The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.

at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”

Im really curious how people know about Esperanto. Since its a relatively recent language (from the 1880s), its obviously not going to be as widely spoken in the world as other languages (altho apparently it is the most widely spoken constructed language). I assume most people are introduced to it later in some way?

If u know what Esperanto is, feel free 2 reblog this and say how you learned about it in the tags.

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

living with ADHD is really like having to parent a toddler but that toddler is your brain. and the toddler doesn’t want to go to bed 😠 or pick up the mess 😠 or brush their teeth 😠 and you have to persuade and TRICK your toddler brain into doing simple everyday easy tasks.

i have to make everything SO easy for myself and it’s so hard and i’m so exhausted and OH the toddler is throwing a tantrum again because they’re overstimulated brb

another thought about this analogy maybe is that like…ADHD is not an excuse? I am the parent of this toddler and it’s my responsibility to manage them and care for them. and i can’t neglect my job or my kid or whatever. at the end of the day i have to do it. but it is hard being a single mom!! and maybe i could use a little extra patience is all

@allthingsmustgeorge ok yeah if we keep this analogy going…who can we ask to help us and be our babysitter for a bit (someone who helps relieve some of the burden so that you can do your responsibilities) ?

部首 bu4 shou3 radicals

i received a request to do a post about 部首 radicals a while back and i figured i would just do it now. they wanted to know if they should study radicals or not. this probably isn’t going to be the post they were hoping for, but i think what i’ll discuss is still important

first of all: you do not need to memorize all of the radicals, especially if you are a beginner. there’s over 200 of them and a fair number of these radicals are never or rarely used as individual characters. i’d honestly start by just learning words and familiarizing yourself with radicals as you go along. if you really want to learn them, here’s a link to a list of the 100 most common radicals (just scroll down to the end of the article for the link)

that’s honestly my whole answer to the original question asked, so let’s move on to what i really wanted to discuss: radicals vs. character components

i’ve seen a lot of people (including myself) say that every component that constitutes a character is a radical or that radicals are the building blocks of characters. this is not true. characters only have one radical. everything else is a 部件 character component that can be used to expressed sound or meaning. just because a character component can be considered a radical does not mean it is a radical in every character in which it appears. or, to quote john renfroe from outlier-linguistics:

the radical is simply the component under which a character is listed in a chinese dictionary. it is important to point out that 部首 simply means “section header”

so let’s take a quick look at the character 验: in this character, 马 is the radical, but just because it is the radical in this character does not mean it will be the radical in every character in which it appears. to prove this point, let’s look at 妈. it contains 马, but the radical under which it is sorted is 女. as renfroe points out in his blog post, radicals are not an innate part of a character; they’re just something chosen by people so they can be sorted in a dictionary. 

in fact, the first instance of 部首 being used to sort characters in a dictionary was in the 2nd century CE in the 说文解字. the dictionary analyzes 小篆 small seal script characters. the first traces of chinese characters appeared over 1,000 years before this dictionary was made

so how do you figure out which component is the radical? it honestly takes a bit of practice using dictionaries. the more familiar you become with characters the easier it will be to locate the radical. the best practice is to expose yourself to as many different characters as possible so that you can see where different radicals are placed in different characters

so, to sum it all up: radicals simply pertain to the component used to look up a character in a dictionary. if you want to talk about etymology or how characters work, that’s gonna be a conversation about sound and meaning components (or if we’re being ~fancy~ semantic indicators and phonetic components)

are radicals the building blocks of characters? no, sound and meaning components are. it’s honestly just a difference in terminology, but i think it’s a pretty important distinction to make

so let’s look at three different dictionaries (two physical, one digital) to see how this works just for fun (under a read more bc it has pictures and is a little long)

Keep reading

En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.

Had to unfollow someone for suggesting Urdu and Hindi are two different languages.

@jabalinya replying on my langblr!  I think they tend to be referred as such in the same way languages like Norwegian / Swedish / Danish are referred to as languages, even though a speaker of each can understand the others without much of a problem (however much people joke about Danish)- it's politically / socially / historically motivated. A language is a dialect with an army, etc etc!

