Cranberry Morpheme 🌻🍉Ա🌲🍀

Refusing to "trust the experts" is meant to be a brave, responsible position.

But (as Carl explains in the thread) there is too much knowledge in the world. You have to trust *somebody*, much of the time.

If you have no trust in experts, you end up trusting the idiots.

Legally Free Ge'ez Fonts collection to use and enjoy.

The first update in a year and a half adds 28 typefaces to the “Legally Free Geʾez Fonts” collection. In total, a gift of 198 typefaces from just over 30 designers, totally free for you to use and enjoy! #Ethiopic

github.com/geezorg/lega...

Preview of new additions:

This thread, and the Nature article, contain some of the scariest climate predictions I’ve seen. From the CNN write-up:

“Every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day”

US yields drop by 50%.

...angloid...

[...]

...French orthography...

[...]

[primed but misreading]
françoid [france-wad]

Party decoration saying THIS SKIBIDI RIZZLER IS 8 NO CAP with a tray of cupcakes saying BRUH I’M 8

Linguistics

What the fu**ing shit, nyt!?!?!?!
Just within 24 hours after five of al-jazeers journalists were killed, nyt published this.
Who wrote it?
An israeli writer.
The blood of the journalists is still fresh in the journalists’ graves.
Blood is on nyt hands.

Grandma/her brother in particular have trouble with liquids and have them in places like "localmotive", "velcore", "pickle de gallow" but they're not accepted by others who still have warsh.

the ʃ here is also pretty retracted, at least on family. Their wash is also /wɑɹʃ/ maybe /wɑɻʂ/. Read once that this was "old Oregonian". Also used to be pop country. Hasn't been for a while though.

whence

some pnw shibboleths idk i'm up there rn

Oregon /ˈoʊ.ɹɪ.ɡʌn/
Willamette /wɪˈlæ.mɪt/
Lebanon /ˈlɛ.bʌ.dʌn/
Yachats /ˈjɑ.hɑts/

And at worse it gets in the way of trying to make the world a better place because they forget we don't live in utopia already and try to correct away from equilibrium because they falsely believe we're on the other side of it, like small gov types and the laffer curve

There's no good evidence for the hypothesis, just hunches from people who are probably bored or trying to make nature out to be just for their own theodicy and not channeling those impulses productively.

They modelled stuff like that with the rat utopia experiments. That importantly haven't been replicated and might not per se translate to humanity if they did.

Is whether or not codal nasals are moraic a Spanish dialectal feature? I've noticed some people have "long" ms whereas others don't, but thought it was a musical/enunciation thing. But I noticed it's part of a stereotypical chicano accent...

In highschool I knew a girl named Kanada. She was quick to disclaim that she'd never even been to Canada. So I asked her if her parents were fans of Karnataka or something and she was surprised to learn a language was called Kannada. She wasn't really a fan of her parents' onomastic choices

a close up of a moth on a flower Alt: A hummingbird hawkmoth in slow motion video. It's a light brown with oddly triangular wings beating at incredible speeds. The body is rounded almost exactly like a bird's, not looking like a moth very much at all. It hovers near a dark blue compound flower, with a long black probiscis extended into the bell-shaped flower.

Don't believe your eyes. You're not looking at an actual hummingbird: this is a MOTH, Macroglossum stellatarum.

The resemblance is so uncanny that their common name is "hummingbird hawkmoth".

Like its avian counterpart, M. stellatarum can hover, emitting a humming sound, to feed on nectar.

german winkel implies an alternate reality where fishing rods are winklers or winchlers and the English are called the Winklish or Winchlish

Follow your heart as long as you live, do no more than is required, do not shorten the time of 'follow-the-heart', trimming its moment offends the ka. (Instruction of Ptahhotep) (ALL)

Some ideas that the weird outcomes of the IE Dʰ D T series were due to original ejectives. IMO, those series likely evolved as IE flaked off, maybe ejectives factored in the Balkan group (def later Armenian), unsure about the rest.

Seems circular to assume histling theories though

There's direct correspondence with semitic between earlier ejectives and later phar.s but was that transferred from like persian to aramaic to everything else.

There's the tʼ to tˁ thing with Semitic and Amazigh but like there's a lot of historical obscurity over the finer details, not clear to me if there were intermediate steps with amazigh.

I've heard an argument that what happened in certain Afroasiatic families with implosives is rather the chain shift ɗ < d < t < tʼ not straightforward ɗ < tʼ, which makes sense to me with how some areas have implosives as allophones of voiced cons

There's strong and weak types of ejectives, though individual languages don't distinguish them. Always thought ejectives more explosive than aspirates but I guess that's because I'm more used to <t!> and <tʰ> more than <tʼ> and <tʰʰ>. Does that play into much? maybe part of what motivates sʼ

I can imagine leaving creaky voice behind, which could spread around. CV I guess could play into tone or turn into something like pharyngealization

Longer VOT might lead to being interpreted as geminates but this might be less likely around aspirates?

full disclosure: conlang motivated question

what kinds of things happen to ejective obstruents besides "just" merging with their pulmonic counterparts?

Also "in itself"/"per se" means something! it's not just there for no reason, things can be contextual!

dear copilot: 'everyone' is a collective that acts together on a single action. 'each individual' is a plurality that takes a series of different actions. They are not synonyms.

Doing some copyediting and getting tripped up by a list like "... family, ethnic, gender, and neighborhood perspectives". The ethnic sounds awkward in the middle like that. It's an adjective, and I guess the others are either Ø Noun->Adj or Ns in a compound. Got me thinking.

I wonder if it's an A > B thing that languages with productive unmarked compounds will have Ø-derivation (or vice versa).

like if you can do Germanic style compounds freely, does that mean you can verb nouns freely too, or something?

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

1
To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...