kot - a regular cat

koshka - a regular female cat

kote (internet slang) - a cute chubby little guy, every single cute cat on the internet

kisa -  a pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kisunya - an extra pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kis’ - just a dork, controlled by aliens

kotik - a bit more disney version of a regulat cat

koten’ka - cuddly little fella, will purr and knead you to death 

kotofei - usually a big, old, extra fluffy cat, who knows a lot of bed time stories

kotyandra - fast, thin and slinky, we not sure if it’s even a cat 

koshak - a tough street guy, dogs fear him

kotyara - extra round, exrta big, kind ass fella. 

Read more here:

Friendly reminder that GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and it’s 100% free. Fuck DRM and the license culture, we have plenty of open source options available to us as a consumer.

If Adobe is going to be greedy shitheads, then fuck ‘em. Don’t use their stuff. Freeware can be just as good, if not better, than Adobe CC.

reblog to save a digital arts major

New Greenlandic Grammar resource

If you are interested in Greenlandic grammar (or Inuit / Eskimo-Aleut grammar more broadly) then head down to oqa.dk and read “An Introduction to West Greenlandic” by Stian Lybech. It’s free to download!

Stian is an active participant at the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan Discord server, where there is occasional lively discussion on all things Eskimo-Aleut. He is a Dane who has spent a good amount of time in Greenland and who has become fluent in Greenlandic, and has taught other ex-pats the language in evening classes.

His new work is a work-in-progress, and the first available chapters focus on phonology and word-formation. It has a lively, slightly irreverent, but very readable style. 

Please note that it’s not a learners’ grammar as such, but is much more of an attempt to describe the underlying orderliness of the language in a limited number of rules (as done by Per Langgård in some of his grammars such as Forsøg til en forbedret grønlandsk pædagogisk Grammatica), rather than simply setting out in long tabular form the bewildering number of noun and verb endings that are possible in Greenlandic when applying eight noun cases, nine verbal moods, possessive forms and combined subject+object forms (textbooks such as Bjørnum’s Grønlandsk Grammatik set these out at length and show over 1500 separate forms, a daunting sight for a learner). 

Similarly, apparent irregularities in morpheme joining and plural formation can be shown to have a greater level of regularity once a few specific rules are learned.  A lot of these rules become clearer when looking at the historical forms of the words, as either appearing in the older Kleinschmidt orthography or when looking at the other (westward) dialects in the broader Inuit language continuum, which have generally undergone less sound assimilation at morpheme boundaries.

The “walri” (aarfit) would be delighted if you would take a look. 

Shamlo (via honeyandelixir)

Today in “semantic shifts do the darndest things”

Linguistics joke lifted from reddit:

So Sino-Tibetan has nearly 500 languages and I didn’t know this until…now? The fuck?

Oh, not only does it have over 500 languages, nobody has the faintest idea how they’re arranged.

The traditional classification is a two-way split into Sinitic vs. “Tibeto-Burman”, but this is (as far as I can tell) a holdover from the days when Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese were essentially all that Western linguists could get their hands on good documentation of, and Burmese and Tibetan looked like they grouped together, so a binary split was proposed. Like many tentative classifications (coughNew Guineacough), everybody missed the point and it quickly became canonical.

The picture is slowly being revisited, but there are barriers:

a) Chinese linguists have to deal with politics–the CCP isn’t too keen on the idea that Sinitic might be the odd man out and that, say, Qiangic or Tibetan might be far more conservative. This exerts some pressure on work in Mainland China, though as far as I can tell it’s still valuable work so long as you read between the lines, particularly since the biggest sorce of pressure is pressure to classify Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai as members of ST

b) Documentation for many varieties is still scanty. Politics doesn’t help, particularly in China and Burma.

c) There is precious little inflectional morphology to work with, with the exception of Kiranti and Qiangic, which have large verbal complexes whose morphemes are mostly cognate, and Guillaume Jacques, at least, thinks they may preserve the original state of affairs–but even if so, almost all of the rest of ST has shed it. Since ST is probably around 7,000 years old, and inflectional morphology is far and away the best yardstick for classification, this makes things…difficult.

d) There’s a fad for phylogenetics at the moment, but this has the usual issues–e.g. there was recently a paper published using phylogenetics on the whole family which grouped Sinitic together with the Sal languages of the India/Bangladesh/Burma border area, in opposition to a group containing everything else–but that very same algorithm grouped Hakka, Cantonese and Min together in opposition to Mandarin, which we know isn’t correct (it’s Min vs. everything else)!

So at the moment, everybody sort of tacitly admits that Sinitic vs. “Tibeto-Burman” is probably incorrect, but nobody has a better model, so it lives on.

Mazanderani

Linguistic Diversity Challenge — Regional Edition Post # 4 / 12: Central and West Asia

Resources:

ah yes, my favourite foreign language feel, “I know what all of those words mean individually but not together like that”

not to forget its twin “i know (roughly) what you’re saying, but what are those words?”

Plus the secret triplet “I managed to get your drift but I don’t know how to answer you”.

I’m upset because I want to change the world but the world is too big and people are too mean

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” - Rabbi Tarfon

I needed to hear this

not obligated to complete the work, not free to abandon it.

Armenian Alphabet Monument, Byurakan (2005)

You know the place.

Expressing Yourself in Persian! 🗣 PS: 🙏 Learn Persian with the best FREE online resources, just click here: https://www.persianpod101.com/?src=social_special_infograph_expressing_yourself_081319

College Tip #2: Check Your Room for Bedbugs

This will probably be a very short one, but it's important.

This is something that no one thinks of, but it is very possible to have bedbugs in your dorm room. Bedbugs can survive for months without food, so they can survive over the summer.

BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING, check the crevices in your mattress and your bed frame, and check corners in the room and dressers. If you see any brownish red and flat bugs, it is a bed bug, and you need to alert the RA's and/or the front desk. They can bug bomb the room, but they may be able to put you in another room if you want.

My first day sleeping in the dorms, I didn't think to check my mattress, and I woke up with 25-26 bites all up and down my legs and arms. Over the next few days, while I was sleeping on my roommate's floor, it itched more and more and two spots got severely inflamed, and I had to go to the doctor. I was diagnosed with cellulitis from me constantly scratching it. Cellulitis is a skin infection that, left untreated, can be *deadly*. I got my antibiotics and we were put into a different room for a few days while they bug bombed the room.

Moral of the story: better safe than sorry. Check everywhere, and don't blame any on the school. Chances are they don't even know about it. Someone can easily bring them from home and cause the room to become infested. And take it from me, it's not fun.

That's it. Share with your friends and follow me for more tips. Push post notifications so you know when I post again.

New post!

Linguistics joke lifted from reddit:

watching Tiananmen 2.0 play out 30 years on it’s interesting how globalisation and the internet has changed everything and changed nothing.

Ancient Sumerian wisdom literature on why you should avoid the Discourse at all costs.

op supplied substandard copper ingots, but go off I guess.

hi hello alert so that classic tumblr flowing jungle river post is now cited in a real book like an actual paper book and it’s called because internet and it’s all about the evolution of internet language and how TUMBLR DID THE THING and you can get it here