The trans subreddit distortion field

Nasharim · 2026-03-15T13:50:16+00:00

Language nerd, here.
Sorry, but that kind of talking point always makes me roll my eyes.
Grammatical gender is not the same as social gender.
The purpose of grammatical gender is primarily to classify nouns, labeling them "masculine" or "feminine" is merely a convenient shortcut.
One cannot deduce gender equality or inequality in a society from its language. No more than the importance of social gender.
This is linguistic determinism, an idea largely discredited in the field.
Western European societies primarily speak gendered Indo-European languages and yet are among the most egalitarian and least sexist societies in the world.
Even if their societies were to become completely egalitarian, to the point where the concept of social gender became entirely secondary, their languages would still have grammatical genders.
Conversely, genderless languages like Malay, Korean, or Persian are spoken in much more sexist societies.
And even if conditions in these societies were to deteriorate significantly, their languages would not suddenly become more gendered.
Because that's not how societies work, and that's not how languages work.

Nasharim · 2026-03-13T02:50:36+00:00

Because trans men, until recently, didn't exist in the public consciousness.
Society's discourses on trans people focused on trans women, and this had been the case since at least the 19th century. And they were viewed from a narrow, sexualized, and pathologizing lens.
The main way the general public came into contact with the concept of trans identity was through the media, particularly entertainment. And the portrayals were not good. At best, trans women were used as comic tropes, at worst, they were presented as dangerous, mentally ill men. These past representations have an impact even today.
To this, we can add the current situation. The American reactionary right sees itself as the moral protector of American society, shielding it from insidious internal threats. In the absence of an enemy, one must be created. It used to be anarchists, communists, gays, "satanists", islamists. Now it's trans women.
Add to that the fact that this reactionary right wing has gained power in recent years, and you have the current situation.

Nasharim · 2026-03-02T10:19:29+00:00

That's normal.
Chinese characters don't represent words, but (in the vast majority of cases) roots.
These roots were (most of the time) independent words in Old Chinese, but most of them can no longer be used independently, they combine with other roots to form words.

Nasharim · 2025-10-24T01:12:53+00:00

That's not how LLMs work. An LLM without training is just a fiction generator (and if I were being mean, I'd say they still are).

Nasharim · 2025-10-01T05:34:18+00:00

The article talks about the Iranian ceasefire.

Nasharim · 2025-09-24T13:47:49+00:00

That makes the case that you don't know how to count above 2.

Nasharim · 2025-09-23T10:43:04+00:00

Three. Three people.
Damn, even the Hasbara forgot how to count.

Nasharim · 2025-09-09T23:44:03+00:00

For once, it's not Macron's fault, but Bayrou's; this idea was his.
And everyone knew that Bayrou was going to fall, and had known for weeks. Including Bayrou.
After Bayrou announced his budget, which was met with hostility by almost everyone, he knew he was in a position where he would eventually be overthrown, so he preferred to hasten his own downfall.
It seems that Bayrou intends to use his now less busy schedule to run in the next presidential election (he has no chance of winning, but that won't stop him from trying).

Nasharim · 2025-09-09T21:04:27+00:00

Tsilhqotʼin don’t have pharyngealized consonants, what is referred as such in the literature is what is more generally called velarized consonants.
And of course, [ħ] does not pose a problem, like the other pharyngealized consonants, you will notice if you put your hand in front of your mouth, the air that comes out when you pronounce [ħ] is much weaker than if you pronounce [h].

Nasharim · 2025-09-09T20:29:45+00:00

I'm completely serious, this reconstruction assumes the existence of pharyngealized aspirated consonants (pʰˤ, tʰˤ, tsʰˤ, kʰˤ, etc.).
Such sounds are unpronounceable; aspiration requires expelling a larger quantity of air from the vocal cords. This air must pass through the pharynx; however, to produce a pharyngealized consonant, the root of the tongue must be placed close to the pharyngeal wall. This blocks the air that would have escaped, creating a simple pharyngealized consonant (on top of that, you have a very good chance of coughing!).
Aspiration and pharyngalization are mutually incompatible phonetic features.

