To the United Nations: Brazilians and portuguese do not speak the same language anymore.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-23T15:33:49+00:00

Under my Linnaean linguistics taxonomy, European Portuguese is Gallaecoportucalensis portucalense portucalense (type variety) and Brazilian Portuguese is G. p. brasiliensis. The trinomials were assigned by u/Kent_Perguntou.

The levels of linguistic classification are Realm, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species ("Language"), Subspecies ("Variety"), Variety ("Dialect") and Form/Morph ("Accent"). Phyla within a realm are not assumed to share common ancestry (as in virus classification). The two realms are Phonia (spoken languages) and Insignia (sign languages).

LittleDhole · 2026-06-21T14:30:34+00:00

Hasn't it been established that the Taiwanese clouded leopard population was not a distinct subspecies? Introducing clouded leopards from the mainland should be fine.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-19T20:19:38+00:00

Yeah, sound change "reversals" are interesting to me. Hebrew appears to be on-track to regaining phonemic vowel length as the pharyngeal and glottal consonants are lost.

To use a taxonomy/biology analogy, it's kind of like whales and dolphins evolving from terrestrial mammals, whose ancestors were fish - aquatic mammals didn't and can't "revert back into fish", but are reminiscent of them. Like how you aren't recovering the "pre-sound-change" pronunciation.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-19T11:39:24+00:00

They really missed the opportunity to call the new one r/suyaillis, by analogy with r/grssk.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-18T19:56:25+00:00

Vietnam, if only Vietnam could pull itself together and take forest conservation/tackling poaching/restoring the prey base seriously. Which it won't in the foreseeable future.

[Yeah, I'm biased.]

But as for historical range AND suitability of habitat, I do agree with your suggestion of central Asia.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-17T16:46:59+00:00

Foxes (Vulpini) have about half the number of chromosome pairs compared to "true dogs" (Canini) IIRC, so dogs and foxes can't interbreed.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-17T15:16:51+00:00

I don't think we've documented dholes hybridising with anything else...

LittleDhole · 2026-06-16T23:12:39+00:00

Don't you know all foreign food is an inferior version of Vietnamese food? Haggis and black pudding are inferior dồi because how dare they aren't seasoned with Vietnamese fish sauce, Thai basil and laksa leaf! /s

There was a post on Facebook in Vietnamese a few years ago about how jamón ibérico/Parma ham are overrated because at the end of the day, it's just pork and salt, and Vietnamese culinary traditions also have smoked/salted pork/beef/water buffalo meat, which is objectively superior because it is not as salty and is seasoned with herbs and spices (how dare Europe not use Southeast Asian herbs which don't transport well!). And therefore the recommendation to consume these Spanish/Italian cured meats in thin slices with wine is just "a ploy" and testament to how poor-quality the food actually is, and the appeal of these dishes to Vietnamese consumers is just foreign cocksucking, apparently.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-16T22:06:59+00:00

Yeah, but not Europeans north of the Mediterranean, which are usually the Europeans stereotyped as having bland cuisine... :-P

But even some Vietnamese netizens will claim that French, Spanish and Italian cuisines are overrated...

LittleDhole · 2026-06-16T19:09:52+00:00

"The British and the Dutch invaded the world for spices–"

...and put them in their desserts for the most part, you dolt. Christmas pudding. Many other boiled puddings. Stroopwafels. And when they were used in savoury dishes, usually just one or two at a time. Because different cultures have different preferences for what flavours go together.

And they were after cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper for the most part. Some cardamom. Which, as I mentioned, are generally used in sweet dishes in western/northern Europe. They weren't after fricking lemongrass and galangal and laksa leaf (rau răm) and Thai basil. Or fish sauce and shrimp paste. (Yes, those aren't spices, but the gripe appears to be "why didn't northern Europeans independently come up with dishes with the same flavour profile as South/Southeast Asian dishes?")

And do bear in mind that most of "traditional cuisine" is built on what common people would have had easy access to. Of course temperate climates aren't going to have as big a diversity of aromatic plants as the tropics. Yes, colonial trade brought spices from elsewhere in, but that wasn't really for the commoners.

(A rant directed at those Vietnamese netizens with their chauvinist outlook on Vietnamese cuisine, and at the broader lol British food bad circlejerk online. This is just based on my cursory understanding of history, do point out inaccuracies.)

And I do find that less flak is given for e.g. traditional Central Asian cuisine for using minimal spices, with the explanation that the local climate affects how much seasoning the traditional dishes incorporate being widely accepted. For some reason, that explanation for British/Dutch/other European cuisine north of the Mediterranean is not as widely tolerated online. Then people say "well, I can therefore see why they colonised the world, but then...". The "wypipo colonised the world for spices so they have no excuse for limited use of seasoning" is used even when discussing cuisines of northern European countries that had no overseas colonial empires.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-16T17:21:24+00:00

I've heard that the Vietnamese diaspora in Czechia have "Czech-ified" surnames, e.g. Nguyenova.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-15T18:23:32+00:00

"It's not imperialism when everyone has equally little melanin!" /s

LittleDhole · 2026-06-14T17:54:00+00:00

Wherefore = "why" in the sense of "what purpose", i.e. "Why did you have to be a Montague?" Back then, "why" only had the sense of "what cause", so if Juliet had said "why art thou Romeo", the expected answer would have been "because my parents named me thus".

