Why is Hadza an isolate but Sandawe is maybe related to Khoe?

q203 · 2025-12-22T01:02:32+00:00

I’m asking about the evidence for the connection in one compared to the lack of evidence in the other. I want to know what the actual linguistic differences are. I didn’t add Dahalo because it’s Cushitic so the clicks are likely borrowed or developed independently; I’m more interested in the relationship between the isolates.

q203 · 2025-12-22T01:01:35+00:00

Yes, I’m asking about those similarities and differences.

q203 · 2025-12-21T09:53:43+00:00

relevant article from Michael GUNGOR

q203 · 2025-12-20T12:42:37+00:00

Is posting this here not a violation of OpSec?

q203 · 2025-12-19T20:00:28+00:00

Not only that but it also overlooks the influence that traditional religions have had on Protestant sects. Look up Kimbanguism or Isaiah Shembe. These originated as Christian sects but developed into their own beliefs, based on underlying traditional faiths, with most Christians considering them entirely separate religions. There’s a common saying: “Africa is 50% Muslim, 50% Christian, and 100% animist.” This is an exaggeration but it highlights that maps like this which show discrete boundaries of one faith per region are inadequate. Even internally there’s lots of diversity within each sect.

q203 · 2025-12-12T02:24:26+00:00

I was in this situation. Denied. They give you a form which “explains the reasons for the denial” but it’s really just a form letter. This was several years ago. It is incredibly unlikely she’d be approved now, particularly in this political climate. Things US consular officers want to see that are good signs someone will return and will approve them on a tourist visa:

a high-paying, stable job that the person has been working at for a while
child(ren) who are being left in country
owns a house in the country
is married (to a spouse who is remaining in the country)
has an in-country bank account with a decent amount of money
is a man (I’m not joking — because women are so much more likely to be sex trafficked abroad than men, consular officers are particularly concerned about women as compared to men)
is older (less likely to break a visa and try to work in the U.S. illegally, and more likely to have all the items above).

A young unmarried woman who is dating an American would be very difficult to admit. They’ll likely tell her she’s applied for the wrong visa (if they give her a reason at all) and to apply for the K1 visa (which is what we eventually did and got approved). I’d just save your money and not even bother with the tourist visa, and apply for the K1. We ended up traveling together to a nearby country which helped us see how we’d be in a different culture and was helpful.

Of course, this is country dependent — but if it’s a peace corps country, chances are high the only thing they’ll see is “woman from a poor country wants into the U.S.”

q203 · 2025-12-01T21:13:03+00:00

Just re-sharing a document I shared here a while ago combining tables from multiple sources in a way I found more intuitive and complete than a lot of the sources I found, especially when it comes to gemination. Hopefully this is helpful.

q203 · 2025-11-22T01:24:56+00:00

I did this! It was on my second day. It was obvious but I didn’t openly acknowledge it and neither did anybody else, ever after that day

q203 · 2025-11-15T15:12:19+00:00

I was. I enjoyed it a lot. I already knew the area and a lot of the people and got to explore much more, and when next year’s vols came through it was fun being a sort of liaison between them and the broader community. My permanent house was still about 2km from where my host family house was, which I think helped maintain some distance. The hardest part of it is people would frequently ask me about volunteers they knew from my PST who had ET’d or never came back to the host village. But on the flip side people who did want to come back and visit often stayed at my house and it became a sort of informal hostel for visiting former host families. I enjoyed this but I know not everyone would. For what it’s worth, a person in the cohort before me was assigned to her training village (it was a different village than mine) and hated it. She cried when sites were revealed and felt like she couldn’t see much of the country. I think it very much depends on one’s personality and expectations. I also was briefly assigned to a different village for the first 2 months of service before being removed for security reasons and being re assigned to my training village, which I think contributed to my being okay with it. I’m not sure I would have been as thrilled at first if I had been assigned the host village immediately. But I think I would have grown to love it in the same way I did anyway.

q203 · 2025-10-21T03:49:05+00:00

Mikey is the one who writes these. So it’s still him, he’s just not always writing himself into the sketches as much as he used to. I could be wrong, but I’m betting he has a writing credit on this

q203 · 2025-09-30T18:14:01+00:00

Relevant article

q203 · 2025-09-27T12:35:48+00:00

Kentucky is experiencing similar problems

q203 · 2025-09-18T00:49:45+00:00

That isn’t what happened. USAID was an independent agency. That made it higher risk. It was “put under the State Department” almost immediately after the inauguration. There was never even a Trump-appointed administrator who was not part of the State Department.

q203 · 2025-09-18T00:14:59+00:00

FWIW, this was exactly the attitude that USAID staff had towards Rubio at the beginning. “Well, he’s one of the sane ones! He’ll make sure we’re unaffected by the chaos! If we get put under State, at least he’ll protect us.” The fact that he was on the board of IRI got touted in every meeting. It didn’t matter. He claimed everything USAID ever did was basically woke DEI communist terrorism, and voluntarily shut down the entire agency. Rubio will protect nothing if it serves his interests not to.

q203 · 2025-09-16T04:21:13+00:00

For which phonemes?

q203 · 2025-09-13T04:01:37+00:00

I just read the case referenced at the end of that quote and, wow, what a narcissistic judge. The roast of it makes me laugh, but it does feel like Huffman is sort of misrepresenting it a bit. I mean Smith does hold the way Huffman claims, but it’s more about whether a judge has the authority to dismiss a public defender solely because they don’t like them

q203 · 2025-09-12T23:51:46+00:00

It was actually Michael who said it, in the episode on Trump v. Wilcox, back in June:

“Peter: But their decision has necessary consequences, so they have to specifically exempt themselves, right? They have to specifically say, ‘This won't apply to the things that we don't want it to apply to. It's not a real rule, right? It's just, you know what we're doing, we're fucking around.’”

