I don't know if a loud and proud Anglo-German should be gleefully mocking ANYONE for having to live under an ultra-right-wing leader rewriting the law to suit his own plans while our most vulnerable populations simply suffer and die without proper medical attention. Or is that too on-the-nose?

I would also argue that, because it's generic, you'll easily find "bark" in situations unrelated to dogs. Like I've heard people bark at others, but not really woof. So woof is more dog specific I think

Just one linguist's opinion: <WOOF> is specifically a deep booming type of bark <BARK> is the general term and thus includes woofs but also all other kinds of barks—not whines or yelps. It's also more likely to be the verb: eg, "the dog barks" > "the dog woofs" See: their respective etymologies

Going to try again because I think this maybe wasn't enough. Let's go back to the start again. Alt text was introduced to HTML in 1993 for situations where images didn't load or loaded slowly. In those situations the alt text is visible in the space where the image would have loaded. Example:

Quick accessibility question: This is the first video I've posted to BlueSky and I definitely made sure to add a description and captions under alt text but I don't see an "alt" button to view them like on photos. Am I missing something obvious or is there an accessibility feature I'm missing?

TikTok creator and indigenous activist Che Jim has been sharing a lot of informative videos recently of isolated petroglyphs (some practically inaccessible) around the US Southwest and I really recommend checking them out! Here's a fun one just for chuckles:

How do students in England, France & Norway think about multilingualism? Our NEW article explores their beliefs and multilingual identities! Read it here, it's open access. #Multilingualism #Education doi.org/10.1080/0143...

Linguists! Tomorrow’s write time Friday is hosted by LSA grad student EC member John Starr! Come get some work done! 🐦🐦 @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

Maybe it’s my polysyllabic ethnic last name that the Anglos don’t even try to get right talking but “Zohran Mamdani” is just not that high up there when it comes to difficult names

I don't suppose anyone who claims it's hard to say /md/ in the name 'Mamdani' would say that the same sequence in, for example, 'someday' or 'Camden' is difficult, but I take the point. (You don't use your tongue to make an /m/ sound, for what it's worth, but again I take the point).

okay chat how do we make a scots translation of pghrt.diy happen because the comedic potential here is significant on top of the important linguistic potential

In a sec. I'm busy guwht dade-ing

A critical takeaway from this: "Existing large language models have instead shown a 'sycophantic' tendency to produce outputs that favorably reflect a human request. […] They are 'not going to produce the level of conflict and diverse perspectives that are required for really pathbreaking work.'"

I can think of a reason.

i genuinely recommend playing games in languages you want to learn - it's a really good way to get your mind around the linguistic logic of another language with lots of reading and some decisions!

*incorrect buzzer sound*

I don't know if time has simply slowed to a crawl for me personally but there's no way <skibidi> is still being used by anyone besides Gen Xers trying to make fun of their own kids

I'm reading a book on animal thought & emotion and it delves a lot into both inter- and intra-species communication. The current chapter is on the dreaded theory of mind and I would like to hear y'all's opinions on which, if any, of these would constitute evidence of ToM:

Love Island has once again proved a treasure trove of dialectal variants I'd never before encountered

No AI could ever say something this stupid

The band Radiohead is technically named after this character actor

Good assignment for Senior Linguistics majors: write a 5 page term paper explaining why this argument wrong!

Amazing things are happening on X: The Everything App

Met another self-described "cunning linguist" on bumble but this one might be salvageable

As always, my favorite oft-abridged quote on patriotism: "My country, right or wrong. If right, to be kept right—if wrong, to be set right." -an immigrant to the US who volunteered to fight for the Union in our Civil War

Linguists Love Cool James

Every 4th of July, I take the time to read "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July." Let us begin: "I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us."

Vegetable (spiritually) 🤝 Fruit (technically) "Welcome to the family, precious baby Tomato!"

Just discussing Jordan Peterson's linguistic skills with a hinge match, how's your weekend going?

Love catching up with old college friends

I've had a vendetta against Google's featured result summaries for years now. Whenever I tweeted about it, 1 or 2 employees would respond that it's impossible to manually check them for every possible search query. And this is why I suggested simply not featuring any summaries they hadn't checked:

Here in .at we call this the "fork breakfast" in a slipshod translation ("Gabelfrühstück") and there is absolutely nothing to say this does not go with wine / beer and a shot....

Kazakhstan may soon recognize sign language as an official language.

This is the thing from the WHATWG HTML standard I am referring to. Source: html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/im...

Wait what do you mean ELEVENSES are a real thing and not just a cute little Tolkienism for hungry hobbit snacks??

Dr Assal Rad— “𝘚𝘦𝘦𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳 is NYT’s euphemism for crimes against humanity.”

Join us this September for Oxonmoot! Taking place on 4-7 September both online and at the University of Oxford, Oxonmoot sees hundreds of #Tolkien readers, artists, scholars, academics and fans come together to enjoy an unforgettable weekend. Find out more at www.tolkiensociety.org/events/oxonm...

Raphael Lemkin was a Poland-born Jewish American who coined the term GENOCIDE in his 1944 text where he explicitly states that it does *not* necessarily refer to mass murder but rather any coordinated plan to destroy a society's foundation with the aim to eventually annihilate their people entirely.

whenever i encounter people who say they can't understand shakespeare verses I always send them this clip from the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing

You're supposed to respect what *anyone* prefers to be called because that is a basic human right and basic human rights aren't just for the people you like. No one has to earn them; that's the whole point. How you treat the people you hate is who you really are inside. That's what you believe in.

hire Cait & Kate for your very professional graphic design needs* *linguistically themed requests only

"AI-assisted translation will continue to improve" this person says. Linguist me asks if LLMs don't store any semantic information, how can they translate anything, and how can those translations "improve" over time? 🤔 Also: totally with you on not using tools built with stolen work.

If elitism is the singular purpose of your educational pursuits Join a country club It will actually cost less

"pride" is a great word because it is a nominalization of "proud" (OE prūd ~ OE prȳde)—wh is a loanword from Romance!—on analogy to inherited Germanic adjective-noun pairs where i-mutation marks the noun derivation, e.g. hāl "healthy, whole" ~ hǣlu "health"

Day 1: "How Europe underdeveloped Africa" by Walter Rodney. Essential reading by Guyanese historian & activist W. Rodney who explains how Africa has historically been deliberately exploited for western gain. It's an eye opener. #booksky #yarnsky

PRIDE originally comes from Kent & Mercia dialects of OE but only in the negative "haughty & overbearing" sense. By the 1500s, we'd turned that all around. Now PRIDE stood for "personal honor & good repute," an "exalted position," "splendor," and eventually "the prowess & spirit of a wild animal."

I will never forget my phonology prof telling me over post-finals drinks “You don’t deserve the grades you get based on your attendance” that was my human work maximising the grades vs attendance, now AI ruins the whole thing