Erika3sis

joined 1 year ago
[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago

The Circassian genocide is the example that comes to my mind first. In my experience, most people, at least in Western countries, when they hear "Circassian", they will immediately think I'm actually talking about Cardassians, a race of fictional aliens from Star Trek (or they'll at least remark on how similar these words sound).

I also think the Milan Congress is an event more people should know about. This was a congress on Deaf education in 1880 that declared a ban on sign languages in schools, causing trauma and poverty and general harm to Deaf people for nearly a century until around the time of Stokoe's research on ASL.

Really, the amount of history that people should know is abundant, but a lot of it is also very clearly more important to know if you live in a certain area, right?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So you're certain that revolution is impossible, but you're also certain that if there is a "strong middle class" in the future, that you would actually be a part of it?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, it seemed like you were saying that if given a choice between more racism and more climate crisis, that you would choose more racism because of how "climate crisis is worse". Don't you think that's at all a weird or uncomfortable thing to say, given how there's a frightening number of people nowadays who genuinely are trying to present "more racism or more climate change" as an actual choice that people will have to make?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

"I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at climate crisis!"

"You can excuse racism?"

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I want to say Kin-Dza-Dza. It's a very silly and memorable work of Soviet science fiction.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

I should clarify that I am not a parent nor a child psychologist nor anything else to that effect, I am only speaking from my own experience of being parented—

I remember being around that age and I had a similar problem of just watching absolute political slop on YouTube. My access to content was never restricted nor closely monitored, but when my mom caught me watching some reactionary bozo on occasion, she would just call it what it was — and then all of a sudden I found myself a lot less interested in that type of content. When she or others would point out the problems with what I was watching or the messages I got from the content, that showed me the "smoke and mirrors" of it. And insofar as I engaged in that content out of a desire to appear precocious... Well, realizing that I was manifesting the exact phenomenon that C.S. Lewis described in that famous quote of his about the "fear of childishness", and that my attempt to convince myself that I was more grown-up than I really was was collapsing in front of me, I just felt ashamed — but very specifically not humiliated.

So I think the best thing you can do is to understand what role these streamers really play for the child. Because it's probably not all wanting to be popular, it's probably not all wanting to appear precocious, and it's probably not all wanting to build an identity; just as it's probably not all noticing the ways in which they're genuinely getting screwed over, and acting on genuine frustrations, genuinely trying to understand why this is and what to do about it even with the limitations of their own lived experience; nor is it probably all learning about the world's issues and wanting to do their best to be a good person even about things that don't very obviously affect them personally.

Rather the child's enjoyment is in all likelihood probably some sort of blend of these or perhaps other things. If you can determine the composition of the blend, you will know where to strike to most effectively reveal the "smoke and mirrors", and make the child feel that sort of productive shame that causes actual self-reflection. You should aim to be like the elderly Hungarian-born immigrant saying "And that makes a difference, doesn't it?", if you're familiar with that old propaganda film: shame is a negative emotion that makes one want to avoid the cause of the feeling, and it should be your aim to make the child identify the cause of the shame to be the shameful thing rather than the one shaming.

I trust that you're on good terms with your child and only have good intentions, so I think that you will succeed. And of course I should reiterate that my own perspective is limited, and what worked for myself might not work for everyone.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is going to sound really tedious, but what I'm trying to get at is this:

To justify that "no more or less than the author's lifetime" is the perfect length of time for copyright to last, you must at the same time justify that "more or less than the author's lifetime" is not the perfect length of time for copyright to last.

The time limitations of "0 seconds" and "until the heat death of the universe" are more and less than the author's lifetime, which means that you must justify why these are not the perfect length of time for copyright, just the same as any finite time limitation.

In other words, in order to justify that the author's lifetime is the perfect length of time for copyright to last, you must first justify both that copyright exists and that it expires. Hence, "What do you think the purpose of copyright is?"

It's from the answer to that question that you come up with criteria to judge time limitations, and it is from those criteria that you decide on an ideal time limitation. On the other hand, without an answer to that question, your beliefs have no actual basis beyond gut feeling.

