#language
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mcpurplemuphin · 2 days ago
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My friend made this
One of my co-workers has a standing desk that he uses sitting down. It looks like this
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incognitopolls · 2 days ago
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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.
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dedalvs · 1 day ago
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https://archiveofourown.org/works/62988064
This is the conlang dialogue from Netflix's The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep. Jessie and I created a new a posteriori language derived from Hen Linge for the merfolk. It's a wild one: relative tone levels that change by word. The cast did it beautifully. Definitely worth a watch.
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mindblowingscience · 1 day ago
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There's a reason "antidisestablishmentarianism" is more a piece of trivia than vital to the English language.  Because a word that long is not what human language favours. According to experts, we tend toward efficiency and brevity — with statistical laws that persist across cultures.  Perhaps now, even across species. Two new studies this week focused on whale song and found striking, structural parallels to human language, especially in humpback whales.  To be clear, we're no closer to translating the meaning of those soulful, haunting, put it-on-a-best-selling-record songs from these ocean giants. But experts say it highlights the role of evolutionary pressures in complex communication. 
Continue Reading.
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blazing-butterfly · 15 hours ago
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I love how this also resembles the if-then statements in some programming languages
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[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or “the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha��� which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
end ID]
this is so cool
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emeraldspiral · 1 day ago
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Been wanting to learn a new language for a while now . I know Duolingo is trash since they fired most of their staff and replaced them with shitty AI and it seems like that's most language apps nowadays. Does anybody know of one that doesn't use AI, or if not an app then an online course?
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wittywords · 4 hours ago
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𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐫-𝐝𝐞-𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐞
The colour of moonlight, a soft white or pale blue-grey, the shade which appears in the glaze of certain Chinese porcelains.
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typhlonectes · 2 days ago
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"Bad motherfucker" is a good gender-neutral alternative
damn, she’s a bad bitch. oh they’re nonbinary? my bad. damn, they’re a bad person
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itellmyselfsecrets · 3 days ago
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“When you say man you don’t ‘include women too’, even if everyone does technically ‘know that’. Numerous studies in a variety of languages over the past 40 years has consistently found that what is called the generic masculine (using words like ‘he’ in a gender neutral way) is in fact not read generically. It is read overwhelmingly as male.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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anim-ttrpgs · 19 hours ago
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Ancient Language Write-in Skill from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. This Skill is optional, and if given to your investigator, must be set at a minimum rating of +1.
Ancient Language (Knowledge) || Ancient Language is a measure of a character’s knowledge of at least one ancient language, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, etc. The player may pick any number of ancient languages for this Skill to represent, up to the Narrator’s discretion. (It’s hard enough to learn a living language, let alone a dead one. It might start to break immersion if your hard-boiled detective from the bad side of town happens to be proficient in Ancient and Medieval Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit.) Use this skill when a character needs to read, write, or, God-forbid, speak an ancient language. This Skill may also be used to identify the age and culture of a text, to determine whether a text is authentic or a forgery, or for anything else related to ancient languages. 
Unlike the regular Language skill listed below, it takes a Skill roll to even read, write, or speak basic information, because these languages are not perfectly understood even by expert historians. Additionally, if an investigator needs to use any other Skill that would require understanding an ancient language (especially Paperwork or any Interpersonal Skill), this would first prompt an Ancient Language roll (which is also an Investigative Roll if the initial Skill roll is). This may add penalties to the second roll, as listed below:
Full Success: No penalty.
Partial Success: -1 penalty added to the other skill roll.
Failure: -2 penalty added to the other skill roll. 
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yvanspijk · 1 day ago
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How did you get into linguistics? What was your education in it like?
Hi! It all started in secondary school. I found an etymological dictionary in the school library and I was hooked! I think I read it from A to Z. xD My grades for the languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Latin) skyrocketed because I started to see all kinds of connections that helped me learn them better.
After graduating, I did one year of Ancient Greek and Latin at university in Nijmegen, after which I switched to Italian in Utrecht. Why not historical linguistics? My teachers from secondary school warned me I wouldn't be able to make a living as a historical linguist. 'You should become a teacher or a translator.'
During my Italian studies, I took every optional linguistics class I could. I loved them - no surprise. :) I also bought books on historical linguistics courses that didn't fit into my programme. I wrote my bachelor thesis on the birth of the compound tenses in Romance (like Italian ho visto, French j'ai vu, Spanish he visto, 'I have seen').
