melalta

Latest Posts by melalta

Hey. Hello.

I am monumentally tired of fighting. But I’m going to continue to do so for as long as I can.

Right now I am seeing long-time followers attack Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for picking her as a running mate. I know a lot of people look at this duo and see “more of the same.” I’ve seen so many intelligent people saying they are not going to vote.

It is absolutely critical that you vote the Biden/Harris ticket. I want you to remember that while you are pointing out the flaws, and here is why.

The current president is literally a fascist. He’s slow-burning, meaning he’s slowly moving the goalpost farther right. The only reason he’s slow-moving is because the Republican party still has the barest semblance of a conscience. Think of what would have happened if #45 said “we should delay the election!” and McConnell said “yeah okay that sounds cool.”

Do you know how terrifying that is? Because if he got congress to delay the election somehow, there would be no reason to ever have a federal election again. He could just keep delaying it forever.

“But CK,” you say. “The constitution says we can’t delay a presidential election!”

Checks and balances say a lot of things. Checks and balances say that bills are supposed to be voted on and go to the president for signing or veto. Currently McConnell has found a loophole and just has 400 bills sitting on his desk, ignored.

I want you to keep this in mind: Under fascism, the constitution does not matter. They will find a way around it. They’re trying to find ways around amendments, too, poking and prodding at free speech until they can find a way to shut it down.

And if #45 decides he doesn’t want to play anymore, he’s got a whole fucking army, and he’s just proven that the secret police he has in his employ will do whatever the fuck he says. I need you to recognized that this throwing people in Portland into vans thing wasn’t the ultimate violation of freedom. It was only one step in a massive authoritarian takeover. You cannot trust the secret police to do the right thing and say no. #45 has just proven they’ll listen to him like trained dogs.

He has already started talking about more terms. If he discards the constitution, there will be nothing stopping him from taking them. He’s currently, blatantly trying to rig a free and fair election. This has happened in other countries across the globe, and the same people who are posting “NEVER VOTE FOR BIDEN” are the same ones who post things like “JUSTICE FOR _______” when a despot steals an election.

If the incumbent president wins another term, this will be the last election we have. This will be it. This is how fascism works. This isn’t slippery-slope talk. This isn’t “potential worst case scenario.” We are in the middle of the worst case scenario now.

Please. For the sake of the millions of people who will die under #45. For the sake of people who cannot survive another 4+ years. Think of Biden/Harris as a road block. A barricade. Right in the middle of the road. It stops traffic and doesn’t do anything to get people where they’re going, but at least it stops them from careening off a bridge.

If you never want to have to make this choice again, you have to fight to abolish the US’s First-Past-The-Post voting system, but it is TOO LATE to do that now. No third party candidate can win. Study the election results from the last 40 years and you’ll see.

Please. Wise up. This is our last chance.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in 1818 and makes it illegal for people in the US to “take,” which means killing, injuring, or possessing, migratory birds in most circumstances. That includes accidental take, such as in oil spills, bioaccumuliation of poisons, or building on bird habitat. 

New proposed rules would make accidental takes legal. This change would mostly impact industries (and of course, the birds that they kill), and has nothing to do with people who pick up bird remains on purpose.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in 1818 and makes it illegal for people in the US to “take,” which means killing, injuring, or possessing, migratory birds in most circumstances. That includes accidental take, such as in oil spills, bioaccumuliation of poisons, or building on bird habitat. 

New proposed rules would make accidental takes legal. This change would mostly impact industries (and of course, the birds that they kill), and has nothing to do with people who pick up bird remains on purpose.

“Simple shapes, I have come to bargain!”

odin is like “when thor was born the sun shone bright upon his beautiful face. i found loki on the sidewalk outside a taco bell”

Watch it in video

Follow our Tumblr - Like us on Facebook

it’s not 2020 where i am yet, but here’s my nomination for the first meme of the new decade

LAST WEEK WE CAN USE THIS SOMEONE HIT THE PANIC BUTTON

t'challa: we’re stuck in this God knows where universe how are you not worried

peter: she will find me anyways

shuri: who

duolingo owl with glowing red eyes tearing through the fabric of the soul realm reality: HOLA MADREFUCKER DONDE ESTA LA BIBLIOTECA

every year we have to say it

It's always a trip checking Mark's Tumblr before Youtube. Like, what does a water demon want with Wade's house? Are the tacos for Wade or the demon? Are they sentient demon-slaying tacos, or do water demons have some extreme fear or fondness for tacos that trump their attachment to Wade &/or his house? Do the tacos and the demon even exist? Gonna find out later today. But until then I have no freaking clue. Anything goes in Mark's videos.

All these low effort memes keep spilling out.....

LIKE WÖTER

Kashmir is bleeding

TW// mention of violence

PLEASE SPREAD AWARENESS.

