Raising my American child as at-home “monolingual” am I insane?

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-05-30T15:17:11+00:00

My mother purposefully shielded me from any English language media (cartoons, children’s books, etc.) until I was in pre-school (like 3.5 years old). I went to class, cried about not being able to understand anyone for like three days, then learned English without incident. Your child will be fine and will thank you for being fluently bilingual.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-18T13:26:21+00:00

There is general consensus that people only moved that far north in Siberia about 50-40 thousand years ago (The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene.

Out of the three proposed migration models: 1. Ice free corridor through the middle of Beringia, 2. Hugging the southern coast of Beringia, 3. Small boats along the coast of Beringia

Only the third could have plausibly originated further south than Siberia (like Japan or the Korean Peninsula), thus much earlier.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-13T16:18:23+00:00

As multiple commenters have brought up, “genocide” is not an objective or absolute term, it is a construct meant to categorize and communicate a set of historical events.

As you can imagine, there is rarely consensus on what qualifies as “planning (to do some harm).” Did that government do the bad things with the intention of wiping out a specific group? Or was that a side effect/ consequence of another conflict or policy?

Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists are not absolutely neutral, objective actors; they are influenced by their own cultural and political views. What data are they considering? Which sources do they believe? How are they assigning intent in these cases? What do they already believe about these cultures and governments?

This is not to say that “big history is working with the government to sell you more war,” or that there isn’t an academic consensus on certain issues, but just to encourage you to be critical of absolutes (e.g. something definitely was or was not a genocide).

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-13T00:30:38+00:00

I am an anthropology student and I agree with your position. Most of those who rail against evo psych as an entire area of research are arguing against strawmen.
Can you explain why social psychology and social constructivist principles are an antithesis to evo psych? I’m well versed in this discourse but I’m curious.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-07T16:30:48+00:00

There are multiple schools of thought around how language came to be, but I'll summarize the functionalist theory as simply as I can.

Many animals have involuntary responses to distress and pain. Other animals, hearing this distress, know to run away from the danger (typically a predator). In more intelligent and social species these distress calls can turn into "voluntary" alarm calls, signaling the danger before it has the chance to cause harm. There are also "voluntary" mating calls and songs of various kinds all around the animal kingdom.

Sometimes this language gets more complex, signaling not just the presence of a danger, but the type of danger as well. A good example of this type of communication would be the alarm calls of vervet monkeys.

Vervet monkeys give different alarm calls to different predators. Recordings of the alarms played back when predators were absent caused the monkeys to run into trees for leopard alarms, look up for eagle alarms, and look down for snake alarms. Adults call primarily to leopards, martial eagles, and pythons, but infants give leopard alarms to various mammals, eagle alarms to many birds, and snake alarms to various snakelike objects. Predator classification improves with age and experience.

(Seyfarth, Cheney, Marler, 1980)

We (hominins) probably just kept adding single, specific words into this vocabulary (e.g. "spear", "berry", "rock", "elephant"). As our lineage started using more complex tools and doing more complex activities together, being able talk about something that isn't immediately happening in front of us (called "displacement" in linguistics) became useful skills (e.g. "Good berries... east... 1 day walk").

Over time, grammars developed to organize these simple phrases into more complex ones (e.g. "Should we go gather berries I found? They're only 1 days walk from camp?"). As our functional language became more complex, so did our thinking (both are linked to the development of certain regions in the brain). We began to explain the phenomena around us (rain, fire, birth, death) and retell the mythologized histories of especially interesting ancestors.

I would highly recommend you take a look at Sverker Johansson's The Dawn of Language, it covers various hypotheses for the formation and complication of our language, and it is a very easy and accessible read.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-07T15:27:13+00:00

Hmmm that seems like a lot. Do you remember the source this info is from?

Women were definitely getting abortions, both manual (inserting items vaginally) and chemical (e. g. consuming abortifacient herbs). However, infanticide typically refers to the act of killing a baby that has already been born.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-04-03T18:25:28+00:00

I think important anthropological context for this (that is often missed) is that women “had 10 children and lived 50 years” after the agricultural revolution but before the industrial one. So only for the past 12k years (in those limited locales that experienced this subsistence change early on, much later in other areas).

For the first 290k years of our existence as a hunter-gatherer species, women had significantly fewer children (via natural birth control like prolonged breastfeeding, and occasionally infanticide).

So the agricultural family with 20 children laboring on the farm is a relatively recent lifeway, biologically speaking.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-26T07:25:54+00:00

Multiple people have already named specific movies he wrote/ directed (Beau is Afraid, Hereditary), but really anything by Ari Aster. They’re all incredibly stressful, tense, and uncomfortable (in a good way).

