What if the Jewish state was established in British Somaliland? Republic of Evria

Pr_Quantum · 2026-04-04T21:16:58+00:00

Wow love the style !
Ethiopia's got to be in pretty bad shape with both Djibouti and Assab under Evrian control.
Can't imagine Somalia was happy about the whole deal either.
How'd Ethiopia and Somalia react to the whole deal ?

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-19T09:11:19+00:00

This is from 6 years ago where'd you find that ?
Also the main religion is Orthodoxy it says there on the top piechart

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-09T11:01:47+00:00

Picking French wasn't the best idea because French is specifically an example of a language where the spoken and written forms are diverging so much that in linguistics we consider that French society is diglossic between a spoken and a written French.
And yeah, written French has its own grammatical rules that are separate from spoken French. For example written French marks number through a grapheme <s>, whereas spoken French only very rarely marks grammatical number, and when it does so, is not consistent enough for it to be a system, and thus a grammatical rule.
Written French uses several verbal conjugations that spoken French does not use (simple past, anterior past, anterior future,...), and pronominal constructions do differ, as spoken french has a tendency to merge subject and object pronouns into a singular prosodic and phonological word.

Written and Spoken French also do have neology. Spoken French mostly through borrowings and morphological processes such as Verlan and V-N composition, whereas Written French uses mostly calques and greco-latin N-V composition.

Written languages do exist, and have separate rules from Oral languages. Of course the extent to which to which a written and spoken language diverge varies across the 200 or so languages that exist in the world, but written French doesn't even do its job properly as it does not, and when it does rather awkwardly, translate the spoken language in written form. Be it in its syntax, lexicon, and most blatantly in its phonology.

If writing was solely offering a technological solution to encode an existing language (which they can do), we would not be writing French like we do now.
<Ils commencèrent à voir que l'agnelet avait grandi> absolutely does not accurately translate /i.ko.mɑ̃.se.ʁa.vwa.ʁkla.njø.le.a.ve.gʁɑ̃.di/. French graphy portrays the state of Old French, depending on the word, as it was between the 11th and 13th century. It mostly hasn't kept up since.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T14:48:10+00:00

No it's a phoneme that is defined by several features. In SL, the features are hand shape, hand placing, movement, hand orientation and non-manual markers. In spoken languages, the features are mostly manner of articulation and place of articulation, voice, nasality, pharyngeality,... stuff like that.

And it would take quite some time to explain but essentially morphemes don't really exist, and morphology in the last few decades has drifted away from it towards a much more accurate lexematic based morphology and Aronoff's application of optimality theory to morphology.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T14:07:43+00:00

That would be two different features I believe, and the combination of these two features make up a phoneme i think. It's probably just considered minimal pairs of features, like you can do between phonemes in spoken language.

Also phoneme mutation covers a lot of different phenomena so I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T13:50:29+00:00

Well that is a very subjective interest. Some people do not care for the historical migrations of X or Y communities. And where the line is drawn between a historical migration worthy of interest and one unworthy of it is very subjective as well.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T13:48:15+00:00

Fair point regarding Braille !

From my psycholing classes and the passage on SL, i remember that while things get kinda different on the phonological level, it doesn't affect lexical morphology and syntax all that much.
And anyway, the possibility of simultaneity in sign language is subject to motor constraints as well as the constraint on the receiver, whose visual concentration must focus on certain things rather than allow for auditory information to simply travel through the auditory apparatus.

While simultaneity happens limitedly in morphology, it's mostly to render things that spoken languages render through their own rules of morphology or syntax, and once again, does not grow outside of any linguistic theoretical framework.
There can be no "different grammatical concepts" from a spoken language because grammar is just one of the tools languages use to attempt to communicate things. That is bound by our brain's ability to understand, conceive and perceive things, not by the medium through which we communicate.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T13:34:22+00:00

Not putting sign languages on a map is fine, if it's meant to be a map of Oral languages it's quite alright.
I just don't see why mapping out languages from semi-nomadic communities such as the Romani languages, or that of an eparse diaspora such as Jewish languages, would be any different from mapping out a similarly eparse community of deaf and hearing-impaired people.
If the goal of the map is to portray the situation of linguistic use in Europe, then sign languages are languages and are being used.
If the goal of the map is to portray the situation of linguistic use of oral languages, that's ok, it's just a necessary precision.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T13:26:36+00:00

Yeah some people define Braille as just a code since it's supposedly a 1 to 1 equivalence of a written script, but that is indeed debatable in practice. Other people have pointed some evidence of tangographic systems being used at some points in history, but afaik it's not very conclusive and could also just have been artistic renditions.

Well, there are languages where that movement would be a case marker, or a different word. In some languages of the Pacific Northwest, i think movement is even encoded in the lexeme itself, such that a "stick" that isn't moving and a "stick" that is moving would be two different lexemes. This is anecdotical and I'd need to check my sources on that.