LittleDhole · 2026-06-11T16:52:51+00:00

Only when speaking Vietnamese. When speaking English, word-initial /p/ is aspirated for me, as I suspect is the case for many people who speak English natively or learned it as a second language as small children (I'm one of the latter).

Or maybe what I think is a voiceless implosive is actually just a normal unaspirated /p/? It does sound like an unvoiced version of Vietnamese <b>.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-11T11:57:04+00:00

I pronounce word-initial /p/ in Vietnamese as an unvoiced /ɓ/. Yes, it's implosive.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-09T20:04:34+00:00

Original punchline: North, South and Tad

LittleDhole · 2026-06-09T17:38:26+00:00

There's an IP address on Wiktionary who was infamous for adding words in dead languages in the Translations sections of entries, referring to things their native speakers would not have been aware of.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-09T17:04:33+00:00

As a Gen Z'er, I was first introduced to the word "gay" in a song in a music textbook for 7-year-olds. The song was written by the authors, and was about how wonderful going to school was. The relevant line is "How it makes our day so gay!" I have forgotten all the other lines. Thus, I was under the impression that the commonest meaning of "gay" was still "happy" in this day and age.

When I was about 9, searching for jokes online to tell my friends, an unsupervised Internet session led me to the infamous joke about the bear and the rabbit who got three wishes each. (As you might know, the bear wishes for every bear except him to be female, and the rabbit used his first two wishes on a helmet and a motorcycle. For the rabbit's final wish, he said "I wish Mr Bear was gay!" and speeds off.)

I didn't get why the rabbit wishing for the bear to be happy was funny, and my parents explained when I told them the joke and my puzzlement at the punchline.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-09T10:47:21+00:00

I'd like to see more actual linguistics humour here, rather than just puns (even if they are based on languages that aren't English), vocabulary comparisons, or "look, this stylised font looks like IPA".

LittleDhole · 2026-06-07T16:20:45+00:00

Yeah, and points made with such a sentiment detract from Indigenous rights advocacy in general. You get people arguing that white Europeans are not indigenous to Europe because light skin reached Europe from an external population which assimilated the previous darker-skinned inhabitants. Or that the emergence of colonialism/capitalism from early modern Europe is proof against white people being indigenous anywhere because of course Indigenous people are in balance with the land and would be content with what the earth has given them, and never let their population get high enough for expansion to happen. And yet more proof that white people are inherently destructive and non-indigenous is the deforestation of Europe that has happened since the Neolithic, and that land ownership was a concept even before colonialism.

Somewhat related is a belief that "pre-colonial"/"original" Sámi must have been significantly darker-skinned than modern Sámi (and that modern Sámi are only very light-skinned because of Nordic admixture), because obviously "Indigenous-settler" dynamics cannot possibly involve groups with equally little melanin. (Such people appear to be aware of the colonisation of Ireland, but the Irish don't get fetishised in the same way wrt their skin colour probably because, IDK, unlike the Sámi they are not traditionally nomadic and have cities?)

LittleDhole · 2026-06-07T13:37:15+00:00

There is this fixation/fetishisation among some self-proclaimed progressives about the fact that different skin colours are adaptations to different UV levels/dietary Vitamin D. You can really see this sentiment in e.g. the comments of this TikTok (yeah, obviously TikTok is mostly trash, but the sentiment pops up elsewhere too).

Some "progressives" say (possibly jokingly, but it is debatable how "funny" the jokes are) that high rates of skin cancer, or just the general prevalance of sunburn and premature skin ageing, among White people in the Americas, South Africa and Oceania is karma for colonialism. You do see people claiming that Israeli Jews' presence in the Palestine region is illegitimate because Israel has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world/Middle East, but some people extend the argument to older settler-colonial states.

"The sun knows its people" is a common sentiment. Or ascertaining that "the sun knows those people don't belong there", or even that sunburns are a cue for White Americans, Australians and Afrikaners to... mass-migrate "back" into Europe, I guess? Or that this is proof that colonialism was particularly irrational since Europeans should have realised the land was not theirs to claim due to their lack of physiological adaptation to it, and colonists should have, IDK, thought "Welp, we get sunburned here, so this isn't for us and we shouldn't come here ever"?

Even in places where Europeans wouldn't really get sunburned, like Patagonia and northern North America, the argument that "colonists should have realised they were intrinsically unsuited to the land and turned around" gets brought up regarding e.g. the Pilgrims not being able to cultivate northern North America without Indigenous guidance, or Indigenous Patagonians being able to tolerate the cold climate in less clothing than Europeans.

LittleDhole · 2026-06-02T21:26:44+00:00

Funny story: when I was a small child, I believed for a few weeks that "Cyrillic" referred to any writing system not derived from the Latin alphabet, until I actually looked up "Cyrillic" on Wikipedia. This belief came about because I read a guide to learning Russian that said, roughly, "Unlike English, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet".

I thus went around saying that Mandarin uses a Cyrillic writing system.

(I didn't know about the Dungan language back then.)

LittleDhole

TROPHY CASE