There’s an issue our lands are dealing with, and it deserves all the global attention possible. To give a short and not-so-detailed explanation, I’d tell you that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were once one, before getting colonised by the British. Once the states became independent and the British finally left, a territory was left disputed, Kashmir. Since 1947, the two countries (Pakistan and India) have been fighting for Kashmir (as it’s historically important for each one).

(You can search up the entire story of Kashmir and understand both Pakistan and India according to their history and culture and religion. I can’t write it because I don’t want my opinion to enter this post- I want people to understand it all through an unbiased view, and also because it’s too much to mention in limited time. )

Yet mindsets have changed. While the prime minister of Pakistan has declared that the “Kashmir solution” is now all up to the cizitens of Kashmir and not Pakistanis, india is deploying 35,000 more soldiers in addition to the 500,000 they have already sent in the disputed territory. The Indian government has declared the repealing of article 370- saying that it is going to ‘improve the lives of kashmiris’. The people of Kashmir are going to die. They have been getting killed day by day since the past years, little babies, school going children, bleeding teenagers, dads and mothers lying dead on the road sides, grandparents. Their land will no longer be their land.

Here’s a bit more explanation.

——————

This isn’t a solution, terrorism is NOT A SOLUTION. Kashmir should get what Kashmir wants, if they want to go to pakistan, become independent or join India, anything THEY want, it’s a home they’ve been living in since 1947. It’s about time we let Kashmir speak, and because they’re bleeding right now, we need to speak for their voice.

This needs attention so please spread some, it’s the least we all can do.

I don’t think I’ve seen an answer to the question of how close or far apart the things happening today (”send her back”, detention centers etc) are to the nazis quite as good or thorough as this answer on quora

none of yall know what propaganda actually is, do you?

The way that exclusionists treat ace and aro people often reminds me of how the average person would treat me when I started being open as non-binary. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times, we are not enemies. Our experiences do not oppose each other, they are intertwined. If you’re ace, if you’re aromantic, if you’re any variation thereupon; your home is here. You belong here, too. You are beautiful, and powerful; and you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. You are a valued part of this community.

goyisch historians: jews did not put up any fight in WWII :) they just complacently marched off to camps 

90% of yiddish folk music from WWII: i can and will kill hitler with my own two fists

Punny Signs.

here’s to lesbians

here’s to gays

here’s to bisexual people

here’s to pansexual people

here’s to trans people

here’s to non binary people

here’s to asexual people

here’s to lgbt+ people that are in the closet

here’s to lgbt+ people that are afraid to come out to their homophobic family and friends

here’s to lgbt+ people that are out of the closet

here’s to lgbt+ people that are still not sure what is their sexuality or what is their gender

there’s nothing wrong about you! you are all loved! you are all important! you are all beautiful! you all matter!

🏳️‍🌈HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!🏳️‍🌈

This single image could not be more inaccurate about about Gen Z slang even if the selection process was getting a series of randomly chosen monkeys to tap on keyboards to generate phrases.

Yes. Yes. Hello. Linguistics grad student here. Big fan of historical and socio- phonetics. Let's look at a few concrete examples.

"It is a widely held belief that colonial or Extraterritorial (ET) dialects are inherently conservative. Being out of touch with the trendier developments of their Mainland sources, they develop more slowly, and are likely to show distinctly archaic features. This property has come to be known as 'colonial lag'. The notion is alive and well in English folk-linguistics: the 'pure Elizabethan English' periodically supposed to be spoken in the fastnesses of Appalachia is one of its loonier and better-known manifestations. Even sober scholars are prone to hold similar ideas; though colonial lag as a global property of ET dialects has now been discredited in a fine study by Manfred Görlach (Lass, 1990)." Some examples from this article of cases in which neither American nor England English are the most traditional: Modern Scots, despite being, you know, in Britain, has a number of conservative forms such as the velar fricative (like the <ch> in "loch", or German "Bach", found in Old English pronunciation of words like "night") that are lost in most other Englishes. While most Englishes merged the vowels of words like "earn" and "urn", Southern Hiberno-English (Ireland, though not all varieties) has kept these separate (with roughly the vowels of "bet" and "but" respectively).

Many dialects of North America keep the r where standard England English drops it, but here's some sounds Americans changed and the English preserved (from Schneider et al., 2004): pin/pen merger: the "eh" vowel becomes more like "ih" when before nasals (n, m, ng), so where in the conservative form "pen" and "pet" have the same vowel, in the innovative form found in the speech of many Americans (MOST MARKEDLY IN THE SUPPOSEDLY TRADITIONAL SPEECH OF THE SOUTH), the vowel in "pen" merges with the vowel in "pin". Betty bought a bit of bitter butter: in RP English, every /t/ in this phrase is pronounced as a classic t sound, but becomes a light d sound in North American speakers. (Compare "bitter" and "bidder" in an American accent and a posh English accent.)