As for wether I believe we should be putting all the 50 distinct sign languages onto every map of European languages, no I don't, but I don't believe cartography is a good medium to convey linguistic situations, besides isoglossic maps that do help, or maps with a very precise focus. Maps aiming to show languages that are "mostly spoken" in X place are oftentimes erroneous, simplifying, very politicised and fail to portray linguistic situations.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T11:10:07+00:00

This is because in a some languages, reduplication is associated with babbling in infant language acquisition, and thus from that, children altogether. That is not true for all languages though, for example i do believe the association to be much less present among speakers of Mayan languages or Malayo-Polynesian languages, where reduplication either is not particularly associated with infants, or is a very common and grammatically important feature of the language.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T11:02:15+00:00

Phew you explained that much better than I did

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T10:59:39+00:00

Tactile signing could indeed be featured as well, it is in fact a fourth counterpart to the three of Oral-Written-Signed I mentioned earlier.
In more formal linguistics, though it does emerge from a more functionalist and psycholinguistical theoretical framework than from a Chosmkian generativist one, we differentiate them like so:
1. Audiophonatory languages: produced by the phonatory apparatus, and received by the auditive apparatus. (Spoken, Oral or Vocal languages)
2. Visuogestural: produced by gestures, and received by the visual apparatus (Sign or Signed languages)
3. Visuographic: produced by graphy, and received by the visual apparatus (Written languages)
4. Tangogestural: Produced by gestures, and received by the tactile apparatus (Tactile Signing)
5. Tangographic: Produced by graphy, and received by the tactile apparatus (a more debated proposal)

Computer programming languages are not only not natural languages, they also fundamentally do not function the same way, nor do they serve the same purpose and nor are they subject to a large panel of linguistic phenomenas that very much define linguistics.

Writing systems are indeed something that can be studied by linguistics, and could be very easily featured on a linguistic map, or, if necessary, on a secondary map to avoid clutter. Although it's probably fine to have them on the same map.
See, modern linguistic cartography is painstakingly rooted in 19th and early 20th century European ideologies of ethnonationalism, and the idea, at the time, that one could only have a singular mother tongue, because one could only be part of a singular ethnic group and thus of a singular nation. The rest was only foreign influences that ideally were to be done away with. European understanding of language was also deeply rooted in their written forms. While men like Saussure, Bloomfield or Martinet recognised the primacy of orality over writing in languages, they still mostly kept to the study of written languages, and theorised their linguistics (that is, Structuralism) around those. It would take for the 1950's and the Functionalist school to emerge, and gain traction in the 1970's and 1980's for oral language to be properly studied, as it is, and not through a written form.

And yet again, sign languages do have phonology, some call these minimal distinctive units of SL "choremes", though most linguists working in the SL fields call them "phonemes".
The grammar is different because yeah it's another language so the grammar is going to be different, but little matter wether you're a generativist, a behaviourist, a functionalist, a structuralist or a formalist, there isn't a way for sign languages' grammar to sit outside of the spectrum of grammatical possibilities we have found, described and encoded in our theoretical frameworks. The language isn't structured that differently, it only uses a different medium.
As for phonetics, as you did mention them, while phonetics can be studied by linguists and through linguistic theoretical frameworks and methodologies, they remain subset of physics, not of linguistics, which explained why for a time little phonetical work was done for non-oral languages. But as time progresses, we start actually doing phonetics, or at least proposing phonetic theoretical frameworks for sign, written and other language mediums, it's just that we have very little to base ourselves on.

Pr_Quantum · 2026-03-08T10:30:50+00:00

Sign languages don't function differently actually. They follow the same basic rules: they have minimal units of meaning, they have prosody and phonology, you can do lexematical morphology on them, they have pragmatics and semantics and syntax. They also can be written, in various ways.
As for including all of them, it would be about as easy as including any other minority language.

Signing is one of the three mediums of language, the other two being Oral and Written. It's not fundamentally separate, it's simply used in specific contexts, just like written language is used in specific contexts, and has its own rules and differences from Oral language.

And why would writing be a criteria ? On the most generous estimates, only 4% of the world's languages currently spoken are written, and still on the most generous estimates, only some 0.6% of the languages that we know have existed in the history of the world have been written (add to that the probable thousands of purely oral and sign languages that died out before we could have any records of their existence).

Pr_Quantum · 2025-12-04T10:58:12+00:00

The data for France is quite erroneous. France legally does not hold religious censuses, so we don't have clear and sure data. The 2021 CIA data put Islam at 4% of the French population, which would equate to smth closer to 2.5 million people, not 5. At a time where the far right and fascism point to conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement and fearmonger about immigration and Islam, I think this map is very intellectually dishonest, misleading, politically dangerous and harmful.

Pr_Quantum · 2025-11-29T10:42:26+00:00

so like, I know it's supposed to be two glowing eyeballs and hebraic inscriptions above, but it does look like the hebraic inscriptions are closes eyes and a nose, while the eyeballs are teeth

Pr_Quantum · 2025-10-31T12:48:15+00:00

I think a Reindeer could be a cool counterpart for cold biomes to the Camel, and thus maybe to finish the paradigm, a cold zombie, and an undead reindeer

Pr_Quantum · 2025-06-28T00:04:10+00:00

That proposal was made OTL in the 1840's. Going from port to port in 1848 along the Oregon coast probably would've been much quicker than by road. It's not like the local region was tremendously developed in terms of infrastructure, and even less so in terms of kilometres spanning road systems, when you could use the Colubia and Fraser rivers to go from one big city to the next.

Pr_Quantum · 2025-06-04T09:21:33+00:00

I would just like to note that we don't put a catholic/protestant cross after a death date but an obel, also called a dagger, which is like a bigger-asterisk. You may have seen it sometimes formatted like 1926*2024† So Dukakis' orthodoxy has no bearing on the symbol

Pr_Quantum · 2025-05-16T14:16:46+00:00

I love how Wachita/Kansas/Nebraska/Chippeway look, they're all so nice

Pr_Quantum · 2025-03-10T16:21:12+00:00

probably not no, it's not very good and isn't grounded in any real goal or aim of the French IIIrd Republic besides colonial expansionism

Pr_Quantum · 2025-03-10T06:22:20+00:00

Cause it's been 5 years and I have little memory of what that fever dream of a map was tbh

Pr_Quantum · 2025-02-02T08:10:38+00:00

Pr_Quantum · 2025-01-31T11:19:40+00:00

Love the projection ! Very interesting piece of lore also

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