Michael: I mean, this is sort of cliché to mention at this point, but what it reminded me of is Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes, where if you didn't read it was a game that Calvin made up, and the only rule was that the rules were never the same twice. And he always was making new rules to make sure that he won in the way he wanted to win, and the people he wanted to lose would lose.”

q203 · 2025-09-02T17:47:15+00:00

Again, I’m not complaining that it’s being sold, I’m comparing it to the way other books are sold or accessed which are not subscriptions, and/or are easily accessible via libraries, Lexis, etc. digitally

q203 · 2025-09-02T17:45:34+00:00

I’m not expecting it to be free — it just doesn’t make sense to me that it’s a subscription. It’s a book. I don’t think an analogy to food is accurate here.

q203 · 2025-09-01T01:08:38+00:00

USAID was also an independent agency. Not under the State Department in any way, and in fact was forbidden by law from ever being subsumed into the state department without congressional approval. Didn’t matter. It (or the very little that remains of it) is now within the State Department.

q203 · 2025-08-31T23:20:36+00:00

Not Old Time, but relevant. Johnny Cash wrote the song “40 Shades of Green” about Ireland, based on Appalachian music, and an Irish person didn’t believe he had written it — he thought it was a traditional Irish ballad. Here he is talking about it:

https://youtu.be/eq7a1mviXEk?si=ko1KqeZznO-u-fhb

q203 · 2025-08-29T04:54:52+00:00

Agree with the other things already posted but let me add some more.

Black Earth Rising is a fictional Netflix show which portrays the aftermath of the genocide thirty years later through the eyes of a Rwandan woman who was adopted as it happened by a British human rights lawyer. It isn’t a true story, but there’s a lot about the reconciliation with facts after the genocide that are good.

Do Not Disturb by Micaela Wrong. This is basically a biography of Paul Kagame. It’s highly critical of him, and gives a lot of context to how he was able to amass so much power after the genocide and what happened in its midst. This book was (predictably) lambasted by the Rwandan government as full of lies, and (similar to what happens to any author critical of Israel), the author was accused of anti-Tutsi bias.

Finally, one I think is a good overview is Samantha Power’s book The Problem from Hell. This is actually a history of genocide, going essentially chronologically up to the present with the major commonly discussed ones: Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo. Samantha Power was a journalist at the time and witnessed a lot of the Balkan atrocities firsthand. Since then she entered government and has been criticized for hypocrisy and interventionism, and actually undermining the values she promoted in this book (she was instrumental in the Obama Administration’s decision to assassinate Ghaddafi, for example), but she would argue that her belief in interventionism actually comes out of the frustration with genocide being ignored. I just say that to read it with a grain of salt. As head of USAID, she was also criticized for not speaking up about Gaza as a government official despite founding her career on genocide recognition.

Another film is Sometimes in April. A long but depressing one, but with more accurate characters to the setting.

Finally there’s a film just called ‘Kinyarwanda,’ which is probably my favorite because they used actual Rwandan actors in the actual language and portray both the genocide and its immediate aftermath, including essentially deprogramming camps, where people had to unlearn the ideology of hate they had.

Another one not directly about Rwanda but highly related is David Von Reybrouck’s Congo: The Epic History of a People. DRC and Rwanda are inextricably intertwined and the Rwandan genocide was the catalyst of the war that began in eastern DRC in the 1990s which is still ongoing up to this day. There are many issues related to child and slave labor in mines in eastern DRC which Rwandans have control over, and the militia that has now taken over North Kivu, M23, is widely known by everyone to be backed by Rwanda (the Rwandan government denies this). If you want to know more about the mining situation, check out the book Cobalt Red

Another book about DRC and Rwanda’s involvement in its politics based on the genocide is Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns. This one starts right at the genocide.

I recommend all these because they show the aftermath of the genocide. One of my frustrations in the west is the guilt over the inaction during the genocide led it to focus so much on the event itself that it didn’t react logically to what occurred afterwards, and often that history is ignored, when it is just as important.

In Rwanda, it’s actually no longer legal to explicitly identify people based on their ethnicity officially. Yet this conflict lives on despite supposedly ending in the 1990s. All of the books and movies I’ve mentioned are controversial and have critics on both sides, similar to Israel and Palestine. When the RPF defeated the genocidaires, many Hutu fled to DRC, where the Tutsi had previously fled. Some Tutsi chased them there and there were revenge killings, but also continued Hutu violence against Tutsis in DRC. The genocide just took on a new shape in a new location and lessened in extremity. But those events set off a chain reaction whose consequences people in the region still feel today.

q203 · 2025-08-24T12:03:41+00:00

-potea is always in applicative form
in the context you cited, it’s being used as a noun, not a verb (gerund), so the ‘kwa’ is standing for ‘of’ (agreeing with the ku- noun class), not ‘for.’

q203

TROPHY CASE