Re Hindi and Urdu - as far as I know they are definitely mutually intelligible - but whether something is a 'dialect' or a 'language' is often down to social considerations i.e. at higher levels using vocab from different sources; religious, historical, political considerations etc. And on the opposite side of the spectrum that’s why some Chinese ‘languages’ are sometimes referred to as ‘dialects’, even though many of them are totally unintelligible to speakers of other dialects - there’s an argument for calling them such (whether or not you agree is another matter, and not the point of this post!) based on mutual history, a shared writing system and so on, as well as being politically motivated (wanting to represent the unity of a country etc) and so on. 

I don’t know too much about the Hindi / Urdu situation beyond a few months spent in north India (where people would refer to their language as Hindi or Urdu), but in general mutual intelligibility on its own isn’t a great way of deciding what is called a language and what is called a dialect. If you imagine that you live in one city, and a friend lives in another 500 miles away, and you speak different languages - that’s clear, because you can’t understand each other. But what about a friend that lives 250 miles away from you can understand both you and your friend. Is that a different language? What about if speakers of language A can understand language B pretty much perfectly (like Danish speakers listening to Norwegian), but speakers of B struggle to understand language A (Norwegians listening to Danish)? What about if you can understand them when they are written down, but the pronunciation has changed to make spoken language impossible? What about if you can understand them at the level of basic daily conversation, but the more formally you speak, the more the languages use formal vocabulary loaned from different languages? (Which I believe is the case with Hindi using Sanskrit vocabulary and Urdu using Farsi / Persian and some Arabic, Turkish etc). 

...etc etc etc XD it just goes on! 

Every time we speak is an act of identity - so there’s a huge amount of tension held by speakers over whether a language is a ‘language’ (seen as its own thing, better, independent, the ‘correct’ written version, educated etc) or a ‘dialect’ (lesser, not ‘proper’, not taught in education, maybe connotations of being less important, from a poor / countryside background etc). Because it’s such an incredibly personal question, right - if you feel like you are part of a culturally / socially / religiously etc different group, but another group calls the thing you speak a ‘dialect’ of their language...that suggestion has a LOT of social ramifications. 

Which...is why linguists tend to chicken out and avoid the question altogether and call them ‘variants’ or ‘varieties’. There are languages with extremely few similarities that speakers call ‘dialects’ of other languages (that some people would maybe automatically think of as 'languages’ if they saw or heard them) and languages that are essentially exactly the same as another one that the speakers maintain are not the same - because the two groups of speakers are different enough in some way that they have a reason for wanting that distance, and for identifying socially as two separate groups.

There are so many examples of this (I’m sorry they are all so Eurocentric; apart from Chinese it’s what I’m most familiar with.) Czech and Slovak are basically intelligible, but after Czechoslovakia split the speakers want to distance themselves from each other, so they are called different languages. Gaelic and Irish have certain similarities and are quite mutually intelligible, but the different spelling systems and common basic vocabulary and grammar is different enough - plus they are spoken in different countries - that they are talked about as ‘languages’. Languages like Ukranian and Russian are more similar than languages like Mandarin or Cantonese that are sometimes called ‘dialects’ (which I personally think is stupid, but that’s a topic for another post), but nobody in the current climate  would suggest they were the same language! In the UK, children were punished for speaking 'dialects’ like Scots instead of ‘proper’ English - I’m putting dialects in ‘’ because Scots speakers call it another language, though it’s intelligible with English, because of the way that English was forcibly promoted at the expense of local Scots, often with violence, and the way both groups of speakers consider themselves distinct. In the north of India I imagine that if you are in a minority of Muslim people in a majority Hindu area, you might have a similar drive and desire to call Hindi and Urdu two separate languages? (Any Hindi and Urdu speakers please chime in!) It gives you identity and ties to a group, and has much further reaching connotations than whether you can understand a person speaking the other language or not. 

Because calling it a language and not a dialect (or half of one bigger language) is an act of saying - look, I’m here, I matter, my stories are just as important as yours, my words have worth and meaning and history and you can’t stamp that out. We’re two different groups; we don’t want to be perceived as the same. 

