Erika2rsis

Curse English idioms, I literally thought they were rebranding to Mud.

As far as I understand, lemmy.world is banning/defederating piracy communities. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Some chud I used to see regularly: "Blackrock is funding WOKE in the movies in order to change pubic opinion!!!"

Meanwhile, actual conservative billionaires:

Hogwarts Legacy? Wasn't that the game with, like, the plot that was suspiciously similar to blood libel, especially considering how similar goblins are to certain stereotypes and caricatures to begin with? The game where early access players found a horn that looked suspiciously similar to a shofar being described as some sort of annoying goblin instrument? The game where, even setting Rowling aside, several of the staff behind it had some very gross political views? The one where they named the one transfem character "Sirona Ryan" and had her voiced by a cis woman with her voice pitched-down in post to sound more masculine?

I mean, I never played Hogwarts Legacy, so that could all be wrong, but that is nevertheless what I remember people talking about... People have a right to play games even if they have problematic content, sure, but I also have a right to hear "yeah I just had to play the Blood Libel Game because it's just so nostalgic" and think "wtf"

RDJ_pointing_at_self: What counts as politics is a political question in itself, with a subjective answer melded by the hegemon. Absolutely everything can be connected to politics in some way.

Actual quotes from Hexbears that I got when discussing Russia with them:

"Those reactionary shitstains [the Russian government] has little to be proud of."

"Russia is extremly Reactionary [...] thats why Russia has a Real Problem with "White Supremacy" , [and] no problems with hunting down LGBTQ+ [...]"

Now I don't exactly see anybody on Hexbear presently discussing this particular bit of news about crackdowns on LGBT+, but I'll go post about this news on Hexbear and see how the people there react. I have a feeling it's going to be consistent with my previous experiences discussing Russia with Hexbears, which is also going to be the reaction that I'd expect from an instance that skews heavily LGBT+.

If we want to be even more proper, they're Avars, Lezgians, Nogais, Tabasarans, and so forth. Dagestan is a very culturally and linguistically diverse region. Its name means "land of mountains", which is just about the only trait that all the peoples in the region share.

(also, Cauc-as-us, or Caucasia or even Kavkaz if you prefer. No relation to "caucus". Sorry if that's pedantic.)

Jewry in Dagestan has existed for many centuries as well, though post-USSR a majority of Juhuro — the Jews of Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus — have now immigrated to the United States and Israel. We can only assume specifically to escape the economic woes and growing ethno-religious strife that came with the last lowering of the red flag.

That's an insult to dollar stores

She neon my genesis till i evangelion my hand

I guess I was thinking that if Gwyneth Paltrow could found a company called Goop that anything goes these days.

Honestly, if Twitter suddenly cracking down on T&A ends up causing another X-odus to the fediverse, then it is mildly amusing that the "masto" in "Mastodon" is literally from the Ancient Greek word for "boobs".

"Oh, no, I just got this flag from my cousin, Chucky Arlaw."

I hope basically everyone goes on strike. The workers don't even need to have any grievances, I just think it would be cool.

got sold to Microsoft while Newell still lives.

Surely you mean while he's "Still Alive", right?

Ayy nice

I currently list my pronouns as she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ, with the idea being that people will have a range of options regarding which word to use: if they like, they can choose to just stick with one pronoun, probably she or it, and forget the rest; and if people do choose to refer to me using a neopronoun, then they can more or less use the spellings or pronunciations or inflections or agreements that work best for them. And this seems to be how most neopronoun users are: virtually all neopronoun users also go by an auxiliary pronoun (he, she, they, and/or it) for accessibility's sake, and virtually all neopronoun users are also very forgiving about how their neopronouns are used.

For me it goes a step further, since I'm good with being called pretty much any neopronoun, even though xe/thon/ꙮ are my favorites; and I'm even OK with being called he or they in a few specific contexts. I don't really bother explaining all that, though, since nobody wants to hear a treatise about autistic non-binary transfemininity in the middle of a pronoun circle, so that's why I usually just list my five favorite pronouns and call it a day.

So all in all, while we all have our linguistic preferences or sometimes complicated feelings regarding how we're referred to, the main thing that matters is that people just try to use our pronouns at all. So the problem with neopronouns, in my experience, is that most people end up either dismissing "made-up words" out of hand, or they get so hung up on using the neopronouns "correctly" that they end up just not using the neopronouns at all. So either way, it all comes back to people's discomfort with using non-prestigious, non-standard language, and this discomfort is sort of justified by the stereotype that people have about neopronoun users being 100% self-centered and unaccommodating.

