 will leave and where the final will leave off.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Hope and Solarpunk

Hope is an affect (aka feeling that drives action) that I’ve been thinking about for a while, ever since I was a graduate student. “Hope” is a word that gives people warm fuzzy feelings when they read it or use it, but I’m not sure that it’s very well understood or theorized in this day and age. Because most people equate the concept of hope with that of naïve positivity and intentional ignorance of “reality”.

Following hot on the heels of last week’s discussion of naïveté in solarpunk, I want to address the idea of hope head-on. I’ve before quoted this same passage from the last episode of the podcast “Secret Feminist Agenda” but I’m gonna do it again because it is super relevant to the way I’m thinking about hope as coming in different types. In the episode, host Dr Hannah MacGregor is in conversation with Dr Eugenia Zuroski, and observes that uncritical expressions of hope “[come] so often packaged in … toxic positivity” that insists that “we are all in this together” and that “we will get through this terrible situation,” yet for many people (especially people of colour and queer people) “we don’t always get through this” (11:52-12:05). In response, Dr Zuroski makes a clear distinction between wishful thinking and “radical hope” as a hope that is earned: the kind of hope that marginalized people such as BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+ and disabled people have been “earning all along … just by living under conditions that are designed to deprive you of … hope for yourself … for your own survival, your own flourishing, and your own future” (13:52-15:25).

" you can’t just hope out of nowhere. You have to do the work of understanding… where we’ve come from, where we all are right now, where you are in the middle of all that, then you can start to…build your hope"  -- Dr Eugenia Zuroski

When I talk about hope as an expression of wishful thinking, I’m thinking of the example that Dr Zuroski gives in that same episode, of someone prefacing their opinion with the phrase “I hope this isn’t racist,” and then going and saying something egregiously racist (17:21). She points out how in this example the speaker’s terminology uses “hope” to express the wish that their statement were not racist, because they cannot recognize themselves as racist. But, as anyone who’s been a captive in that particular conversation can attest, that wish is contrary to the actual reality of the situation; as Zuroski says, “you can’t hope for realities not to exist” (17:21); hope is not an applicable word in this situation. Zuroski goes on to say that in order for marginalized people and their allies to access truly radical hope, it is necessary to dedicate time to “thinking about temporality … your relationship to histories [and] to the present …. and let that inform how you build a relationship to the future, which is what hope is…. hope is the name for relating to a future of some kind” and that “you can’t just hope out of nowhere. You have to do the work of understanding… where we’ve come from, where we all are right now, where you are in the middle of all that, then you can start to…build your hope” (18:03). Dr MacGregor agrees that positive change has to be intrinsically tied to will and to action, not an ephemeral wish for a better future to abstractly happen, somehow.*

I’m using the word “abstract” here as an intentional nod to the work of José Esteban Muñoz on queer utopias, who contrasts a concrete “queer” version of utopia with an abstract utopia, one that’s made up of unrealistic dreams that have no grounding in “reality.”** I think that most people assume that solarpunk hope is the abstract, wishful thinking kind.

I am of the opinion that that is very far from the truth of it, however. What draws me to solarpunk is the way it conceives of hope stripped of its naïveté: eyes open to the devastation of the climate crisis, institutionalized racism, violent misogyny, rapaciousness of capitalism, the fact we’re witnessing a genocide and even though we are lobbying our governments, attending protests, and organizing boycotts, we’re unable to make any tangible move towards stopping what is happening. Is this a result of an eye-for-an-eye worldview, cynical capitalist greed trumping any human compassion, corporate and governmental hypocrisy, the legacy of colonialism, the systemic long-standing disinformation about the reality of the situation, run-of-the-mill racism, or all of it at once? And does it matter what the origin of violence is when the violence is still ongoing? All of this can be overwhelming. It takes a lot out of one to have their senses wide open to what is happening in the world and still try to choose to do what is best in the situation.

