🌈Ranibow Sprimkle🌈

May i add this to your thesis

Not to mention

The ever-classic

Haha no it's n-

wait what the fuck

Gargoyles are specifically waterspouts. If it doesn't redirect rainwater, if it's just decorative, then it's called a grotesque, which doesn't mean disgusting, it means "cave like," same etymology as the word grotto.

It’s called copula deletion, or zero copula. Many languages and dialects, including Ancient Greek and Russian, delete the copula (the verb to be) when the context is obvious.

So an utterance like “you a bitch” in AAVE is not an example of a misused you, but an example of a sentence that deletes the copular verb (are), which is a perfectly valid thing to do in that dialect, just as deleting an /r/ after a vowel is a perfectly valid thing to do in an upper-class British dialect.

What’s more, it’s been shown that copula deletion occurs in AAVE exactly in those contexts where copula contraction occurs in so-called “Standard American English.” That is, the basic sentence “You are great” can become “You’re great” in SAE and “You great” in AAVE, but “I know who you are” cannot become “I know who you’re” in SAE, and according to reports, neither can you get “I know who you” in AAVE.

In other words, AAVE is a set of grammatical rules just as complex and systematic as SAE, and the widespread belief that it is not is nothing more than yet another manifestation of deeply internalized racism.

This is the most intellectual drag I’ve ever read.

Reblog every time

To add further:

Stuff like copula deletion occurs naturally over time. Consider the word “Imma,” as in “Imma get breakfast.”

I am going to get breakfast

I’m going to get breakfast

I’m gonna get breakfast

Imma get breakfast

“Imma” is only about 15 years old. I first heard it in 2008.

Here’s another example, which occurred over centuries:

God be with ye

God be w’ ye

God b’ w’ ye

God b wye

Godb wye

Godbye

And because the word originally formed in Old English, “god” was pronounced similarly to modern “good.” Hence: goodbye.

Forms of English that aren’t AAVE also do this, and if you were honest with yourself, you’d know that.

But instead—as the AAVE speakers would say—you be racist.

But instead—as the

AAVE speakers would

say—you be racist.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Guys gals non binary pals I tried so fuckin hard to find this and finally here it is

is it queer to use a different language than english?

Oui

Sí

Ja.

Da.

I think part of why I'm so skeeved out by the way people on here treat various words as inherently bad or inherently good is that I paid close attention when everyone was being like here's how to phrase your arguments to appeal to liberals here's how to phrase them to appeal to conservatives and like ultimately I gave up on the idea of trying to change conservatives' minds with rhetoric but along the way I became painfully aware of how easy it is to sell leftist progressive people on deeply reactionary ideas provided you phrase it in vocabulary they consider trustworthy

my hot take is that this is treated as a strength of liberalism and it is not. It is a glaring weakness that reactionaries exploit at every turn. You have to have at least some moral principles that nobody can budge by phrasing shit correctly, anything else is inviting psyops into your brain

Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: 22 full volumes micrographically reproduced and condensed into three volumes.

On this day (1 February) in 1884, the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, was published.

In 2 minutes flat lmao

To hopefully give people hope about this. The general museum world is absolutely moving to equitable collaboration to give everyone a voice at the table when it comes to artifacts on display (NAGPRA), and how those stories are told. As more and more younger gen x-ers and millennials are moving up in the various museum hierarchies and gen zs are entering the field, the industry itself is being poked, prodded, and cajoled into looking at, literally, everything about its admin, curatorial, educational, interpretive, hiring, collaborative, and maintenance practices and how they can be more equitable. Every conference ive seen advertised (not quite the right word, but im tired and still brain ded from a conference i just got back from) has had this as either the main theme, or folded into the theme of change as it relates to everything going on in the last few years. And it’s also, thankfully, being gradually moved away from bowing to rich donors and being run by rich, white dudes who cater to other rich, white dudes.

This absolutely does not excuse past practices, but we’re working on giving everyone a voice. Many people are working on building relationships with local Tribes. Those conversations take time. And more then time, they take trust. As an industry, we’re working on it. We want to be better, but it’s not going to be a fast change if we want to make a lasting change.

this actually reminds me of a tv program i watched about how people faced historical finds in a very narrow minded way. like, there’s a famous historical find that archeologist adamantly decided it’s for a mysterious ritualistic act and only do research just from that angle. meanwhile, artistic community know exactly what it was: a piece of art people have in certain areas in xxx century. but despite them showing the data, examples, etc, the archeological team won’t accept it, coz it doesn’t adhere to what they believed all this time. they also refused to share this new possibility, so most people still believed that item is for ritualistic purposes.

so what i want to say is, well, some people will still refuses to, let’s say, put the correct description to things they already said “this is nonsense” after getting the correct information. i believed many other people won’t be that petty just to make the seems incompetent (i myself will be thrilled to share new information to things i said i don’t know about before), but sadly, some kind of people thought their image is more important than correcting themselves.

MO 1.05

I LOVE COMPLEX DATED ADVERBS. Wherein. Heretofore. Thereon. Hereunto. Whereof. Hitherward. Hereinafter. How can you look at these words and not lose your mind. They're insane. I think I'm in love.

— Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy (b. 2 June 1840)

hope this guy gets to have a lot of sex with the people of his choice.

Impressive

Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: 22 full volumes micrographically reproduced and condensed into three volumes.

On this day (1 February) in 1884, the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, was published.

It’s weird to think this comic predates the rise of Internet spam, though otherwise it reads like it could’ve been drawn yesterday.

I've been thinking about the phrase "verbing weirds language" for nearly 30 years

Folks, friends, y’all…. esk*mo is a slur. I understand a lot of people don’t know that, I don’t want to be a dick about it, but I’ve been seeing it in fics. Wanna write “esk*mo kisses”? Just say “nuzzled noses” or something.

I’m not here to call anybody out, it’s been in multiple fics, I’m not vague posting. This is just a psa. 👍🏻

If you could help me spread awareness about this by reblogging, I’d really appreciate it.

I’ve had this post on insta saved for sometime ❤️

[Text Description: “Hey! Reminder: Eskimo is a slur. It means ‘snow eaters’ in Cree and is a slur against Inuit . Also don’t use ‘Eskimo kisses’. It’s called Kunik. It is a greeting mostly used for family… Kunik was how I’d greet my mom and grandmother as a small child.” /TD]

Rebloging for the awareness and especially for the alternative words

And so people who are just learning this now know the proper usage: “Inuit” is plural. The singular is “Inuk”, as in “he is an Inuk”

There are a lot of other Peoples referred to by that term in Alaska as well: the Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Northern Athabaskan. One slur to rule them all I guess.

(When you do your research just make sure you have the right region.)

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

they shouldn’t be surprised