Fake Charity Nerd Girl

I kinda want my new tumblr aesthetic to be “obscure rationalist woo” but every time I try this I get nice people responding to my posts with “what does this mean? can you give an example?” and I feel bad. how do people deal with this

that just means you aren’t being obscure enough

true. once I achieve enlightenment I will delete my tumblr and make a new one where I blog in reconstructed proto-languages and have four followers

mélōys púHlōys me h₃néyds gʰí sokʷóys kʷetwŕ̥dḱomth₁oḱtōw mébʰi h₁sénti  ḱunéh₁ h₃yébʰoyth₂e téḱnomkʷe ḱuh₁yéh₁s

sokʷóys kʷetwŕ̥dḱomth₁oḱtōw? meĝos

I kinda want my new tumblr aesthetic to be “obscure rationalist woo” but every time I try this I get nice people responding to my posts with “what does this mean? can you give an example?” and I feel bad. how do people deal with this

that just means you aren’t being obscure enough

true. once I achieve enlightenment I will delete my tumblr and make a new one where I blog in reconstructed proto-languages and have four followers

a while ago I was having a conversation with my sister in which I was like “you know that thing nerds do when they talk? how they release the t’s at the end of words?” and she was like “… no”

so I feel vindicated to learn that this is a known fact in the literature (and in addition to it being a nerd thing it is also a Jewish thing apparently)

(also whenever I spend too much time around rationalists/EAs I start doing the /t/ release thing too)

Wait, so what exactly does “release” mean here? I hang around with enough nerds/am nerdy enough myself that I suspect I’d know this thing if I heard it, but I’m drawing a blank. Anyone have an example of a word where the t is often “released” (or better yet, a link to a video where someone does it)?

“Plato” has a “release” in most everybody’s speech.

In most American dialects, the letter “t” between vowels is pronounced very differently from the letter “t” at the beginning of a word. Between vowels, “t” merges with “d” into an identical-sounding consonant that’s called an alveolar flap. So “writing” and “riding” are pronounced almost the same (the consonants actually are the same but the preceding vowels may be slightly different in length; this is more advanced stuff). Often people don’t consciously notice that they pronounce “writing” and “riding” the same way, but if they listen carefully to themselves they’re forced to admit that.

Fun fact: the word “Plato” is apparently unique in resisting this evolution. It is not pronounced like “play-dough”. 

So if you’re like most speakers of North American dialects, you pronounce “writing” and “riding” virtually the same, but “Plato” and “play-dough” differently; you might say your /t/ has a “release” in “Plato”. Now suppose that you consciously start pronouncing everyday words like “writing” the same way as “Plato”. That would be an example of the affectation discussed in the article linked by the OP. It may or may not sound “British” to you.

The OP actually talks about “the end of words”, which may be a related-but-different thing to what the article they link talks about. At the end of a word, /t/ is never an alveolar flap to begin with, but the usual explosion of air that follows it may be lessened or omitted in many contexts. I’m guessing the OP refers to an affectation where /t/ is especially carefully articulated at the end of a word, and that’s the “hyperarticulation” the linked article talks about.

Thanks for the explanation! After we talked about that paper in class I was googling to find more about /t/ release but most of what I could find was sociolinguistics papers that did not really explain the phonetics stuff?

So yeah, I guess what I was referring to was nerds aspirating /t/ at the end of words, though I think I also hear nerds releasing /t/ in the middle of words–both give the person’s speech the same hyperarticulation vibe.

(Weirdly, I’m pretty sure I do actually pronounce “Plato” the same as “play-dough”?)

get people to stop using emoji and start using chinese characters imo

囧

‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’

Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.

‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’

Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.

Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:

Beekeeper: *keeps bees*
Bees: *is keep*

or

Me: *holds puppy*
Puppy: *is hold*

I just love how this all develops organically with no deciding body, and how we all understand and adapt to it.

THIS IS SO COOL

I love all of these

although oddly I associate all of them with Tumblr/the internet/the last couple of years except the first? I’ve been using “is that a thing” for at least five years: it was in common use at my high school back before any of us spent much time on the internet

actually I have a great linguistics memory associated with it

someone made some reference to Jennifer Lawrence doing something in 2008 and I responded “did Jennifer Lawrence even exist then?” intending that in a sort of figurative way to mean something like “was she famous” or “did the phenomenon of Jennifer Lawrence exist,” since obviously she had been born at that point

and my 10-year-old sister looked at me in puzzlement and corrected, “you mean she existed, she just wasn’t a thing.”

