Nothing More Heartbreaking Than Seeimg A Gay Person Say Something Idiodic, Only To Find Out They're Pushing

the short answer is that babies are just goated at phonology. the working theory is that in order to acquire language as fast as possible, our brains need to be receptive to any and all phonetic information from birth (and possibly even earlier; there's some evidence that prenatal infants pick up on rhythm and pitch information from the sound waves that travel from the parent to the womb). linguists have been testing them on this for a long time, and until they're about 6 month babies can distinguish phonemes from languages they've never been exposed to and who's phonology is completely different to their own. eventually the brain starts to lose that ability in order to focus on correctly articulating those sounds, which is an incredibly complex task, not to mention once you have to start arranging them into patterns to form words and sentences. basically to do takes up lot of cognitive effort that then can't be used to maintain such a massive inventory of sounds.

as for adults, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that it's impossible to learn phonology, since in order to fluently speak a second language you have to be able to understand and produce all the sounds, even if they're not 100% perfect. but in terms of why it's so much more difficult to perfect than something like syntax, it's partly of your brain not being as flexible anymore and, consequently both having a worse memory and a deeply engrained phonemic inventory, to the point that it's difficult for non-native speakers to even "hear" the difference between contrasting sounds your not familiar with (to be clear it's not that you physically can't hear it, it just doesn't register phonologically). this is also why people have consistent accents instead of making pronunciation errors at random; they're still following a set of structural rules, most likely very similar to the ones of native speakers, but with the influence of their first language changing it slightly.

so like. as i understand it, at any age, if your exposure to language is restricted to a single language, you will learn that language. like it just sort of happens, your brain figures out its grammar, semantics, etc, formal training HELPS but is not required. but this is *not* the case with the language's phonology! people will live in a foreign-phone country for years, primarily exposed to its language, they will understand it perfectly, generate it perfectly, and yet will still have a strong "accent" if not trained how to avoid it. that's weird, right? why doesnt the brain learn the phonology? (and why does it learn it perfectly as a baby?) is it too "low level", muscular-level, and that stuff gets "hardened" while higher level stuff is more flexible..?

is the US government fa-- no i'm just kidding, it's my turn to ask you that next week. do you think that the occasional criticisms of tumblr as the "moral OCD website", or just generally viewing interactions online or irl through a lens of moral OCD as a social/communal phenomenon, are useful? i know it's not intended to be of any particular function other than winning arguments online but i still wonder about it.

I mean moral OCD is an ironic or joking way to describe it, this is really just ascetic guilt-based morality. This is what happens when people think responsibility and accountability are the end all be all of politics and have a hard dichotomy between purity/goodness and impurity/guilt so they always want to be the ones holding accountable and never the ones being held accountable. It’s an extreme version of what popular radical liberal morality used to be because as a website and subculture Tumblr operates like a sealed vivarium

in amber skies, is alberta still rat-free?

rats have been extinct for roughly 10,000 years, and Calgary is buried under a thirty foot glacial ice shelf.

the thing about "don't shame people who choose to try to lose weight" is like in its initial iterations among fat liberationists it was largely intended as guidance for talking about people who are 1) fat and 2) some degree of participatory in fat liberationist activism. like i remember this coming up when roxane gay wrote about deciding to get weightloss surgery for example. the point (again among more radical fat lib types) was to recognise that it was something she pursued because of how miserably the world treated her, economically & interpersonally -- "don't shame her" wasn't supposed to detract from conversations about fatphobia but ironically was supposed to be a framework that pushed people to focus more on those structural factors, and to understand individual choices as being the result and not the cause of those factors. in this understanding, inside activist circles, often the people choosing to lose weight are also some of the people bearing the most brutal effects of fatphobia and so the thinking was, don't shy away from analysis of the systems that force them to seek weight loss but at the same time don't treat them with *needless* hostility for responding as individuals to those pressures, assuming they are amenable to actually deconstructing fatphobia. it's a contradictory position to be in of course but such is often the case (an obvious comparison being, like, a feminist who argues that makeup should not be required for women to exist in public, but is also dealing with say a boss who punishes her if she skips it). but the nature of social relations is such that it's very hard to keep terminology in some kind of linguistic quarantine esp when it's regarding a political position designated as fringe & cringe by (for example) an extremely profitable medical industry so now you just see "don't shame people for losing weight! ^-^" on like pastel infographics and comment sections of virulently fatphobic 4% bodyfat fitness influencers &c

"canada" if louis riel won

there's a lot of reason why I think terfism is a fundamentally nihilistic ideology, but particularly the way it uses genuinely traumatic and oppressive experience as a cudgel just oozes ressentiment

sigh...

while I'm obviously happy that ocd continues to get more and more awareness, I do wish it didn't involve so much reassurance posting.

"I can 100% promise that you're not a bad person 💖" is a nice sentiment, and I'm sure well intentioned, but oh my god is it unhelpful.

a friend is planning to read tlt and I need to resist the urge to say shit like “yeah idk Gideon’s relationship with Harrow is pretty fraught at the beginning and by the end of the first book she’s still kind of on the fence about it”

it’s fun that Mormonism is based off pseudo-archeology and Scientology is based off pseudo-psychiatry. By that logic the big American New Religious Movement of the 21st century is gonna be based on… pseudo-computer science?

the way you guys treat transmascs is actually fucking disgusting

that's a very unfair accusation, I have many transmasc friends who I treat with only love and kindness :)