#extinct language

[learning-konkani]

Hi,

This side blog will be for learning Saxtti and Bardeskari Konkani which are dialects of a language spoken in the north and south of a tropical state called Goa in the west of India.

Due to portuguese colonisation as well as several attempts from India to supress the language and culture Konkani is a spoken language. While there may be ~2 million native speakers accoriding to a 2011 census, that number includes dialects belonging to different parts of India including Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Gujurat, Daman and Diu. So the number of native Goan Konkani speakers is far lower.

Konkani is continuing to die out due to lack of native speakers, migration and of course the attempts to get rid of it which also causes a lack of resources and structure. While I am starting with learning it as a spoken language I hope to progress enough and figure out how to read and write as well. I will have to learn about grammar, sentence structure etc so I will also post about that.

If you are also attempting to learn a sort of or fully dead/extinct language please interact so we can share this struggle together lol :))

I also have another side blog for Japanese here

[vm-haunts]

Culture Shock

Look, Danny knows not all of the ghosts from the Zone are human, ok?

Skulker is an alien, Wulf is from another dimension, and Frostbite's ancestral world don't even have planets.

You can meet any ghost from any world and any time period, it's only one of the infinite weird things about the Realms.

So it wasn't a big deal when Danny asked Walker to teach him his mother tongue. Just an attempt to reduce the communication error with the guy, and maybe an effort to get to know his Zone neighbors better.

Generic ghost speak can only get them so far after all.

And ok, Danny wasn't expecting to get actual language books and fucking homeworks from the warden, but whatever. Walker is stuffy like that. It's actually pretty sweet of him to give Danny all of these materials, and Danny can appreciate that.

It might have, unfortunately, slipped Danny's mind to ask more about Walker's origins. Although to be fair, learning an alien language wouldn't be a problem normally, it shouldn't be.

If not for that cursed Fenton luck.

How in the realms is Danny supposed to know Walker is Kryptonian??? Walker acts nothing like Superman, how is Danny supposed to connect the two dots?!

Shit, how do he even start to explain this when Superman is knocking on his dorm window??

[p3arlsandcoff3]

As a communist, leisure is something I find especially sacred. No matter what area a person finds fascinating, I believe that person should have the right to indulge in it (given it is harmless). The pure idea of a world in which an inspiring historian has to sit at a desk and click on buttons to survive sickens me, let alone the reality of it. As long as you can, especially if you are young enough -

Read that Wikipedia article.

Analyse those films.

Learn that instrument.

There is a reason all my post end with

Stay yourself, Stay curious.

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

[p3arlsandcoff3]

Give me a word and I'll translate it to one of the oldest languages - Hebrew!

Any word!!!!!!! ヽ⁠(⁠*ﾟ⁠ｰﾟ⁠*⁠)⁠ﾉ

Stay yourself, stay curious

[theeyesofthestorm]

[frogposting]

Panamanian Golden Frog

Atelopus zeteki

These guys are tiny. So small, in fact, that they’re born without eardrums. They use a form of sign language called semaphore to communicate with other frogs. This sign language involves waving hands and raising feet to greet each other, defend territory, or attract a mate. For example, male frogs will wave their arms to attract females, and females will wave back if they are interested.

Unfortunately, they’ve been extinct in the wild since 2007 due to the amphibian chytrid fungus but they’re being bred successfully in captivity.

[thatneoncrisis]

re whitewashing in tlt spaces. i feel like id be way more chill with seeing lighter toned harrow, bc at the end of the day she IS lightskinned you can just look at the cover of nona and that whole "skin the color egg carton" this is like. fanciful and kind of strange if your mind goes to the white or grey ones but like

absolutely within the range of human skin tones. its tan but its not like a dark chocolate brown. gives you enough to work with. but on top of just making harrow incredibly pale a lot of the time she is just. drawn like a white girl. just zero indication that she isnt entirely pakeha let alone maori if you didnt already have that info in your back pocket.

and so much shit contributes to this its tazs descriptions in the book just focusing on how pointy and scrawny she is, its fanartists not really getting the nuances of how to draw poc outside of "white person" and "black person", its the fact that irl maori obviously have a vast array of different ways they can look and some of them can be white passing and that doesnt make them less maori, its that fact coming into conflict where in a book if you have a main character you say is maori but is lightskinned, white passing and has zero connection to maori culture, language, and wasnt even born on earth and its been 10000 years since that particular ethnic group has even existed. what does that mean. how would the text change if she was just pakeha

[sodaneko]

the ancient and bloodthirsty entity who haunts my narrative and i saw you from across the ritual chamber and we love your vibe

[witchofthesouls]

I'm surprised there wasn't a language barrier between Cybertron and the Lost Colonies! I mean, there should have been some differences or a linguistic drift, especially since the Titans left Cybertron before the Quintesson occupation and the rise of Functionism?

