Erika2rsis

If you’re curious about the actual historical reasons:

The consensus is that は行ぎょう was originally pronounced with a P sound in Old Japanese. So, 花はな was originally pronounced pana. The P sound involves pressing one’s lips tightly together to abrupt the airflow, without the vocal folds vibrating.

But with time Japanese people increasingly started pronouncing the P sound with the lips slightly parted, such that the airflow was not blocked completely. This produces a sound kind of like blowing out a candle, it’s a bit F-like which is why it’s usually represented with that letter in romanizations. This sound change was often blocked by ん and little っ, which is why aside from onomatopoeia and foreign loan words, one only really finds ぱ行ぎょう after ん and little っ in words like 散歩さんぽ or 切腹せっぷく. In fact this is also why ぱ行ぎょう has that unique ring diacritic: the 半濁点はんだくてん was invented by Portuguese missionaries because Japanese people themselves did not distinguish between は/ぱ in writing, and this made it more difficult for the missionaries to learn Japanese. That’s the story I remember, at least.

Incidentally, changing a P sound to an F or otherwise F-like sound is a fairly common sound change across languages. That’s why it’s “father” in English but “padre” in Spanish, and that’s also why the word “philosophy” is spelled with P’s, too.

So our situation is now that we have a sound which is pronounced as F in most situations, and as P in a handful of places where the old pronunciation sort of fossilized. This is when we encounter another sound change, which is that often times between vowels, the F sound would become more V-like — which is to say that the vibration of the vocal folds from the immediately preceding and following vowels started to “bleed into” the F sound, that the vibration would stop too late or start too early relative to the movement of the lips, and this gave the F sound this more V like quality. And due to the acoustic similarity of this V-like pronunciation to the Japanese W sound, it ended up being conflated with the W sound and merging with it. But the old spelling stuck, which led to a situation prior to the postwar spelling reform, where は行ぎょう and わ行ぎょう could both be used to represent the W sound, depending entirely on the historical pronunciation of the word.

And indeed, the は particle, and for that matter the へ particle, were often reduced/slurred in such a way that they were basically treated like the ending of the previous word, and so these words were in fact often affected by this F-to-W sound change despite nominally being their own separate words which on their own wouldn’t be affected. And this happened so often that は and へ ended up being pronounced as wa and we always. A similar shift in pronunciation happened to a lot of English-language function words that we spell with TH — the magic word in linguistics is “sandhi”. So this is why “thy” and “thigh” are not pronounced the same, for instance.

And yeah, another sound change ended up merging the syllables wi, we, and wo with i, e, and o, so this is why へ is today pronounced as e rather than we. And then when the postwar spelling reform rolled in, it was decided that は/へ/を were particles used so frequently that they should just be left alone despite their historical spelling; otherwise, をゐゑ were respelled as おいえ, and every はひふへほ pronounced with a W sound was respelled as わいうえお, leaving the particle は as the absolute last and only remaining example of は行ぎょう being read with a W sound. This spelling reform is incidentally also why there are no Japanese verbs ending in ふ, and why the Japanese verbs ending in う have わ as their 未然形みぜんけい rather than あ: the Japanese verbs ending in う historically ended in ふ prior to the spelling reforms.

But yeah. Not too long after the F-to-W sound change, most of the remaining examples of the Japanese F sound went through a different sound change, as the lips became less and less rounded, which gradually changed the blowing-out-a-candle F-like sound to a more simple exhaling H-like sound. This sound change was blocked whenever the Japanese F sound was immediately followed by a U, because that vowel also involves rounded lips, so that sort of reinforced the rounded lips of the F sound. And that’s why はひふへほ is ha-hi-fu-he-ho instead of ha-hi-hu-he-ho. Badabing badaboom!

※ Note: the H sound before the vowel I ended up being palatalized, similarly to how we say the H in “huge”. So while Hepburn romanization spells ひ as hi, the pronunciation of the H is a little different from the H in はへほ.

All this being said, is this actually useful information? Honestly, probably not super useful for most people, no. It might come a bit in handy if you ever try learning Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Uchinaaguchi, though, because memorizing sound changes can help you identify, remember, or even to some extent predict the forms of the shared vocabulary between these languages. Otherwise equipping yourself with some knowledge of other historical Japanese sound changes or knowledge of phonetics can help make sense of some other oddities you will inevitably or potentially run into while learning Japanese, like why the volitional form of verbs might be described as sticking ～う to the end of a verb’s 未然形みぜんけい form even though it just plainly isn’t (spoiler: it was prior to the spelling reforms!); and why especially older people might say the particle が as “nga”, and why 東北弁とうほくべん is Like That; why words might change their last vowel or first consonant when used in compounds and why the 濁点だくてん turns those specific consonants into those specific other consonants; why i/u are so often silent; why pitch accent patterns include the particles after a word; why the word です sounds almost like the English word “this” at 1:20 in the song ｢アイドル｣ by YOASOBI; and all sorts of other fun things like that.

Not that one couldn’t learn through simple memorization and exposure, but I just think it’s fun to know, and I think that having actual scientific or historical explanations helps the new information stick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation_of_sign_languages

I’m assuming you meant 「私は」 and 「話せません」

There’s no real consensus on translating neopronouns, so different translation approaches are used depending on the needs of the translation and its target language. It’s a good idea in any case to provide translation notes or glosses for anything that might get lost in translation.