This is all just English, but I'm sure New World French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and other post-colonial European languages work similarly. Icelandic is another interesting example: often referenced because of its geographic isolation from other Scandinavian languages, it kept certain Old Norse verb endings, but lost features like vowel length (Lass, 1990).

So what did English of Shakespeare's time sound like? There were many dialects of English back then and the language was in flux, so there's no single answer, but in general, it was definitely not identical to any current living dialect of English. If you can imagine a slightly illiterate Canadian pirate, you're in the ballpark. (For examples and explanation from scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s )

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood linguist

The sources: Lass, R. (1990). Early Mainland Residues in Southern Hiberno-English. Irish University Review, 20(1), 137-148. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484343 Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. (2004). A handbook of varieties of english: A multimedia reference tool two volumes plus CD-ROM. De Gruyter Mouton Courses I've taken, including sociolinguistics, history of English, and historical linguistics.

In short: Statements like 'Americans kept the original British accent' or 'Southern drawl is slowed-down British' are drastic and misleading oversimplifications. Dialects that are conservative in some senses are innovative in others. Because languages - ALL languages - change over time. Also, Shakespeare would sound strange to any modern ear.

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents

I feel like I've reblogged this before, but I'll REBLOG IT AGAIN

Please reblog if you think that “they/them/theirs” is a valid set of pronouns.

This whole thing is gold but I lost it at the Southeast food slide.

I made this powerpoint for this week’s lesson - Regional/Iconic American Foods. I went back through and replaced all the text with my student’s reactions.

Ah yes, I knew 7 Spanish.

When people assume Celtic = Irish I get a strong urge to stab myself in the eye.

No no no no no no. 

Sit down we must have a conversation.

There were 6 Celtic nations.

Éire, Cymru, Alba, Kernow, Breizh, and Ellan Vannin.

Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Mann respectively.

They’re all related, but not the same. They all have different languages descended from a similar group, Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish (Gàidhlig), Manx (Gaelg), Welsh (Cymraeg), Cornish (Kernowek), and Breton (Brezhoneg). Some are more widely spoken than others, for example Welsh is still commonly spoken in Wales, whereas hearing Cornish in Cornwall instead of English is rare.  All Celtic nations have varied mythology and culture. Irish Mythology is different from Breton Mythology, and even Welsh and Cornish mythology (arguably the most related Celtic Nations) have subtle differences to each other. I wish I could add more about the cultures at this time but my knowledge of Celtic nations is primarily made up of the history and languages of those regions, particularly Cornwall. 

You might have notice that England and English are missing from this, because the English descended from Anglo-Saxons, who were German invaders that came to the isles right around the Fall of the Roman empire in the 5th Century, erasing the Celtic influence in what is now England. 

So what this all really means is that Celtic is an umbrella term, and just because it’s Celtic doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Ireland at all. So don’t assume that just because someone’s talking about something Celtic that they’re talking about something Irish.

Because she was lonely.

So, today, a woman came into our shop. It was a woman I’ve only heard my parents refer to as ‘the Deaf Lady’. My mum had told her about me, explained that I was doing Sign Language, and come to find me on a day she knew I was working.

But today, she didn’t need her lawnmower repaired. In fact, she hadn’t touched it since it had been, and as far as she knew everything was fine.

She’d come in to sign to me.

She waved hello, and instantly explained that my mum had told her I would be in today. I asked her how she was, and the smile that she had on her face was the biggest I’ve ever seen.

And we spent about an hour in my family’s little shop, talking about everything. She told me about her life, about how she’d lived in the same house for 60 years.

She’d been born deaf, and been a Brownie, but never a Guide, because of the War… she’s now 86.

She had some amazing stories to tell, and twice she cried. One of those times was remembering her youth, and the other was when she was explaining to me that her husband had died around 20 years ago, and how he’d been the last person she’d known that could communicate with her.

She’s been alone for 20 years, living in a silent world, unable to communicate with anyone for the most part. The most interaction she has is when she writes things down for people, but she’s struggled to make any recent friends, and her family is long gone.

Now someone explain to me what’s wrong with every school teaching a certain amount of Sign Language, and for colleges to offer it more freely and frequently. People should be encouraged to learn BSL, because otherwise we’re cutting ourselves off from talking to around 8 million people or so (in the UK alone).

That’s millions of people who are no less important than you are, who have their own stories to tell, and the same need for communication as anyone else on this tiny little planet.

J. cried today because it was the first time for a long time that anyone has asked her for her name, or listened to her stories.

She’s also coming back into work tomorrow, to sign with me, and help me practice. But also - because we’re only human - for the company.