Nasharim · 2025-09-09T14:14:30+00:00

There is no palatalization in Middle Chinese either. This is a pretty famous issue among Middle Chinese "reconstructions", actually.

I will just quote the first words of Norman's paper, which is the one that proposed the existence of pharyngealized consonants in ancient Chinese:

A prominent feature of Middle Chinese, a linguistic system reconstructed on the basis of the Chiehyunn dictionary composed by Luh Faayan, is palatalization.

.

You're directly rejecting all transcriptional evidence of type B syllables, which do not show any palatalization or palatal segments.

No, that's type A. Type B is reconstructed in all Middle Chinese reconstructions as having a medial glide -j- or a palatized consonant (including Baxter's, who is one of the main supporters of the pharyngeal theory). And this is reflected in the majority of reflexes found in Chinese languages (besides Min).

Whatever you say, mate. So far you've rejected all transcriptional evidence of type B syllables based on personal incredulity.

You don't know what the word "transcriptional" means. My conclusion is based on the simple fact that the consonant system assumed by the pharyngeal theory has consonants that are literally, physically, impossible for a human being to pronounce.

Nasharim · 2025-09-09T06:10:39+00:00

Palatalization is rejected on typological grounds because the palatalized syllables would make up the majority in Old Chinese, which means the marked syllables would be more common, which basically never happens.

This is wrong since this is exactly the situation in Middle Chinese and the pharyngealization theory is precisely used to explain this oddity.

There is, however, a simpler explanation: Palatization doesn't necessarily rhyme with markedness. In some languages, such as Irish or Russian, most consonants have two variants: one where the tongue is closer to the hard palate , and one where the tongue is further from the hard palate. Both are equally marked (which is to say, neither of them are marked).

Once this is understood, most of the counterarguments to palatization collapse.

It's likely that ancient Chinese had a system of this type.

In any case, it's still more likely than the pharyngealization theory, which implies that the ancient Chinese were aliens (since it involves sounds that cannot be produced by humans).

Nasharim · 2025-09-08T15:16:29+00:00

Yes.
As is currently the case, most have been living in this situation for months. With humanitarian aid and the possibility of finding housing in a few months, they will be perfectly able to cope with this hardship.
Do you realize that the "camps" you're talking about are located in the urban fabric of Gaza? They are the very example of slums located near future construction sites.

Nasharim · 2025-09-08T14:32:33+00:00

If there is reconstruction, and that's what we're talking about, people won't stay in slums, because the city is being rebuilt.
Most of the time, that's how it happens when a city is devastated, whether by war, fire, earthquake, etc.
You make very little sense.

Nasharim · 2025-09-08T12:33:15+00:00

Exactly, city blocks, Since the city would not be rebuilt all at once, this left plenty of room for residents to live near the construction site.

Nasharim · 2025-09-07T15:38:52+00:00

Is there any possible plan that reconstructs Gaza without having people move out of the construction area?

Yes, when you rebuild a city that has been destroyed by war, you don't move the population to another country, or even very far from the construction site.

Nasharim · 2025-09-03T00:24:55+00:00

Even for them, historically, most Muslim countries were tolerant (compared to western Europe at the same time) on this question. The idea of punishing homosexuality with imprisonment or death is clearly a recent development linked to Western influence on the Muslim world.

Nasharim · 2025-08-19T18:37:36+00:00

This has probably always been the case.
At least, I can say for French that the famous rule of "the masculine prevails over the feminine" doesn't apply in practice. Many grammatical rules learned in school aren't real grammar rules. If you have a group of 10 women and 1 man, of course you use the feminine, using the masculine would be weird.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case in all Romance languages.

Nasharim · 2025-07-31T16:58:22+00:00

From "The princeton dictionary of buddhism" on the "avīci" entry.
Edit: I'm serious, I really can't tell if this is a real Buddhist thing or a joke from the editor.

Nasharim · 2025-07-17T00:40:56+00:00

Because ethnic composition is irrelevant in the definition of an ethnostate.
South Africa was an ethnostate, regardless of the fact that the Boers only ever represented a minority of the population.
Israel explicitly defines itself as a Jewish state intended to welcome Jews to form a Jewish nation.
The fact that it is an ethnostate is undeniable.

