The-antihero-of-the-story - 「ᴀɴᴛɪʜᴇʀø」

i'm sorry but language-wise we gotta start moving things along. English has been around for 15 centuries and still barely scrapes a couple hundred irregular verbs. for starters i propose the past form of "slice" should be "sloce"

Finally continuing on a book that i really really need to return to the uni library; and just skipped a chapter (they're independent essays) because it wasn't relevant/interesting to me; but this next chapter is coming through within the first paragraph:

"To know another's language and not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of yourself"

- attributed to Winston Brembeck

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit

You know we don’t actually have an accurate count of how many bilingual people there are in the US because our census asks people “do you speak a language other than English at home?” and not what some other countries might ask which is “can you comfortably have a conversation in a language other than your native language” or something similar.

When people say “20% of Americans are multilingual” they mean that 20% of Americans speak a language at home other than English.

This doesn’t account for people that speak English at home but also speak another language. I personally know multiple people who speak Spanish or another language even though they speak English at home. I know someone who speaks six languages conversationally and she’s not getting counted by these statistics because she speaks English at home.

We don’t actually know accurately how multilingual the US is. Like imagine if they just asked Dutch people if they speak a language other than Dutch at home. The Netherlands has a multilingualism rate of something like 95% but that number would probably go down substantially if you just asked if they speak Dutch at home or not.

The Sino-Arabica Project

Xiao’erjing—Writing Chinese with Arabic Letters: An Introduction

A writing system is not merely a means of recording sounds and ideas, but itself a carrier of religious and cultural values. In Europe, for

Xiao’erjing is, at its core, a phonetic writing system which represents the phonemes of Chinese using adapted Arabic letters. In its phonetic aspect, Xiao’erjing is thus akin to pinyin, the system commonly used to write Mandarin Chinese in Latin letters, though differing notably in that tones are not explicitly marked. This lack of tone markings may be cause for confusion, given the vast repertoire of homophones in Chinese. In a given semantic context, however, native users of this writing system rarely encounter ambiguity, just as an experienced reader of Arabic or Persian has little difficulty inferring the short vowels of a given word despite the absence of diacritics from most texts.

Sharing this article that I thought might interest both Arab and Chinese speakers following me

Looking up how many phonemes exist in different languages because I’m that guy and apparently Hawaiian only has 13 phonemes.

I don’t know what to say about that. That’s not a lot. I think it’s cool you can have a language with so few sounds.

†

I 100% agree with this statement. Although I have been blessed enough to have really good history teachers for most of my life (having it as a hobby is definitely so much better though)

Midnight Rain

Oh my god i want a phd too but idk what the fuck am i suppossed to do a phd in like do they give you topics to choose from once you enroll in the course or it becomes evident to you as you complete your studies and reach that level.

it depends on the program. some will have you closely associated with a faculty mentor's research, like a traditional hard sciences "lab," but even in that structure you typically have to develop your own project rather than having it assigned wholesale. many of the milestones along the way, like course papers and qualifying or comprehensive exams, are often intended to help you explore potential topics before you reach the formal proposal.

i will not lie, my dissertation was originally inspired by a joke my advisor made in my first year, and i gradually fleshed it out into a real area of research as i got more knowledgeable in the field. it turned out pretty damn good for something that lodged in my brain over a post-excavation beer.