Like, what if the Lost Colonies were time capsules of extinct or dead Cybertronian languages? As in modern Neocybex of Cybertron was their version of modern English? Sure, each region has its own dialect, but it's all English...

And then, Windblade and Chromia rocks up to the planet, and they're straight up speaking Latin/Ancient Greek.

The closest Cybertron equivalent to said living time capsules are Primal Vernacular speakers, and those are ridiculously few in the factions, and that's not even a straight shot because of the regional influences that happened.

I think we need a fic where there's a Giant Big Bad that united everyone to the point that the Council of Worlds was started far earlier, but now it's Decepticon Justice Division being interpretors since Vos is the only fluent Primal Vernacular speaker and the other D.J.D. members are stuck in the new role playing charades with the Colonists' delegates because they figured out how to parse out a few phrases.

Their translation work isn't as shoddy or inaccurate as expected, much to everyone else's worries considering what's being said...

[livelaughlambbam]

Just like any person who is sane about both Cult of the Lamb and linguistics would do, I responded to the massive monster lofi stream by using my day to turn all the random symbol's in Lamb's notebook into an alphabet for a language of the Old Gods, complete with phonology, grammar, and enough vocabulary to translate the Bee Movie intro and transcribe it onto a commandment stone. Exact translation of the text:

The edicts of flight state that a bee should not fly. Its inferior small wings cannot lift its inferior fat body. Honorably, the bee flies regardless. Why? Bees care not for our edicts.

It's pronounced: Tiirutyi ibri yatru ubribati nachyriapruip chyira yiwyuiba yitu ikri. Yitutiirua shrichyi lutlat trulru naishraubu ti pyichyi nachrik’ubu. Wratrarupru, tiichyira yiwyuiba usyapru. Riya lut? Yitutiit’ruchri yiwyuiba tuprat naubribati.

[river-taxbird]

[just-watch-and-calculate]

(Spoilers for The Magnus Archives) generative AI and Smirke's fourteen (plus extinction)

With how commonplace generative AI has become, it is an interestig consideration how it realtes to smirke's fourteen (plus extinction). I'd argue that at heart (ha) it is a digital extension of the Flesh. It feeds off the pieces of themselves people put into their works. It lets us engorge ourselves on its endless stream of soulless regurgitation.

Common use of modern generative AI beckons us to consume what it outputs, with less care about the quality and more about the quantity; with almost a "text is text/art is art" kind of attitude being exhibited by some. The models themselves also have to consume large amounts of input to be able to mass-produce output. With how much input is needed, there is little room to give credit, scraping images/text often happening with little regard for where the pieces of input are coming from, who they are coming from. Human emotion expressed in photography, drawing or writing is reduced to mere training data, to be consumed the generative AI, and then regurgitated to people in a new, diluted, mangled form. Individual pieces of training data cannot be removed from the AI as it now inseparably consists of them, has assimilated them into its substance.

But, like food, training data can be poisoned. Tools like Glaze/Nightshade can subtely change images, with little effect to what the image looks like to a human; but if enough thusly poisoned images are in the taining data of a genAI model it produces wrong output. Poisoned meat can be dangerous, if shown to be poisoned it should not be consumed; there is no point in doing so. While a genAI asked for a dog producing an image of a cat is (thankfully!) harmless, the poison has done its job of making the genAI and its output useless.

There are other things too that can make it throw up broken nonsense, that infect the models with something; in a way I've seen compared to mad cow disease (which likely can spread among cows if their feed contains meat and/or bone from infected cows), training a genAI on training data that has itself been generated by a genAI can significantly worsen the output. This infectious self-consumption carries aspects not just of the Flesh, but also of the Corruption.

This kind of "genAI cannibalism" is becoming easier to accidentally do as the internet becomes more and more flooded with genAI output, in a way resembling conventional spam; this realted phenomenon having a mass-produced meat as its namesake. But this AI flood can also be likened to pollution, feeds filling with digital waste, and datasets being of no more scientific use because now they say less about people but more about genAI. This is less the Flesh and more the Extinction; The dead internet theory becoming more and more widespread in the wake of this (And I'm sure the nuance of it is enough for a separate analysis). This replacing of humans by genAI hits artists the hardest, their line of work already moving past being merely polluted and towards humans being replaced.

Artists' work being consumed, but the actual creating being separated from the output consumed; 'AI "artists"' take the act of creating, the artistry, the art out of the images they consume. The thing that makes images, sounds, words art becoming extinct in this pursuit of having more to consume with an "art is art" attitude in how they self-proclaim to be artists.

Though one thing that sets this apart from how the Flesh works is that these genAI outputs are not something that is consumed away, but something that is made to be Beheld. The Eye's hungry curiosity wanting more to observe, always more. The works stolen to train genAI is not gone, but drowned out in a massive ocean of too much information. The genAI output likewise sticks around on the internet, to be seen by all who find it. Vanishing not by being consumed, but by being judged unworthy of it and deleted.