Likewise, to criticize someone's understanding of the purpose or nature of copyright, is criticizing the criteria used for finding an ideal time limitation, is criticizing the favored time limitation itself. My first reply was then based on an assumption of what I figured you thought the purpose of copyright was.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What do you think the purpose of copyright is?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Frankly, if you're a small creator, copyright already doesn't really exist for you in any meaningful sense: because copyright is enforced through the courts, you only really have rights over your work to the extent you can actually pay the court costs of continually defending your rights again and again and again — and if you have that kind of money to spare you aren't exactly a starving artist.

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I support complete abolition of intellectual property as a whole.

Say you want to write closed captions for a movie, or even film a sign language interpretation of it, such that d/Deaf people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — even if you don't post the movie itself, you're still creating a derivative work and hence violating copyright.

Or say you want to record an audio description such that blind people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — again, even if you release only the AD track, this is still a derivative work and hence violates copyright. This obviously also goes for audiobooks.

Or say you even want to make a full-on dub of a movie into an endangered language, to try to break the reliance of its dwindling speakers on dominant-language content — in this case, unless you've secured a deal with the rightsholders such that you have access to the original SFX and music tracks, your only choices are VO dubbing like is common in the Former Soviet Union, or painstakingly redoing all the sound effects and music, before you can add the dialog. In any case, without a license, you're still violating copyright even if you only release the dub track.

Now obviously the fact that these things violate IPR doesn't stop people from making these things anyways, but IPR does still end up greatly limiting volunteer work in scope and visibility, and creates an antagonism between the rightsholders and those volunteering to make the content more accessible. So intellectual property in practice then ends up being among other things yet another mechanism through which the sighted oppress the blind, the hearing oppress the d/Deaf, the settlers oppress the Natives, et cetera. There is no universe in which accessible media and intellectual property coexist: as long as there is intellectual property there is a profit motive, and profit motives will never prioritize accessibility.

And this is not to get into a greater discussion of how private property in general oppresses the working class, although I should disclose that I support the abolition of all private property and not only intellectual property by itself.

 

In most languages it's easy to tell where one word ends and another begins in writing, assuming that one has spacing or interpuncts or perhaps one uses some sort of logography à la Chinese or mixed script à la Japanese. But what about in speech? People will generally not make any sort of clear stop from one word to the next, in fact people will often use reduced pronunciations when they speak.

And this is why it's important to think about the methods that speakers of a language can use to separate words from each other. The process of identifying word boundaries in speech is called speech segmentation, and this process utilizes things like phonotactics and allophony, prefixes and suffixes, syntax, set or stock phrases, common contractions and reduced forms, intonation and pauses, stress and pitch accent, and simply trying to figure out the most logical interpretation of what one has just heard from the knowledge that one already has. Surely among other methods, with multiple methods working simultaneously as redundancies.

So the way I like to test this is just by writing out a sentence, and then marking down what the telltale signs are of where one word ends and another begins. I have attached a diagram of this, and I'd find it interesting to see similar charts of your own languages, or otherwise hear about the methods that your languages use.

When I say "by sound" I am assuming that you're all developing spoken languages as opposed to signed languages, but if there is anyone here who is developing a signed language, I would love to hear more about how segmentation works in such a language.

 

The types of words that might get one's speech stereotyped as "lazy" or "disfluent" or "uneducated" or whatever else if used excessively or in too formal a setting, but which in truth are vital for fluency and listening comprehension.

I dunno, this is just an impression because I don't interact much with the broader conlang community, but I feel like these words often end up being sort of overlooked by many conlangers. I certainly overlooked them for a long time myself. But to me these words make a language feel that much more alive, you know, that different people talk in different ways with different registers.

Do any of you have any interesting thoughts or experiences with these types of words? How are they handled in your own conlangs?

[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 6 points 8 months ago

I can see why. Although the stars occupy a larger portion of the sky, they are also further away than the moon. So either version of the phrase makes sense in its own way.

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