Im Here To Announce That The New Hot Meme Is Writing Textposts In The International Phonetic Alphabet

Still, I tried to ponder questions formulated in terms more familiar to me: what kind of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat’s principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them?

ARRIVAL (2016) dir. Denis VILLENEUVE based on Story of Your Life (1999) by Ted CHIANG

I think sometimes we get so caught up in how a translation can never be a copy of the original that we forget what an amazing job many translators do every day and how a good translation can add layers and meaning to the original and I think that's beautiful

“I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”

-M.L Rio (If we were villains)

The best part of any class that deals with phonetics/phonology/morphology is watching everybody carefully, silently, repeatedly mouthing every sound the instructor brings up, like:

Instructor: [is talking about schwa]

The entire class, every time:

So first, we need to make sure that they understand what a question is. Okay, the nature of a request for information along with a response. Then, we need to clarify the difference between a specific “you” and a collective “you”, because we don’t want to know why Joe Alien is here, we want to know why they all landed.  And purpose requires an understanding of intent. We need to find out: do they make conscious choices? Or is their motivation so instinctive that they don’t understand a “why” question at all? And, and biggest of all, we need to have enough vocabulary with them that we understand their answer.

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”

Arrival (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Arrival (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order… But now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings.

Arrival (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve

3/100 days of productivity

I am once again coming at you with a changed study location - this one is here to stay! The marble table is super cold and so I'm somewhat thankful for the fact my laptop loves to violently overheat. ✨warmth✨