dactylotheca @ dactylotheca @suppo.fi

Sarcastic bitch with a wine problem

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647

Joined

1 yr. ago

Speaking of parasites, you may want to have that brain slug removed.

I doubt they spent all that much money murking whatshisname. The R&D money goes to the parasites known as executives and shareholders

Conservatives don't give a shit about what's actually getting criticized – if they're told that they need to think Walz is bad, then anything he does can be used as an example of him being a "villain". Could be fucking "he donates to charity" and they'd find a way to doublethink that into being a bad thing

Fucking Russian psychos use the majority of their missiles on civilian targets and now suddenly Putin has a problem with (alleged! I frankly don't believe it for one second) “indiscriminate shooting from various types of weapons, including missiles, at civilian buildings, residential buildings, and ambulances.”

English is enough of a universal language nowadays that it's understandable that it might not be immediately obvious how language and culture / identity can be linked. Any sort of written, spoken, etc. cultural artifact is tied to a language, and while translation is absolutely a thing (duh), you do lose nuance even when translating to a closely related language.

With Finnish it's not really the vocabulary I'd like to see preserved, but grammar. English grammar is relatively lightweight even compared to most Indo-European languages, and Finnish and Uralic languages in general are on the other end of that spectrum. There's a lot of cool grammatical features, which, while not super duper necessary, add a lot of nuance that can take multiple words or even nearly a full sentence to replace. Where English and most other Indo-European languages usually need a completely new word to express new concepts, we can often just express the same thing by using our frankly ridiculously complex grammar (for a non-native learner!).

As an example, let's take the verb for "to look", katsoa. If you were to use a verb aspect called the momentane – which indicates that something was sudden and short-lived – to form the verb katsahtaa, you'd have something that's close to the English word "glance". Then you could use eg. the frequentative aspect – which (quoting Wikipedia here) expresses "repetitive action, but may also represent leisurely and/or prolonged activity, or activity that is not done in a particularly determined attempt to reach a goal" – to give you katsahdella and you'd have a verb that translates to something approximately like "to glance around aimlessly".

This sort of grammatical minutia has been getting rarer for centuries now, but the speed has definitely accelerated over the past ~40 years mainly due to more. In many ways it's unavoidable, but I still think it's a bit sad.

Oh and to answer your question about word origins, there's a free online Finnish etymological dictionary, and eg. Wiktionary has an etymology section.

As a native speaker of a relatively small language (under 6 million speakers) in a very niche language family, I understand eg. Iceland's desire to "preserve" the language – languages are by definition communication tools, but they're also inextricably tied to the culture(s) that produced them (and vice versa), so while I absolutely do agree that fighting change is relatively pointless, I think it's understandable that speakers of minority languages try to protect them.

So yeah, even though I definitely am a descriptivist and know that linguistic evolution is just a fact of life, I just can't help being a bit sad about it at the same time when it comes to Finnish. Not that I'd want to somehow "freeze" it since that'd be silly and impossible, but at the same time I'd love to see eg. promotion of some of the features that are currently dying out (whatever the hell that'd mean in practice). The primacy of English in this age of global mass media has minority languages in a real bind.

It's a great photo. Fucking terrifying to think that there could have been a 300kt boom at the end of each of those pretty lines

Why are drill sergeants so angry anyhow?

🤮

Many Lemmy instances do just fine without them though, and unpopular extremist views are still unpopular. Frankly that sounds more like a case for moderation than downvotes.

One of the main problems I have with downvotes on Lemmy is that when people browse All, niche communities tend to attract a lot of drive-by downvotes (which is why many instances that host them opted to disable downvotes) that tend to drown out votes by people who are actually in those communities and push the content lower when using a sort that takes votes into account.

Yes there's all sorts of lofty ideas about how downvotes should be used, and eg people are not "supposed" to downvote things just because they disagree (and no I'm not talking nazism here). Never goes that way in real life.

Oh yeah it's not like it makes any real difference – although the points may be fake, whether we like it or not people do seem to let them influence how they look at a comment or post. It's just a bit silly that so many people cling to the idea that downvotes are a valuable tool (apparently we'd be overrun with nazis if we couldn't downvote things)

That's one of the most American things I have heard in a while

Shit, true! I'll just edit that away and we can pretend it never happened. WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE

Love it that you're getting downvoted for this highly controversial comment.

Proof #52895167698 that downvotes shouldn't even be a thing

Can a bitch have some context, please

Just goes to show that cat memes have always been a thing.

Needs more compression artifacts though:

It's awesome that the Library of Congress page had TIFF files of the kitty

With conservatives you really only have two choices: they're idiots or psychopaths (and that isn't an exclusive "or")

I'm somewhat partial to Mirv

Edit: they grow up so fast

Yeah gee I wonder why that could be.