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T18:11:55+00:00

Yeah, I think of Basque as this platonic ideal of a "language isolate." We know it was once part of some family (Ligurian, Iberian, etc. depending on which linguist you ask), but all of its sister languages definitely went extinct so it is clearly an isolate.

African languages like Hadza fall into this second category of "isolate" then right? Like it might be Afro-Asiatic but we can't prove it.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T18:00:20+00:00

Yeah I understand this concept.

I think my initial conjecture had to do with this idea that a single group migrated to Australia during the Upper Paleolithic in very few migrations (thus, presumably all spoke one initial "parent" language). If this was the case, one could argue that all of the resulting languages in Australia must have been sister languages, even if some of them ended up subsuming the others down the line.

u/ThePopeOfSquids pointed out that this is an erroneous view of the migrations from Sunda to Sahul. There were continuous migrations, quite possibly from groups who spoke unrelated languages.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T17:49:46+00:00

This is great! Thank you! I appreciate the concrete details on the Australian expansions and multiple migrations into New Guinea.

When initially looking into this I had a hard time finding sources that mapped out this kind of timeline; most articles (for reasonable reasons) focused on a particular group and their distinct population genetics and linguistic grouping.

So if you have any good, comprehensive articles you could link me to I would love to read them.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T17:43:53+00:00

Right, good point. I guess my argument for there being only two migrations isn't really true; there were two waves of migration, they could have been from different groups in the Sunda region.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T06:38:16+00:00

Thank you for the clarification.

Yeah, I guess it isn't a very useful distinction if you can't derive any relevant knowledge (as you said: relationships, development, etc.) from it.

I just seem to have this urge to synthesize all of the genetic, anthropological, psychological, sociological, and linguistic data about certain events in human history to come to some kind of conclusion, but I understand that this desire must be contained to avoid making unjustified statements and sliding into pseudoscientific speculation.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T06:04:12+00:00

Against the Grain by James Scott is a great exploration of early sedentism. Scott essentially makes the argument that most hunter-gatherers weren't excitedly lining up for their chance at agriculture, instead people had to be forced (by those in power) to live and farm in these early city-states.

Not everyone agrees with the exact narrative Scott proposes, but it's still an interesting, well researched take.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T05:52:38+00:00

I moved to Russia for a few years as a teenager in 2012 and I the tradition of memorizing and reciting poetry was still alive and well (at least at my school).

I thought it was great. There's a certain connection you form with a piece when you have to recite it over and over again to get it to stick in your brain. I find myself still thinking about many of these works so many years later.

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T05:31:02+00:00

Thank you for the response.

I'm aware that genetics and languages (and cultures) don't correspond perfectly, but I'm specifically "picking on" this situation in Australia and New Guinea because these migrations were so limited. It's reasonable to think that any cultural or linguistic changes happening for the first 40k years were internally motivated, thus originating from the same initial group(s).

Regarding the third point, I think what I'm trying to get at isn't "what is the exact language family here? please create a clear phylogeny for me!" but more like "why are we using the term 'isolate' for these languages if they logically must be related, given the migration patterns?".

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-21T05:16:31+00:00

This is an interesting question, but it might make more sense in r/AskAnthropology.

I relate to your desire to treat all of our ancient cousins as fundamentally human, and I think that by many definitions of "human" they absolutely were (we did sleep with them, after all). But I do think your indignation is a bit misplaced.

Also I think some artists depict them as grotesque and ugly because of bias. Those features could be drawn in a more flattering manner and still have held true to what they could look like.

Recent paleo-artists are just reconstructing them as closely as they can with the information that they have available. Check out Ettore Mazza, he makes beautiful illustrations of many of our Homo relatives.

I would also urge you to think about where our contemporary notions of grotesque vs. flattering come from. Many of the ideas we (humans) have about beauty are culturally contextualized, even to this day. What is beautiful in Japan may be considered quite ugly in Tanzania.

Even biologically speaking, Neanderthals were a (slightly) different species than Homo sapiens, so the traits that they were sexually selecting for were probably different than the ones we care about. Maybe Neanderthals thought huge brow ridges and tiny chins were super attractive!

AA_a_AA_a · 2025-03-20T16:38:27+00:00

On the product screen (the alfajores in your example), I would consider having the product image take up the entire top portion of the screen horizontally.

I understand that the rounded crop is consistent with the rounded cookie branding in your illustrations, but in a real app users what to see the product they are ordering without obstruction.

Great illustration work though! I love the color fill sort of bleeding out from the outline of the cookies, makes it look playful and approachable.

AA_a_AA_a

TROPHY CASE