A conlang where which pronoun to use is determine not only by gender but by the first letter of someone’s name.

Actually this is a great idea minus the gender. Gendered pronouns are problematic but useful for disambiguation: compare

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? He said he’d had a crush on her for a long time” to

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? They said they’d had a crush on them for a long time” which is really ambiguous to the point where you just can’t use any pronouns and end up with

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? Dan said Dan had had a crush on Elizabeth for a long time” which is unwieldy.

But with this system you can say stuff like

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? D said D’d had a crush on E for a long time” which is concise, clear, and politics-free!

That requires that the persons’ names be known.  It also seems to be doing the exact opposite of the thing cryptographers do to aid in keeping track of multiple-agent interactions. Of course, that technique might not be necessary in a culture with name-based pronouns.

I contend, however, that gendered pronouns are a very good choice. They divide humans into groups of roughly equal size, so the variance in the amount of information given by a pronoun is small. Which pronoun applies can almost always be determined by seeing the person or hearing their voice. No interaction or detailed knowledge is necessary. And, gender can be useful information outside of the context of remembering which person is being discussed.  First letters of names, not so much.

Yeah this is a good point. I do still like the idea of having 26 categories instead of 2, though.

I actually wonder if this system would lead to more people giving their kids names that start with Q, U, X so they would be more distinguishable.

A conlang where which pronoun to use is determine not only by gender but by the first letter of someone’s name.

Actually this is a great idea minus the gender. Gendered pronouns are problematic but useful for disambiguation: compare

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? He said he’d had a crush on her for a long time” to

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? They said they’d had a crush on them for a long time” which is really ambiguous to the point where you just can’t use any pronouns and end up with

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? Dan said Dan had had a crush on Elizabeth for a long time” which is unwieldy.

But with this system you can say stuff like

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? D said D’d had a crush on E for a long time” which is concise, clear, and politics-free!

Hey everyone! I’m going to tell y’all something that totally blew my mind the other day. So we’re doing borrowing in my historical linguistics class, and here’s one of the examples my professor gave. So background info: English was conquered by the Normans at one point (not sure of the actual year), which is why our structure and sound systems are Germanic (English is a Germanic language) but have so many French and Romance loan words in our vocabulary. So the word gentil, French for nice, kind, etc. was borrowed into English four different times:

genteel
Gentile
jaunty
gentle

That’s not even the cool part. The cool part is we can actually tell the relative order in which the borrowing happened. So the general principle of linguistic borrowing is that when you’re looking at borrowed words, the longer they’ve been in the language, the more they’ll look and sound like words native to the language they were borrowed into, and vice-versa, the later they were borrowed, the less time they’ve been in the language, the more they look like the language they were borrowed from.

So take the modern French pronunciation of ‘gentil’, it’s something like /ʒã’ti/, with stress on the second syllable, and no pronounced /l/ at the end. But, we can tell by the spelling that there was once a pronounced /l/ at the end, which was lost. Well, out of all four words above, which of them doesn’t pronounce the /l/ at the end of the word? That’s right, jaunty is the latest borrowing of the word.

#4 jaunty (was imported into English around 1600)

Next we look at the vowels. One of the most major sound changes in the English language was the great vowel shift, which happened around the 16th or 17th century. I won’t explain all the changes here, that’s what Google is for, but it’s basically the reason English ‘five’ is pronounced /faiv/ and not /fiv/. The main difference between ‘genteel’ and ‘Gentile’ is the second vowel. We can tell that ‘Gentile’ was in the English language before the vowel shift, because the /i/ in it was shifted, making it older than the next oldest word, ‘genteel’. Notice that apart from ‘jaunty’, ‘genteel’ sounds the most like the modern French pronunciation.

#3 genteel (around 1600)

#4 Gentile (around 1400)

And finally, I don’t quite remember all the justifications my professor gave for knowing ‘gentle’ was number 1, but notice that the /l/ at the end is syllabic, and very strongly pronounced. Combine this with the fact that the first vowel is very different from the modern French pronunciation, and you can tell that ‘gentle’ is not only pronounced like very old French, but also that it is super “nativized” into the English language.

#1 gentle (imported as early as 1200)

This is why I think diachronic sound change and historical linguistics are so cool, if you learn the types of changes, you can use individual words like little time machines! 

Ahh, loanword stratification. Gotta love it.(I’m tempted to investigate how large a similar set I could dig up for Finnish… etymological loan doublets are easy enough — e.g. juhla “fest” ~ joulu “Xmas”, vuoro “turn” ~ vuokra “rent” — but a quadruplet might not be.)