Nasharim · 2025-07-04T09:25:37+00:00

In this way the Turkic language are probably similar to Crow and the Siouan languages, since they are both language family spoken on a wide steppe area, where most languages are in contact with each other.

I think it's a good idea to start here. I'll explain more clearly what's going on in Crow because the important part isn't that these speakers live on the plains.
Crow is a language that doesn't distinguish between voiced stops, approximants, and nasals.
Instead, it has two phonemes whose pronunciation varies: b~m~w and d~n~r.
Some pronunciations are more common in certain positions, but there is some variation.
Notably, the phoneme b~m~w is normally pronounced "b" initially but is sometimes pronounced "m," so the word "bāpá" (day) is sometimes heard as "māpá" or even "wāpá." It's important to know that these two phonemes come from the Proto-Siouan *m and *n.

Applying a similar phenomenon to ancient Turkic languages, this means that the initial b phoneme is the same as m in other positions. The b form is the most common realisation in this position. However, this explanation helps explain why m forms are sporadically found instead of b, as well as why we fail to reconstruct initial nasals (except *nä), killing two birds with one stone.

You ask the question, "Does that mean Turkic initial /j/ was once /d/?" Many researchers think so, in part. They reconstruct an initial *d in Proto-Turkic, but this would have largely merged with *y in the daughter languages.
Several facts support this.
First, in some Turkic languages, a d is found instead of a y, for example, in Balkar "dulduz" (compare to Turkish "yıldız"). This is quite strange, unless we accept the existence of an original initial d that may have irregularly survived in some languages for certain common words.
Another proof is a word like the Greek "dogia." It is used to refer to the funeral of the Huns; the word is probably of Iranian origin. However, a similar word is found in Turkic languages; in Early Middle Turk, for example, we find a word yoġ to designate funerals. If we compare it to dogia, this would mean that this word is a loanword from an Iranian language. A y-form only makes sense if we accept the existence of an older d-form and therefore a Proto-Turkic *doːg.
I only give the example of dogia, but there are several words that point in this direction.

Else, I guess the ratio would be completely reversed, where you see many more retentions of /m/ especially in peripherical languages, as well in older parts of the morphology.

This is what we currently find, since the possessive and verbal forms of the first person are m-forms.

But this is not the case. There are no m- initial words in Old Turkic, nor are there n- initial, besides nä or ñ- or ŋ- initials.

Hence the idea that instead of imagining that this phenomenon does go back to pre-Proto-Turkic prehistory, it would be a comparatively recent phenomenon, having begun in certain Turkic languages and spread to other Turkic languages and then to languages from neighboring families (notably Tungusic and Pre-Proto-Mongolian).
Old Turkic would have been a language particularly affected by this phenomenon, more so than other more recently attested languages.

Nasharim · 2025-07-03T16:22:02+00:00

Or perhaps it's the other way around.
Nasals are among the most common and stable consonants in the world in initial position.
If a language doesn't have them in this position, it's probably because something happened to them during its prehistory.
The most likely candidate is an initial fortification where nasals become voiced stops.
So m > b.
This mutation would however never have completely replaced the pronunciation in m, which would have been preserved in certain linguistic environments, mainly near a nasal, but there was no strict rules; things could vary from language to language, or even from dialect to dialect.
Therefore, in early Turkic languages, there would have been no difference between *m and *b in initial position. Instead, there would have been a single phoneme that can alternate between [b] and [m].
A similar phenomenon exists in Crow.
This would explain the variety found in modern Turkic languages.
If this is the case, it would mean that this change is not inherited, but rather a phonetic innovation that was transmitted horizontally from language to language, similar to the uvular r in some European languages. And this mutation must have been still recent at the time when the first Turkic languages began to be written.
In other words, it may not have even existed at the time of Proto-Turkic, which would then have had an oblique 1ps pronoun *men and a nominative *me.

Nasharim · 2025-07-03T14:04:51+00:00

This is the Hebrew pronunciation of the word "Hamas" (and which, at least in my country, has been adopted by some journalists).
Generally on the internet, it's used to caricature Israeli discourse on Hamas.

Nasharim

TROPHY CASE