((A word of caution, there is a type of hope that can trap one into a despairing situation. It’s what Berlant calls “stupid optimism”. It’s the dark side of hope, not an empowering or active type of hope, but another expression of wishful thinking in direct contrast to the reality of the world - in which you have no control over the sequence/flow of events. Instead, the more that you believe the world to operate otherwise, along these abstract, wishful lines and rules that have framed this situation for you in the imagination, the more trapped one becomes, succumbing to a powerlessness within a fantasy over which you once had complete control, as you are the one who made it.))

I’ve found that if I take a pickaxe to the solarpunk aesthetic and rip it back, underneath the best examples I find throbbing, raw hope, the ability to look at our current world and deliberately choose a better path, often to the detriment of the self. It takes a lot out of one to have their senses wide open to what is happening in the world (or even on the “small scale” of violence in their community) and still leave themselves open to further wounding, sometimes by the very people or systems within which the solarpunk individual is trying to help.

What this hope looks like is the choice to be positive. The drive to choose against all odds to work grimly towards the betterment of humanity even if that solarpunk feels that humanity doesn’t deserve it.*** To me, the best examples of the solarpunk aesthetic are artistic expressions of that hope-as-a-choice despite everything.

I’m not an art critic, but to humanities scholars, the world is a text to be analyzed, yadda yadda, so I can’t help but read it thusly. I don’t see the art of solarpunk as pure escapism but as a concrete expression of the belief that there are beautiful things in this world, they are worth celebrating and, most importantly, hope that future humans will have more time to incorporate making, appreciating, or simply existing around beautiful things in their lives.

Solarpunk art as an expression of hope in humanity’s ability to create and appreciate art not just in the present but in a future where art is much more ubiquitous is not abstract, to me. It directly relates to art programs in the present for kids in underfunded communities, for humanities education for community members, for encouraging art daycamps and in schools. It relates directly to the fight to preserve art that exists and art-making in the present, with an eye to the future.

As Marwan Makhoul writes,

In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds ​the warplanes must be silent 

To me, the solarpunk version of hope can translate into direct action for peace. To me, that is not abstract. This type of hope - what I call a solarpunk hope - is a direct motivator of positive action.

What do you think, though? Am I going in the right direction, or off the beaten path entirely? How do you think of hope and solarpunk?

—

*I definitely ripped most of this section from a previous essay of mine published with the Science Fiction Review Association; I had solarpunk in mind when I was writing that piece though the argument was more about traditional ideas of utopia than the genre of solarpunk per se. So now I get to apply it to solarpunk, which is cool.

**For more of an explanation on why “reality” is in quotes here, I’d recommend a listen to our episode with Dr Joey Ayoub on what exactly is “realistic” when it comes to thinking about the future and incorporating solarpunk ideals into it.

***I know a few people who say they hate other humans and yet are some of the kindest, most gracious and generous humans in their interactions with others; imo they don’t hate other people, they hate the way that other people are forced to act under systems that have fucked them up so badly they cannot locate that graciousness in human interactions in themselves. I have begrudgingly come to realize that people are generally good, if you take away the trauma and shittiness they may have had to deal with throughout their lives that shapes them into cruel people or even rewards them for it. My Calvinist forbears are turning in their graves.

[cea-tide]

Just finished my second exam this week and it felt like both went well~

Now only one more theory exam on Thursday—

[marley-warriors]

Wanted to sketch a young Loki with a greek god / Jotnar hairstyle.

Didn't think it looked like him until I double-checked with his abomination of a hairstyle. xD

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

2nd week of the semester is a shitty time for my laptop to stop working

[edge-oftheworld]

it might be because I sat in a train for 12 hours straight doing music theory (because of this band too. because I wanna understand what’s in their songs) but it just hit me today, once again, that calm is such a sad and desperate album like I knew that already but. I had to listen to sounds good feels good to cheer myself back up

[theromanticrationalist]

Penny: "Sheldon, aren't you going to spend a little time with Amy?" Amy: "Oh! It's okay. I'm used to it. The other day at Whole Foods, he spent an hour optimizing the cheese aisle." Sheldon: "Yeah, and some thanks I got! The assistant manager chased me out with an artisanal salami!" Amy: "His quirks just make you love him more!" The Big Bang Theory 6x19 The Closest Configuration