These hollow attempts at imitating art can be something other than a cosumerist search for more to behold though. some if it is attempts by something not quite human (but almost, through its human-made training data) to resemble something human not just to be liked by humans but to not even be noticed as different. If it is successful to the point of replacement this is the Extinction, but if it balances just on the edge of plausibility, uncannily unclear, then we are instead dealing with the Stranger. GenAI output can have an uncanny hollowness; and it is not just attempts at mass-produced "art" where this happens. thispersondoesnotexist.com is not meant to output art, just plausible yet nonexistent images of people; I cannot help but be reminded of the not-them by it. And it is not just faces, there's LLM-written e-mails, and meaningless bug reports, even attempts at skipping the work of writing academic papers and essays. It is becoming hader and harder to know if something is by a person or by a machine, the worst thing being not even if it is one or the other but that it is so hard to tell. Is this chatgpt or was this email just written by someone autistic? is this reasonable bug report an actual bug or just one more piece of generic technobabble that looks convincing at a glance? Is this Stranger real or not? Is that a strange person or a convincing AI? And people are even beginning to ditch search engines in favour of asking ChatGPT, less "tank you kind stranger, here's a reddit award" and more "artificial Stranger, be my oracle"

Though it cannot know better than its training data, this artificial Stranger is becoming more and more trusted, more of a "friend" — a friend who may tell you to eat rocks, as google's AI search results have. Deepfakes can be made to abuse the trust put in a real person or to abuse the trust put into video recordings portraying real things. As the artificial Stranger becomes the artificial friend, as mistrust turns to trust, we are now dealing with the Spiral. Distrust makes way for disinformation and misinformation. It does not even have to be deliberate deceit; when a genAI does not know something, it just makes stuff up, a behaviour called hallucination. It can be as convincing as court cases that never happened, or it can be as feverish as the minecraft-resembling dreamlike object impermanence and endless downhill slopes, the unreachable water turned ice turned heights above in a sudden drop towards what a moment ago was the unseen clouds; and the yellow skies of oasis ai.

To me, the strangeness of that last example is oddly beautiful — it failed at being minecraft but succeded at being something unique. Its failure is what makes it so interesting. The deep flaws are making it less an imitation of something that exists and more something new, gaining an odd, almost human charm. Flaws are something that differenitates us from machines, after all.

There is another example that stuck with me of the unintentional flawedness of a genAI creation being what makes it so oddly intersting, that perhaps even inspired this whole post. Of it being so wrong about what it imitates that it becomes something else: this AI video of gymnasts, making such nonsense of human anatomy that its regurgitation of human input resembles the 'creations' of the Flesh in episode 90 of The Magnus Archives.

[labratofthemonth]

fun summer idea to keep yourself sane: learn a lesser known, endangered, critically endangered, or extinct language!

Im currently learning Ainu and it feels cool to be a part of keeping it alive. A great resource i’ve been using is So You Want To Learn A Language, but there are some lesser spoken languages on Drops. (Ex.: Galician, Igbo, Irish, Persian, Samoan, Māori, etc.)

Another resource I really like is LingoHut. It’s free and has lessons for languages like Macedonian, Armenian, Malay, Urdu, etc.

Have fun learning!

スイ　ウヌカラアン　ロ！☻

(p.s. this doesn’t just have to be for the summer! you can learn a language anytime ☻)

[135-film]

also an additional 2 cents into the colossal/dire wolf controversy: nobody is reading their websites whatsoever. colossal is 2 companies, one in "extinct" animals and one in extant animals.

i'm currently on the fence of cloning (which is what a lot of extant labs want to do but ESPECIALLY colossal) because i worry about genetic bottlenecking since if you have CLONES, there's only so much genetic information that animal is able to give and obviously that would be bad in an animal we're trying to save. even in a breeding population, this is still a threat (see: cheetahs) BUT i understand that it could be an important tool in revitalizing these populations as well and could potentially bring these animals away from the brink of death.

however, their websites (both of them) are full of AI. i only noticed it being in the artwork, but considering their extinct animals website is an incredible, incredibly long scroll it would not surprise me that the text is AI as well. which really concerns me with how they're going to and whether or not they already have used AI in some form in how they bring back these animals (be that either images of weird lumpy animals generated by AI, or using unstable/generative AI during any stage of genetics testing).

[errant-heron]

i met someone irl who complained that the universalising nature of capitalism is to blame for ills such as having common systems of measurement and many people learning to speak a common language. it is in poor taste to complain about it on the internet where he cannot defend himself, but i'm not sure any case was made that either of these could be regarded as a bad thing, nor that there is anything uniquely capitalistic about wanting to collaborate with people around the world. i think that the Système international, being able to converse with many people, and being able to work together in research and industry across great distances are pretty cool achievements.