Re the Hindi vs Urdu thing again - because the grammar is very similar, many linguists will refer to Hindustani in textbooks or for example sentences, but are usually careful to try and separate that from what to call the language ‘out and about’, as it were. So if the other person on the post were going ‘No, they are so different, we can’t understand each other at all!’ that...would also be wrong? Because it’s objectively not true. And I would also have been a bit confused. But if they were talking about the experiences of people and the language in a social context, then I personally feel like talking about Hindi vs Urdu is very valid and probably the ‘normal’ way to do it. Personal opinion! 

Generally speaking when talking about languages vs dialects, aiming high (that is, calling things a language) and getting it wrong hurts less than the other way around. Does it hurt any English speakers to suggest that Scots is a language? Not at all; why would it? Many non-Scots speakers of English might not even know Scots exists (which is its own special brand of privilege of the majority language speakers lmao). But it will be incredibly hurtful to many speakers of Scots to suggest that it’s a dialect of English.

So...linguists just say varieties (unless talking about it in a specifically sociological context where that perceived distinction is important) because it steps neatly around the ‘language’ vs ‘dialect’ distinction. Because that is so often because of political / historical / sociological reasons and not based on any actual measurable or reliable distance or difference between the languages in question.

At this stage I think most people give this up to be a personal / sociological question, not a purely linguistic one - it isn’t a linguists’ place to answer, not really. It’s not an academic decision, because it’s not based on anything you can actually measure. Speakers of the language decide, and linguists follow - or (what most actually do) avoid the question entirely.

I hope that makes sense! All of this was written in good faith, so I’m sorry if there is stuff you already know or I misread anything!!

As ever, any corrections welcomed. Still learning etc etc. 

I have!!!!! finished the first 200 pages of tgcf. this is more exciting than just me being literate I promise. it is the first time I have ever:

- read in traditional Ever

- read vertically

- read An Actual Real Proper Book In Chinese that’s not on my kindle to more than 50 pages. and only the second time I have ever actually held a physical book in chinese and even attempted, and the first time was only about two months ago and was simplified and horizontal

it took about 2 weeks?? and I got the flu halfway through, so minus about 5 days of no reading at all. some takeaways:

- I’m honestly not sure whether I dislike the vertical text anymore? I AM slow, but on the other hand I’m not sure that’s a field of vision thing as much as I am baby at reading chinese thing. though it’s definitely something to do with a combination of the font (songti die in hell!!!!!!), the closeness togetherness of the lines (18 per page, compared to 16 for mdzs), the traditional-ness and the vertical-ness. I can skim noticeably better in horizontal simplified. 

- the speed of everything is improving. I’m not sure how much I’ve leeeearnt however? which proves that reading for reading / solidifying grammar structures etc and reading for vocabulary are two different things. have started, as of three days ago, also putting some vocab into pleco. though my recognition of traditional characters is def getting better

- my ‘ohhhh shitttttt this takes brain effort’ instinctive balking and cowering and cringing etc at lines of chinese text is also…less? I think that’s the biggest takeaway. both today and yesterday I read 20 pages; at the beginning I was struggling to read 5 without feeling exhausted. it’s becoming more chill!

- xie lian is such a fucking loser and this book is so so immensely funny. and this is not a ‘oh my godddd you simply haaaave to read it in the original hurhurhur’ it’s just me being pleased that I can Get Jokes And Humour in another language. the third time I’m reading it and I’m sitting here chortling in public places. he’s so lame (affectionate). I look forward deeply deeply to reading mdzs and laughing even more! 

200 pages!! I’m officially over 1/12 of the way through this singular book!!!

that is….less impressive, written like that.

@mejomonster​ Thank you!! Back in December this year I studied about the most common 100 characters in traditional to hand-write (by which I mean common in total, not just the most common ones that only appear in traditional). Otherwise I hadn’t really studied it at all before. 

It has definitely been a learning curve!! But honestly not as bad as I thought. In the first few days I was looking up a lot of words that I could guess by context would be something fairly simple. The most frustrating thing are the words which are totally different and which you have no way of guessing unless you know them - the words that have components that are just more complex are fine. 

A type of character I should have honestly anticipated but just didn’t think about was the kind that replaces one phonetic component giving the sound with another, simpler phonetic component. So for example 種 (种）or 鐘 （钟), aside from the simplification of the semantic component 金 in the latter, also replace the phonetic components 重 and 童 with the much simpler phonetic component 中, which gives the same sound. (Especially in the case of 鐘 where the phonetic component is tong2 not zhong1 - the simplification gives a much clearer clue on how 钟 should be pronounced.)