What I’d personally recommend is this:

When writing about a real person, ask yourself:

• Can I ask this person for translation recommendations?
• If yes, translate according to the recommendations.
• If no, does this person also go by pronouns which are easier to translate?
• If yes, use those pronouns instead of the neopronouns.
• If no, use the “default” gender-neutral terms of the target language.

When writing about a fictional character, ask yourself:

• Can I ask the original author for translation recommendations?
• If yes, translate according to the recommendations.
• If no, use whatever feels right.

Avoiding pronouns entirely, leaving the neopronoun untranslated, or matching the neopronoun with one from the target language, are all translation approaches that may be more appropriate in some situations, but which also present unique challenges for the translator.

※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991

Honestly, I absolutely already believe that Wikipedia can be highly biased in those ways. The problem is really just with the liberal shaitan who whispers kapitalist propaganda into my ears. I should know better.

I don’t live in the US, but I’ll try to ask around about it anyways. It doesn’t really come up in real-life conversations for me either.

“MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ” — “ALL IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD” — were the words uttered by Juda, leader of the Bikinians, to Commodore Wyatt when asked to exile his own people for the “good of mankind”. It is said that Juda’s words were intended to imply, “It would literally take divine intervention for me to agree to this.”. Nevertheless, the Bikinians would be taken from their homes, and as the ships sailed away, the Bikinians got to watch their many-generations’ houses and boats get burned down by the American soldiers. Many of the Bikinians wouldn’t eat after witnessing that, and they would live in poverty in their new homes.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Bikinian flag looks like a desecrated American flag.

This isn’t to say that Bikini was a more inhumane act than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hearing any recollection by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or seeing any of the artwork that they created to process their experiences, makes that much obvious. But you hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it has a place in the popular imagination, even if it is a heavily sanitized version that portrays the annihilation as “necessary”.

In contrast, when’s the last time you met someone who knew of “Bikini” as anything other than swimwear?

Honestly, I read the above article a few months ago, and I think it is a genuinely good article that I would recommend others read. It was written nine years after Tiananmen by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who was in Beijing during the protests; and the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication written by and for professional journalists. So the article is basically just trying to disspell the dumbing down and memeifying and misremembering and making-into-propaganda that happened with Tiananmen, and which honestly tends to happen with any major loss of life. No conspiracy theories, no denialism or claiming that “they had it coming”, just dispelling misconceptions. It’s good stuff.

I can’t speak for Davel’s other comment citing Prolewiki, though — I’m pretty skeptical to any website that tries to be Wikipedia but for X ideology.

In any case, this “butthurt report” feels pretty unfair, although I honestly did kinda roll my eyes at how Davel’s comment said “6 out of 7 ain’t bad”, that was kinda cringe… But basically, what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a “9/11 NEVER FORGET” post about the extent to which mismanagement and confusion contributed to the death toll of that, and likewise I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a Tiananmen Square post with more nuance about that event.

“Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?”

—“No.”

“Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”

—“…Ermh…”

“Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself.”

—“The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square.”

“I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”

—“Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted.”

“Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?”

—“Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest—”

“Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you.”

—“…Force may have been used when provoked by attacks.”

“May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they’d put up?”

—“I mean… you know… uhh…”

“Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers’ revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?”

—“OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN’T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER.”

Always a good time to share Geoff Lindsey’s “Oh Naur Explained”

Thank you for your contributions.

That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.

People find love through dating apps

That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn’t entirely their own fault that they haven’t made the progress that they’re expecting.

Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you’d eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can’t harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you’re making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.

This isn’t to say that these apps don’t have a place in the language learning process, but rather I’m saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you’re aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.

got sold to Microsoft while Newell still lives.

Surely you mean while he’s “Still Alive”, right?

Jan Misali’s 2022 Toki Pona language cover of the Symphogear “Beef Stroganoff” song is nearing its 40,000th view on YouTube. Whether this entertaining deconstruction of a beef Stroganoff recipe will reach this milestone of popularity this year or next remains to be seen. “Moku Sutolokanopu” is the most popular song about beef Stroganoff of the 2020s thus far, and the most popular song about beef Stroganoff in the Toki Pona language of all time.

That concludes this year’s big Stroganews. Thank you for your attention.

1. United Kingdom (or Liechtenstein, whose anthem uses the same melody)
2. United States of America
3. Dunno
4. People’s Republic of China
5. Canada
6. Dunno

Hopefully number 3 and 6 will come to me later!

STOP POSTING ABOUT POLITICS. I’M TIRED OF SEEING IT. MY FRIENDS ON LEMMY SEND ME MEMES. ON KBIN IT’S FUCKIN’ MEMES. I WAS ON AN INSTANCE, RIGHT, AND AAAAAAALLLL OF THE COMMUNITIES ARE JUST POLITICS STUFF. I- I SHOWED MY CHAMPION UNDERWEAR TO MY GIRLFRIEND, AND THE LOGO, I LOOKED AT IT, AND I SAID, “HEY BABE, WHEN THE COMMODITY IS FETISHIZED” [ding-ding-dings to the tune of The Internationale] I FUCKIN’ LOOKED AT A TRASH CAN, I SAID, “UNDER CAPITALISM, WASTE PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN THE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY THAT UNDERPINS THE ENTIRE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM”. I LOOK AT MY PENIS, I THINK OF THE OMNIPRESENT PHALLOCENTRISM IN OUR PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, AND I GO, “POLITICS? MORE LIKE POLY-DICKS!”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA