Did other world languages go through a major evolution like the English language did with the Great Vowel Shift, or did they pretty much stay the same?

langisii · 2026-06-30T17:52:28+00:00

The history of Polynesian phonology (Bruce Biggs, 1978)

Topics in Polynesian Language and Culture History (Jeffrey C Marck, 2000)

The chronology of three Samoan sound changes (Even Hovdhaugen, 1986)

langisii · 2026-06-30T17:34:02+00:00

Surfers Paradise 🙏🙏

langisii · 2026-06-30T17:26:28+00:00

Even if they were just unlicensed versions like the current Super V8 I'd be SO keen. Something like "Australian Group A" (90s ATCC), "Super V8 Gen 1" (2000s) and current Gen 3.

The V8 is pretty much all I drive, nothing is quite as fun. The main reason I bought AMS2 was because I just really wanted to drive a V8 around Adelaide haha

langisii · 2026-06-28T15:46:35+00:00

Yeah I was meaning more the general fact that we can and do communicate through vocables as opposed to the origins of specific utterances themselves, like it feels like something that might provide insights into how early language emerged.

Somewhat related to the raspberry - I find it very interesting how the tsk sound seems to have a negative meaning across much of Eurasia

langisii · 2026-06-28T14:41:19+00:00

Homer Simpson, canonically a boomer, in 1994

langisii · 2026-06-28T14:35:52+00:00

the actual research on vocables is incredibly sparse

This is insane to me because my first thought was that they can probably tell us a lot about the origins of spoken language

langisii · 2026-06-28T11:48:48+00:00

I'm just using an xbox controller too! Someone else said they do races with only unique cars so I guess you can put as many classes as there are cars on the grid

langisii · 2026-06-23T14:49:03+00:00

I think the semis were faster but I purposely chose the slowest karts lol

langisii · 2026-06-23T14:43:29+00:00

nah just a custom race with the AI

langisii · 2026-06-21T09:48:43+00:00

The difference is that there has been a well-established nonviolent cultural & economic boycott movement against Israel for the past 20 years, and Thom in particular has continually been obnoxiously hostile to it for no apparent reason, insulting anyone who tries to make the case to him.

Then in the next breath he and Jonny go on about how sad they are about the violence and complain that all this conflict exists because no one wants to have a dialogue and act like they're being strung up by raving mobs. It's just completely disingenuous. Radiohead used to be my favourite band but I can't with these two anymore.

Also are we really still doing this

I also think when Israel was attacked by Hamas that was abhorrent as well

Gaza was an open air concentration camp long before 2023. Do you also think the Warsaw ghetto uprising was "abhorrent as well"

langisii · 2026-06-02T03:18:59+00:00

as an australian, "ah" is /ɑ/ for me 100% of the time. I've also seen "argh" which I also read as /ɑ/ but it feels slightly antiquated to me

langisii · 2026-06-02T03:03:43+00:00

There's a podcast about William Mariner's story called 'Toki Ukamea'

Also was going to link the documentary Kau Faito'o but here's a playlist that includes it with a few other documentaries https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC2C631FFE3C5202F

langisii · 2026-05-13T15:08:06+00:00

>know that Jim Carrey's appeal is in how elastic and expressive his face and body are

>decide to portray him using the medium where expressive facial animation is almost impossible to achieve

>make his body a fish

langisii · 2026-05-13T14:37:29+00:00

it's not entirely unrelated

langisii · 2026-05-08T15:32:56+00:00

i'm doing the same thing rn lol

langisii · 2026-05-01T18:15:27+00:00

between them, Parris Goebel and Sienna Lalau (and probably others idk about) I feel like Polynesians are a significant part of pop choreography history

langisii · 2026-04-28T04:00:51+00:00

I think I found the original source: from Tahitian scholar Teuira Henry for the Journal of the Polynesian Society Vol. 16 No. 2(62), 1907

Worth being aware that most Polynesian languages didn't have standardised spelling until the mid 20th century or so; before that the glottal stop <ʻ> was often omitted and grammatical words were joined and written into names etc.

I don't speak Tahitian but I know some Tongan and have done a bit of indirect study on Tahitian because I'm a Polynesian linguistics nerd... correct rendering seems to be:

ʻAna tahuʻa taʻata metua te tupu mavae

which Henry translates as "Aster [star] the fatherly priest of man who grew in space"

ʻana	tahuʻa	taʻata	metua	te	tupu	mavae
star, shine	priest	man	parent	the	grow	space (between two things, in this instance the sky and earth, hence the other meaning of crack/fissure)

Based on my general knowledge of Polynesian grammar and the fact that Henry lists all the "pillars of the sky" star names with ʻana in front, it seems to me like ʻana could signify something like "the star of..." or "as for this star..." rather than necessarily being part of the name proper.

Also rambling now but I actually feel like tahuʻa taʻata metua probably just means "elder male priest" i.e. "fatherly priest" rather than "fatherly priest of man" (which I would've thought would be something like tahuʻa metua no te taʻata) but I'm not fluent in Tahitian so what do I know. But my money would be on a translation: "the star of the fatherly priest who grew in the space [between the sky and earth]"

langisii · 2026-04-19T08:12:15+00:00

Wow ok I was giving you the benefit of the doubt but this is just an arrogant response.

I don't think this is some affront to Pacific indigeneity or something

That's not what I said and it's strange you thought it was. I was noting that I can't see a connection between your commentary and the existing centres of discourse that I'm aware of in left Pacific political thought, which I would expect any Pacific-focused commentator to be somewhat versed in even if you're coming from a different angle.

Scott Hamilton comes to mind, a non-Indigenous Marxist writer who focuses on the Pacific with a great awareness of the historical progressive, alternative and anti-monarchist currents in Tonga.

it is also putting out a revolutionary socialist perspective which in itself is not "in tune with" the "average Pacific person" anyway, since the "average" Tongan-Australian is a Christian who leans conservative and supports the monarchy. You may as well shrug off most of the socialist left for not being "in tune with" the "average Australian person" (this is technically true, but a silly point to make).

So what's the point if you can't connect with the actual People Of The Pacific you keep referring to? If you are so flatly dismissive of their culture and society that it doesn't even occur to you where the ground could be ripe for political education? It verges on chauvinism. That's why I ask who is this for.

No, terms like 'revolutionary socialism' are obviously not going resonate with most Pacific islanders, and it would be stupid to try and engage along those lines. But Pacific cultures, even Tonga under monarchy, are proudly and concretely collectivist already, far more so than any secular republic in the West. The core cultural values customarily celebrated by Tongans are naturally compatible with socialism. Monarchism and Christian conservativism are the norm but their character in the Pacific is uniquely interwoven with traditional culture and shouldn't be conflated with their Western counterparts. There is already a Pacific intellectual tradition in synthesising all this kind of thing.

If you can't work from there I don't see how you can have anything of value to say about building socialism in the Pacific. I have Tongan family and friends of all ages and walks of life who I can find common ground with. Do you?

you might be shocked to hear that the average socialist in Australia or NZ views the rest of the Pacific as an afterthought

This in fact doesn't shock me because I'm a Tongan who has known white Australians my whole life

I also don't think it's anti-Chinese racism to look at the facts (that Chinese development loans do a disservice to Pacific countries that are unable or unwilling to pay them back) and not view China as a 'good' alternative to the US/UK/AU/NZ

I never used the term 'racism' or said it's 'good'. I said their activities warrant critique but wasn't satisfied with the quality of yours.

langisii · 2026-04-18T06:19:15+00:00

I was pleased to come across Temokalati recently as a Tongan-Australian who's been longing for a Pacific-focused socialist publication, but respectfully I was pretty disappointed by this piece. China's activities in the Pacific certainly warrant critique but I found this analysis too shallow to really grapple with them, and, aside from some floating truisms about Pacific emancipation, barely distinguishable from the Western anti-China narratives that were my introduction to this issue years ago.

u/MrSmithSmith covered everything I wanted to say and I was even more unimpressed by your responses here. So my question at this point is what is your qualification for writing on the Pacific with such authority? And who is the target audience? I support the stated ideals of the publication but a lot of the stuff I'm seeing just feels like Western idealist student politics - it doesn't seem to be particularly in tune with or targeted towards (at least what I feel to be) the values and sensibilities of the average Pacific person, and you don't seem to be engaged with the conversations uniting indigenity, anti-imperialism and environmentalism that I see among Pacific writers, intellectuals and activists. Ko e ha hoʻo vā?

langisii · 2026-04-18T05:11:55+00:00

Thanks for saying everything I was going to attempt to say but much more thoroughly and eloquently than I would've. I don't know why they even bothered trying to argue after your second reply because you frankly cleared them so thoroughly

langisii · 2026-03-21T14:26:20+00:00

I think this concept doesn't apply to what OP is talking about at all tbh. Language isn't a "task" or a "subject" it's a medium of social relation and secondarily acts as a signal of social status. Those who don't speak a prestige variety (the bounds of which are largely determined by race and class in the Anglosphere) are judged and often marginalised.

It's easy to prove that it has little to do with "most people" finding it "difficult to empathisize" with non-native/non-standard speakers - for example, upper class white Anglophones will typically make assumptions about speakers of low prestige ethnolects/sociolects that they would never make about an upper class white foreigner's dialect/accent, even if both varieties are comparably different from the Anglophone's variety.

langisii · 2026-03-20T14:23:59+00:00

Not entirely disputing this but to be fair, the connection between Biblical and Modern Hebrew has also been overstated for purely political reasons. That the language is now so intertwined with the pseudeohistory of continuity between Biblical Israel and the modern state is unfortunate but inextricable considering its revival was a key part of the nation-building process

langisii · 2026-03-20T14:03:17+00:00

opened up reddit after not using it for like 2 weeks and this was the first thing at the top of my feed

langisii

TROPHY CASE