I think part of the problem is that most neopronoun users don't really think or know much about the linguistics (especially the pragmatics) of neopronouns, and this causes neopronoun users to be worse advocates for neopronoun usage... But I also don't think that people need to have a scientific knowledge of which words they prefer to be called, in order to have their preferences respected.

Potential solutions:

• while saying "they", hold up one or two fingers depending on if the word is singular or plural (also possible in emoji: ☝️/✌️)
• mutter "singular" or "plural" under your breath before saying "they"
• replace plural they with "theys" or "thy'all", à la "yous" or "y'all"
• pronounce singular they as /θeɪ/ and plural they as /ðeɪ/

With Chinese the situation is well that in spoken language, the pronouns aren't gendered, but in written language, they are. This was as a European influence, I believe.

All of these are third-person pronouns read as "tā" in Standard Chinese:

• 他 - masculine, originally/occasionally gender-neutral human; human radical
• 她 - feminine; woman radical
• 牠 - animate non-human, Traditional usage; cow radical
• 它 - inanimate; animate non-human in Simplified usage; historically general
• 祂 - divine, primarily Abrahamic usage; spirit radical
• TA - gender-neutral, also used in other letter case forms
• X也 - gender-neutral, handwritten form has no Unicode support

Here's the thread I made on Hexbear.

https://hexbear.net/post/1232126

Four comments as of me writing this comment:

Putin really is a big fan of the Russian Empire. He's even doing his own pogroms that will inevitably lead to a brain drain.

Russia is so fucked. People who identified as not-religious has been constantly falling from since 1991 from 60% to 20%. Orthodox Christianity from 30% to 70%. Russian youth (16-29 yo) are 75% religious (62% orthodox) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/02/10/russians-return-to-religion-but-not-to-church/

Man, fuck Gorbachev for allowing the USSR to be dissolved by the west.

[an emoji titled "russia-cool", depicting a burning Russian flag]

So yeah, if you're looking for Hexbears criticizing Russia, then there you go.

You can't milk boys, silly, they don't even have nipples!

That's the thing: you can use basically whichever pronunciation or grammar you want. Since it's already non-standard language, prescribing how to use it is beyond pointless. But if you absolutely need prescriptions, then my own tendency is to use the paradigm ꙮ/ꙮm/ꙮr/ꙮrs/ꙮself with singular agreement, and the readings I use are seraph/seraphim/seraphir/seraphirs/seraphimself, sometimes indicated with ruby characters. But again, you're under no obligation to use even remotely the same inflections or readings — that's part of the fun.

As for the background:

The character is the Cyrillic multiocular O, which appeared exactly once in exactly one 15th century Old Church Slavonic manuscript to write the phrase "many-eyed seraphim". That is, ⟨ꙮ⟩ was originally a fanciful variant of the Cyrillic O, meant to look like a bunch of creepy eyes. After the letter was encoded into Unicode, it became a somewhat popular symbol online, often used for a sort of comedic horror effect, for instance by writing "ꙮwꙮ" instead of "OwO". This would've been at the peak of the whole "biblically accurate angel" craze.

It was from this horror-comedic usage of ⟨ꙮ⟩ that my closeted self first started replacing my deadname with ⟨ꙮ⟩ in certain contexts, under the pretense that I was "just being silly" and that "these people don't really need to know my real name, do they?". Later on, I saw that a few other people were using ⟨ꙮ⟩ as a neopronoun, so I decided to start experimenting with using that character as a neopronoun, too. I think that an essentially unpronounceable image of a bunch of eyes really captures the whole "wrong planet" vibe, and these sorts of Unicode/emoji neopronouns in general are a really creative use of language, since they're basically a form of mixed-script writing.

I'm saving this one, hell yeah, I love it. That chud was absolutely obsessed with Joe Rogan, acting like that guy was the new messiah, all while he went on and on about "the corrupting influence of media from America". It drove me up the wall...

Unrelated but I love your username

That's James Rolfe, in his role as the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Egdiretteb's law, obviously

liberalism, the ideology which is actually doing to most for LGBT rights.