With those characters though I think it also helps that I have a decent grasp of phonetic components that appear in certain characters, and also the kinds of ways in which they can vary. So two characters with the same phonetic component being pronounced ‘jian’ and ‘lan’ is not unexpected; but if one were pronounced ‘zhong’ and the other ‘lan’, that would indicate that maybe the component is not acting phonetically in one of them. So for the above if I don’t know what 種 means, taking away context which to be honest is the most useful way of determining/guessing what a character is, I know that the simplified character likely has a 禾 and then maybe some kind of component that reads ‘zhong’ or ‘chong’ if it’s acting phonetically. Which gives 种. For the second one, context would help a lot - but ‘tong’ and ‘zhong’ are not super unexpected varieties on a sound series, so I could still guess that the simplified character would have a simplified 金 component and would sound like maybe ‘tong’ or another element that often appears in a sound series with it. 

(For 童 for example the majority of words according to pleco that have it as a phonetic component are pronounced tóng, or zhong, chong, zhuang and chuang with some kind of tone, with a very few also pronounced dong.)

Another example: when I saw 頭髮 （头发）- which is made up of two fairly simple/common characters; I just really have never read traditional before - I had no idea what the first one was. 豆 is dòu which, on its own, would be great and seemingly very helpful - but it’s not a very ‘reliable’ element? Like lots of characters that have 豆 don’t sound anything like that. If they have 豆 in them they tend to be part of a larger component which gives the sound - like 證 zheng4 or 燈 deng1 which both have the active phonetic component 登 deng1 in them. And then 頁 doesn’t usually give the sound (think 頗，項，領 etc where the other element is a very helpful and clear phonetic component). So I had no idea for that one. 

But for 髮 on the other hand - the top bit I knew was some kind of ‘hairy’ semantic component and the part underneath I knew to be 发 fa1. And I knew that traditional often makes differentiations between characters that are written in the same way in simplified Chinese - and the meaning of ‘hair’ is very far from the normal meaning of 发? So I thought maybe this was the case with this one - that, hmmmm, it was a character being ‘overused’ in simplified Chinese. And then we have a sentence like ‘San Lang’s long black 頭髮’, so San Lang’s long black something-fa. Ahh! 头发!! Huzzah!!!

So that’s basically how I’ve been going through. I haven’t been looking up every word by far, but if there’s a word that gives me kind of ‘basic’ vibes (i.e. in context or where it’s used or if it’s paired with another common character / phrase, like 儘管如此 / 尽管如此) and I see it more than twice I might look it up. Before looking it up, I have been going through a similar kind of process - sometimes very fast and subconsciously, and sometimes very deliberately and slowly - to see if I can figure it out before turning to pleco. 

Otherwise though it’s been ok? My speed is getting slowly better, but it was fairly slow at first. The main thing seems to be tiredness that affects it. If I can get into the ‘flow’ state of whatever, I don’t have to subvocalise and I can skim whole chunks of 5 or 6 characters. If I’m tired, I have to literally read every single one. Which is terrible and I hate it and so I’m hoping it gets better quickly Xd

Honestly I had built up traditional to be this huge scary thing in my mind, almost a mental barrier about Taiwan and Classical Chinese etc, and I wish I had realised earlier that it isn’t. I think grabbing something and forcing myself to read it has been incredibly effective and I really, really wish I had started earlier now. Because I am reading this - not easily lmao, a LONG way to go before that, but easily enough to make it pleasant enough that if I’m not tired I can sometimes read up to 20 pages in a sitting. I should have listened to other people and started earlier XD because it’s literally fine, and if anything is giving me a much more in depth understanding of characters and forcing me to really think about how they are made up much more. 

I now have polls and want to find out about language communities on tumblr!

I'm considering doing another with languages like Old Irish and Middle Welsh if any of that crowd see this to see what people have studied coz I'm nosy and sad that I'm not gonna be able to study them at uni and so learning bits of Old Irish through memrise and books lol

happy international mother language day to those who speak dialects, minority and indigenous languages, discriminated and endangered languages, “economically unprofitable”, “useless”, “unprestigious” languages and everyone who defends languages from colonialism and chauvinism