After my bachelor's degree I decided to do a master's degree in linguistics, where I specialised in dialectology. My master thesis was about the changes the Brabantian languages underwent - regional languages spoken in the south of the Netherlands - during the 20th century due to influences from Dutch, the dominant standard language.
I finished my studies in 2015, after which the head of the Italian department asked me to become a teacher of Italian and linguistics. In 2017 I left university because of the job climate: due to the university policies, they could only give three years' contracts, after which you were expected to find another job for six months (courtesy of the Dutch law) and then reapply. -_- I had a brilliant Italian colleague who even decided to go back to Italy because of this.
While I found another lovely job, I kept studying historical linguistics in my free time. Eventually, I became a freelance linguist in 2023. It's the best decision I've ever made. It turns out you can make a living as a historical linguist (at least here in the Netherlands). :)
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onthishamsterwheel · 1 day ago
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I love how this is written. There’s a pleasing rhythm to “it isn’t remotely by the way, quite a ways out of the way in fact” and the phrasing so cleverly highlights the two different meanings of the word “by”— near and incidentally.
The wit and rhythm are what caught and kept my attention, and despite the ironic fact that my response here isn’t quite as succinct nor as compelling, I want to stress the importance of one’s style/mode of delivery. In other words, choose a pleasant messenger, for the messenger is half the message. “Half” might be over (or under) selling it, but you get the idea.
I love using "by the way" as a segue into topics that are completely unrelated to the matters at hand. it isn't remotely by the way, quite a ways out of the way in fact. a little adventure
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obsessioncollector · 23 hours ago
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This is a different issue than learning a language out of necessity (or at least for a significant material incentive) but even when it comes to language learning as a hobby there are obvious disparities between languages associated w more economic power and others.
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If you live in a Western country, have you EVER met someone studying Bengali (except maybe a heritage speaker trying to improve)? How many universities offer it? Fifth most common mother tongue in the world! Most usamericans probably couldn't even name Marathi or Telugu off the top of their heads if you asked them what languages are spoken in India. And even Hindi is rarely taught! Of course part of that is because if you are doing business or international development in India, your Indian coworkers likely speak English, so why learn Hindi? (I know lots of Indians don't speak Hindi or it isn't their primary language, but my point is that there's a significant disparity in the expectations for knowledge of second languages here.) If you are a westerner you can have an entire career associated with another country or culture without being able to string a sentence together in its language, and there's virtually no curiosity about other cultures—again, how many people have you encountered who have studied an Indian language to any extent (if you are a westerner), unless they have a family connection to India? And people learn Mandarin Chinese for business, but many people probably don't know the terms Yue Chinese and Wu Chinese.
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murfpersonalblog · 2 days ago
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Nosferatu & Castlevania: Orlok → Olrox
Guys, I had no idea that "Olrox" is just the Romanization of Orurokku (オルロック), the Japanese version of Orlok--as in Count Orlok from Nosferatu--until I actually bothered to read Olrox's wiki (x x)! 🤦
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Orlok's name derives from the Eastern European words for "war" (oorlog) & shapeshifers (ordog, varcolac/werewolf, etc). Orlok is also a false cognate with warlock/waerloga (from "liar" in Old English).
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The rabbithole has officially gone too far. I'd been knew Castlevania Nocturne's character Olrox comes from the iconic Castlevania videogame Symphony of the Night, where he's also named Olrox. Nocturne just changed him from a European vamp to an Aztec one; keeping his color palette, powers, & reptiles/snakes/dragon motif.
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I never thought any deeper than that, or even WHY videogame!Olrox's design looked the way he did--people are giving Robert Eggers TOO MUCH credit for the mustachioed Orlok--Castlevania did it first! 🤯
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What's wild is that Netflix!Olrox's design originally was supposed to more closely resemble Orlok from Nosferatu 1922--I'm suddenly having war flashbacks to Solas from Dragon Age, LOL.
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Thank GOD Netflix changed Olrox's backstory & overall design to the cooler Aztec Mexican vampire (tlahuelpuchi) + Quetzalcoatl instead.
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Which now makes total sense why Orlok/Olrox's been a dragon this whole time; from Symphony to Nocturne; as I already explained the connection between Orlok and dragons here:
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So not only are Olrox & Orlok technically the same, but they also follow the exact same blueprint: the dragon/serpent tempting Eve into the Original Sin of sex; either killing their human love interest, or turning them into vampires.
Dracula & 1992!Mina Harker, 1979!Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra
Orlok & Ellen Hutter
Lestat de Lioncourt & Louis de Pointe Du Lac
Olrox and Mizrak
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