Just so that you're aware: liberalism here refers to the belief in market economies and the right to private property. There is a bit more to liberalism, naturally, but that's the main point. So whenever you see Hexbears talk about "libs" or "liberals", rather than applying whatever American definition or preconception of the word "liberalism" that you may have, instead think, "someone who supports the free market and private property"... And indeed, the liberal parties in Russia are right-wing and deeply conservative: "liberal" non est "progressive". Decouple those terms in your mind. You can have liberal progressives and liberal conservatives alike if you're not using "liberal" as a synonym of "progressive", like Americans tend to do.

Furthermore, LGBT+ criticisms of capitalism have a history stretching back even before Stonewall. Harry Whyte's letter to Stalin in 1934, which criticizes the regress of gay rights in the USSR while also analyzing the position of gays in capitalism at the time, stands out. Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014) is another important figure in the history of LGBT+ communism. You might find Feinberg's Lavender and Red to be particularly interesting, as it lays out a history of the intersection of LGBT+ rights movements and leftism.

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don't know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It's by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I'm kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a "terk er jerbs" thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a "procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend" hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to "dub" shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There's also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven't had much success with this, personally.

Andrewism my beloved

"Oh those poor, poor ESLs, who are far too stupid to learn the intricacies of Our Tongue, surely we must dumb it down for their sake!"

Listen, as the child of an immigrant and a language learner in xyr own right, the problem with people being forced to learn a complex language is not that the language is complex but that people are forced to learn it. Making the world accessible for ESLs or non-Anglophones does not mean berating native speakers of English as "malicious" for developing their own language to suit their own needs.

But the real question is, can two?

I'm using Alexandrite and see no thumbnail.

Kind of funny how you say that in Dutch people are using hen, because hen has ended up being the Norwegian gender-neutral pronoun as well, but for completely different reasons. We imported hen from the Swedes I think in the early 2000s, but I only first heard about hen I think earlier this decade; the Swedes, in turn, imported hen from the Finns in the 1960s, although I think it was only in the 1990s when the use of hen in Swedish really started taking off.

The reason why hen became so successful in Norwegian is because "he" translates as han and "she" translates as hun, so a gender-neutral pronoun having the same consonants but a different vowel from the gendered pronouns is a no-brainer, right?

The Finnish pronoun hän, which refers to a singular human being regardless of gender, originated as an alteration of Proto-Finno-Ugric *sän, so you can see that hän is a close relative of the Northern Sámi pronoun son, which is used as a general third-person singular pronoun. And this relationship between hän and son is funny to me, because when I was a teenager, I proposed making Northern Sámi part of the mandatory school curriculum in Norway. The reason why I proposed this was, among other things, so that we could more easily import a gender-neutral pronoun from Northern Sámi — and end the whole gender-neutrality debate feeling a bit foolish about how we've lived our lives so unaware of our northern indigenous friends that we didn't even notice that they'd had all this stuff sorted out since forever!

So while my teenage plan didn't end up happening, Norwegians instead borrowed a close relative of the pronoun I proposed, from a close relative of that language. So I was this close to getting it right!

Some Norwegians instead prefer using singular de instead of hen, essentially as a loan translation of the English singular they. This is kind of funny to me, given the Norse history of they in English, and given the historical use of De as a second-person formal pronoun in Norwegian.

In any case, I like what you say about how "the pushback from assholes will be the same anyway". I think that with these sorts of things, there will always be a lot of awkward-sounding proposals at first, until the speech community ends up honing in on one of the proposals through simple evolution, when there is enough of a need for standardization for that sort of honing to happen. And once that honing happens, what might've initially sounded awkward to your ears starts to just sound normal, because that's just how the language is now.

I put a Kbin and Lemmy community in the sidebar of /r/vexillology shortly after the beginning of the API protest.

Of all the industries to profit from bored ape NFTs, I was not expecting white cane manufacturing to be one of them.

Honestly, it was very cathartic to write, so I appreciate your sympathy very much. Sometimes I just need to scream at the world, you know. So just reading my attestation is all the support you could give right now.

So I wish you the best as well. All animosity has dissipated. Take care of yourself and stay curious.

My country is the best!

I genuinely appreciate how you put scare quotes on "becomes" in "becomes political", because it's legitimately baffling how some people think that Rage Against the Machine "wasn't political" before. Like, they literally donated their profits to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and interviewed Subcomandante Marcos for one of their video releases! You can hardly get more political!

No, it's supposed to be read boustrophedon! /j

I'm getting flashbacks to the discourse around Lera Boroditsky's keys & bridges experiment

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