Erika2rsis

Maybe not concrete goals with set time frames, but what I’d like to do is…

• become reasonably proficient in Norwegian Sign Language
• get better with Norwegian prepositions, word recollection, and specialized or technical vocabulary
• get a few grades higher in Kanji and perhaps start branching out into Chinese more actively
• improve my listening skills and fluency in Russian

If you go to “trending” or “recently added” it will say “scope : federated” near the top of the page. If you go to “local videos” it will only show local videos sorted by default by upload date. If you go to any of these pages and click “more filters” you can choose under “scope” whether it shows federated videos, whether to sort by popularity or upload date etc, which languages or categories to display, etc.

Still, it is difficult to find good content on PeerTube in my experience. Your best hope is probably using sepiasearch.org rather than the search feature of your own instance.

If you’re curious about the actual historical reasons:

The consensus is that は行ぎょう was originally pronounced with a P sound in Old Japanese. So, 花はな was originally pronounced pana. The P sound involves pressing one’s lips tightly together to abrupt the airflow, without the vocal folds vibrating.

But with time Japanese people increasingly started pronouncing the P sound with the lips slightly parted, such that the airflow was not blocked completely. This produces a sound kind of like blowing out a candle, it’s a bit F-like which is why it’s usually represented with that letter in romanizations. This sound change was often blocked by ん and little っ, which is why aside from onomatopoeia and foreign loan words, one only really finds ぱ行ぎょう after ん and little っ in words like 散歩さんぽ or 切腹せっぷく. In fact this is also why ぱ行ぎょう has that unique ring diacritic: the 半濁点はんだくてん was invented by Portuguese missionaries because Japanese people themselves did not distinguish between は/ぱ in writing, and this made it more difficult for the missionaries to learn Japanese. That’s the story I remember, at least.

Incidentally, changing a P sound to an F or otherwise F-like sound is a fairly common sound change across languages. That’s why it’s “father” in English but “padre” in Spanish, and that’s also why the word “philosophy” is spelled with P’s, too.

So our situation is now that we have a sound which is pronounced as F in most situations, and as P in a handful of places where the old pronunciation sort of fossilized. This is when we encounter another sound change, which is that often times between vowels, the F sound would become more V-like — which is to say that the vibration of the vocal folds from the immediately preceding and following vowels started to “bleed into” the F sound, that the vibration would stop too late or start too early relative to the movement of the lips, and this gave the F sound this more V like quality. And due to the acoustic similarity of this V-like pronunciation to the Japanese W sound, it ended up being conflated with the W sound and merging with it. But the old spelling stuck, which led to a situation prior to the postwar spelling reform, where は行ぎょう and わ行ぎょう could both be used to represent the W sound, depending entirely on the historical pronunciation of the word.

And indeed, the は particle, and for that matter the へ particle, were often reduced/slurred in such a way that they were basically treated like the ending of the previous word, and so these words were in fact often affected by this F-to-W sound change despite nominally being their own separate words which on their own wouldn’t be affected. And this happened so often that は and へ ended up being pronounced as wa and we always. A similar shift in pronunciation happened to a lot of English-language function words that we spell with TH — the magic word in linguistics is “sandhi”. So this is why “thy” and “thigh” are not pronounced the same, for instance.

And yeah, another sound change ended up merging the syllables wi, we, and wo with i, e, and o, so this is why へ is today pronounced as e rather than we. And then when the postwar spelling reform rolled in, it was decided that は/へ/を were particles used so frequently that they should just be left alone despite their historical spelling; otherwise, をゐゑ were respelled as おいえ, and every はひふへほ pronounced with a W sound was respelled as わいうえお, leaving the particle は as the absolute last and only remaining example of は行ぎょう being read with a W sound. This spelling reform is incidentally also why there are no Japanese verbs ending in ふ, and why the Japanese verbs ending in う have わ as their 未然形みぜんけい rather than あ: the Japanese verbs ending in う historically ended in ふ prior to the spelling reforms.

But yeah. Not too long after the F-to-W sound change, most of the remaining examples of the Japanese F sound went through a different sound change, as the lips became less and less rounded, which gradually changed the blowing-out-a-candle F-like sound to a more simple exhaling H-like sound. This sound change was blocked whenever the Japanese F sound was immediately followed by a U, because that vowel also involves rounded lips, so that sort of reinforced the rounded lips of the F sound. And that’s why はひふへほ is ha-hi-fu-he-ho instead of ha-hi-hu-he-ho. Badabing badaboom!

※ Note: the H sound before the vowel I ended up being palatalized, similarly to how we say the H in “huge”. So while Hepburn romanization spells ひ as hi, the pronunciation of the H is a little different from the H in はへほ.

All this being said, is this actually useful information? Honestly, probably not super useful for most people, no. It might come a bit in handy if you ever try learning Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Uchinaaguchi, though, because memorizing sound changes can help you identify, remember, or even to some extent predict the forms of the shared vocabulary between these languages. Otherwise equipping yourself with some knowledge of other historical Japanese sound changes or knowledge of phonetics can help make sense of some other oddities you will inevitably or potentially run into while learning Japanese, like why the volitional form of verbs might be described as sticking ～う to the end of a verb’s 未然形みぜんけい form even though it just plainly isn’t (spoiler: it was prior to the spelling reforms!); and why especially older people might say the particle が as “nga”, and why 東北弁とうほくべん is Like That; why words might change their last vowel or first consonant when used in compounds and why the 濁点だくてん turns those specific consonants into those specific other consonants; why i/u are so often silent; why pitch accent patterns include the particles after a word; why the word です sounds almost like the English word “this” at 1:20 in the song ｢アイドル｣ by YOASOBI; and all sorts of other fun things like that.

Not that one couldn’t learn through simple memorization and exposure, but I just think it’s fun to know, and I think that having actual scientific or historical explanations helps the new information stick.

I did not mean f###ot in a bad way I just mean you gay people have a lot of drama.

Makes me think of The Boondocks: “[It’s] n###a technology — technology for n###as. Only don’t start trippin’ and shit, callin’ me a racist, 'cause I don’t mean n###a in a disrespectful way — I mean it as a general term for ignorant motherfucker.”

I’m assuming you meant 「私は」 and 「話せません」

Liftoff is incompatible with the latest version of Lemmy

Fun fact: the opposite of estrogenize is in fact to androgenize. No relation to androgynize with a Y, they’re just one letter apart and for many speakers 100% homophonic, but they’re very different in meaning, if we’re talking about men’s sex hormone intake.

I should’ve gone into detail, but I’m just not in the mood to argue sometimes. I’ll get back to you if I do.

That’s the Republican strategy when they’re in the minority and the legislation in question is stuff that actually helps people. Real POSIWID hours

This is very superficial.

Honestly sometimes I think every country should have its own Sinn Féin of sorts. Just a party that never takes its seats. Yeah, try calling it the “same thing” when you can’t pass any legislation or form coalitions or get anything done because a third of the seats in the national legislature are literally left empty on purpose. Don’t like it? Well, it’s your problem that your party is literally less electable than No Representation!

relevant azumanga

I too am 83% female and between the ages of 18 and 24

The same thing we do every night, Pinky.

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.

The jokester in me wants to say TARDIS → TARDES by analogy of penis → penes but the fact of the matter is that Time and Relative Dimensions in Space doesn’t really pluralize even when it isn’t abbreviated

This is basically just Skwerl but for “young people who are good with computers” slang

A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot…

She neon my genesis till i evangelion my hand

Based granddad