Z.

also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.

Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:

- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"

- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)

- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.

- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.

So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)

But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.

Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.

... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!

#linguistics #chinese #classicalchinese

remembering this iconic team rocket moment

The tale of the Little Mermaid implies the existence of the Big Mermaid. (Clicks remote. A picture of Godzilla appears on-screen.) What I’m about to suggest may seem shocking

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are:

1. Getting up in the morning
2. Going to bed at a reasonable time

@nev @futurebird

we three ants (two workers, one drone)
bearing honeydew from our home
field and fountain
moor and mountain
following pheremones

i unironically do want “transgender for everybody”

name changes that don’t mess up your credit. hormones and abortion pills over the counter. standards of “looking professional“ that aren’t patriarchal and white-supremacist. hell yeah

you don’t need to *use* transgender but you should be allowed to *have* it

*chanting sigils to the epoxy resin*
get hard get hard get hard get hard get hard

setting a default browser

me: i consent!
firefox: i consent!
teams and outlook: isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?

"gosh, this installer is taking an awful long time to run"
the bashful UAC prompt hiding minimized in the taskbar:

When a kernel commit starts with "In A.D. 1582 Pope Gregory XIII found that ..." you know you're in for a ride:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716
tl;dr: Rockchip decided November should have 31 days...

@tay two robots doing the pocky day kiss thing but with a nuclear fuel rod

When it snows in Scotland the snow turns the Bannockburn statue of Robert the Bruce into something magical.

📸Marisa Braithwaite

@mudkip if we don't make it more gay, alan turing died for nothing

Hey there kiddos!

It's your GAYINT Internet Auntie, here to have some real talk. There's a whole bunch of major holidays coming up (US Thanksgiving, then a whole slew of other days throughout December/January depending on your region/religion). And holidays are stressful.

That goes double when you're. Well. Kinda different. Maybe queer, maybe neurodivergent, both, something else... Look. Holidays are complicated at the best of times. And, these are, quite frankly, not the best of times.

Maybe you're with your family and you wish you were a thousand miles away. Maybe you're a thousand miles away and you wish you were with your family. Maybe you're glad to be with your family, but they can be a bit a bit much. And it's easy to feel like you're the problem.

Listen.

Really listen.

You. Are. Not. A. Problem.

You are perfect just the way you are.

You are doing the best you can in a system that is working against you every step of the way. And you're still here.

Quite frankly, that is *amazing*. *You* are *amazing*, sweetie!

Whether its your family, or your friends, or your pocket friends, or just your Internet Auntie, know that there's people who love you and cherish you and want nothing but the best for you.

I'm not gonna lie to you and say everything's gonna be fine, but I can absolutely tell you with certainty that you're not alone, okay?

And remember: you're doing *amazing*!
#GAYINT

Warning: Gender fluid level critical

Estradiol administered

in my fully automated luxury gay space communism-punk world if you make a proprietary binary, your computer explodes and kills you for the glory of the party