✨Ben Hamill✨ @benhamill@witches.town

Anyway, Xhosa is a member of the Bantu language family. Members of that family are spoken in roughly the southern third of Africa. It's theorized that Bantu languages didn't evolve clicks on their own, but borrowed them from members of a smaller (in terms of speaking population and geographic coverage) language family: Khoisan.

Part of the reason for this is that Khoisan languages use clicks a lot more and in a lot more places, but Bantu languages use them less often and in places in words that are "easier" to pronounce. Where "easier" is about where the tongue and lips and such are already placed based on surrounding sounds.

#LinguisticsMinute

Today, I learned that the language that stood in for "Wakandan" in the Black Panther movie is a real language called Xhosa. The "x" is a click. It happens at the alveolar ridge, which is the part where the roof of your mouth swoops up behind your teeth before it becomes your palette. The following "h" is because it's aspirated. So don't say it like "Kousa" or whatever. Try the click. English speakers make this noise to imitate a clock sometimes, so it's not THAT hard to do. I'm not practiced enough to differentiate in saying or hearing the aspiration, though.

#LinguisticsMinute

@sysadmin1138 Yeah. I often hear "refugees", but that's probably also a poor framing. Maybe "escape" is a good framing? People who have escaped pathological cultures? Hmm… it's hard.

Good morning, friends.

@bootsy Hmm. OK. 🉑

The thing I don't understand about ChiaPets is the manner in which they are… pets?

@Stephen_Stone @shel @kibi I like "hopepunk" for the usage of "punk" in, like, ecopunk or solarpunk as opposed to the sense very closely related to, like, Sid Vicious or whatever. The sort of "we will make the thing (hope in this case) by whatever crappy means we can, despite systems that will try to undermine our attempts to do so."

I think there's at least a bit of a there there.

@lizzard "NOOOO!!!! BE A LESBIAN, DAINE, don't fuck this teacher who is twice your age" Good life advice in general, tbh.

@ajroach42 Cool. Thanks. Sleep well.

@ajroach42 I have headphones and I can get audio out if I plug them in, but the audio card won't support the mic with the one cable (the small audio jack, witness the depth of my understanding of the relevant terminology). I won't be the saddest if the audio quality is just "good enough", but would at least like to know what the options are. So please nerd out at me, if you like.

If I wanted to add Bluetooth capability to my (Windows) desktop machine what kinda stuff do I need to know to buy intelligently? Is this just, like, a card I can buy, or...?

@witchfynder_finder I hesitate to recommended it because it is dark and the second and third books need a CW for various kinds of trauma. But the Dragonoak trilogy plays a lot of things straight (well, except basically everyone's queer and mostly ladies) and it treats the traumas thing very beautifully. If that makes sense. And there's a happy ending. But… a lot of not happy things happen along the way, so not for everyone.

@witchfynder_finder Maybe Among Others for fantasy. Hmm…

@witchfynder_finder I'll have to think about recommends for this.

@witchfynder_finder Hmmmm. I agree. Or at least don't just vapidly flip the trope. Play with it and subvert it but subtly. Say something with our about it more nuanced than, "What everyone else does, but backwards."

@gdkar @catoutofbed @djsundog Same. Except about blaming Sundog. I can only blame SNL.

@noelle @ThisQueerBashesBack Your FACE is a sandwich! (Like, open face… because… face. Ahem. I'll see myself out).

@ThisQueerBashesBack Recently, someone was like, "Is King Cake a cake?" and asserting it was just bread and then we got into the distinction between a cookie and bread and cake and eventually it devolved into that birthday cake is clearly a sandwich. 😜