I have been on tumblr for 9 years and NOW they’re telling me it’s illegal to be horny???
Jameela has been on fire this week. 🔥
honestly missionaries are evil. the idea of traveling the world to tell people Who Didnt Fucking Ask that their beliefs are wrong in the hopes that theyll adopt your beliefs seems sinister
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?”
“No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.”
“Then why,” asked the Inuit earnestly, “did you tell me?”
~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity? Swedish, Greek, Hungarian, and Czech have a wealth of language resources, created one human at a time over centuries. They’re the languages of entire nation-states, with national TV and radio recordings that can be used as the foundation for text-to-speech models. Their speakers have the kind of disposable income that makes media companies translate popular novels and subtitle foreign movies and TV shows. They’re found in countries that tech companies imagine their customers might be living in or might at least visit on holiday, meaning it’s worth localizing interfaces and adding them as translation options. They have regularized spelling systems and dictionaries that can be rolled into spellcheckers and predictive text models. They have highly literate speakers with internet access who can contribute to projects like Wikipedia. (Speakers who can even, in the case of Swedish, create a bot to automatically make basic Wikipedia articles for rivers, mountains, and other natural features.) Language resources don’t just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that’s by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.”
— Gretchen McCulloch, The widely-spoken languages we still can’t translate online. (My latest article as Wired’s Resident Linguist.)
Terrible maps
I’m waiting for a map that’s terrible, where are they?
Brazil is there, so i’m happy
Nothing will ruin your 20’s more than thinking you should have your life together already.
this.. is so hard… to keep in mind…
Essentials of Linguistics is an entirely free online open access textbook with accompanying videos for introductory linguistics classes by Dr Catherine Anderson at McMaster University.
This is the first edition and it has a pretty basic set of chapters which are geared primarily towards the Canadian learner. It also looks useful for people trying to self-teach linguistics because it’s freely available online and all the chapters are designed to work together, which is so often an issue when trying to cobble together various online resources.
Since it’s open access, hopefully it will continue expanding to provide intro chapters for more subfields and with more international options. Even if that ends up creating a book that’s too comprehensive to be used in full by any single intro course, it’s always great to have more options!
Birakiyorum okulu
When Stan Lee dies, all the Marvel movie characters should mention they have funerals to attend for their postman/doorman/friend/stripclub DJ and then be very confused when they all show up at the same one.
*deep inhale*
presented without commentary or apology
Why OP
slam that fucking unmute button
“I know I’ve heard this before. Is this from an anime or someth-OH FUCK!”
writing-apprentice
