Raistlin's recent activity

  1. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
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    I think we need to differentiate between constructing a new language without gender, and removing gender from a language. Obviously this is all hypothetical and noone can affect a change of this...

    I think we need to differentiate between constructing a new language without gender, and removing gender from a language. Obviously this is all hypothetical and noone can affect a change of this scale on a language used by hundreds of millions of people,. but I can't overemphasise how impossible removing gender from Spanish would be. Every noun, article and adjective is gendered. I'm not sure what removing gender even means in this context.

    Chair will always be silla. Unless you're removing the very idea of gender in its entirety, that will always be a feminine word because it ends with -a, like the female names María, Ana, Gabriela, Elena, etc. Similarly, a piso ends with -o, like Roberto, Fernando, Benedicto.

    Obviously it's not as simple as the above and there are names that follow different structures, I'm just trying to clarify what we're saying it should look like. The suggestion I saw was just using the -o ending. But that's not removing gender, that's making masculine the only gender, which leads you into awkward phrases like el silla rojo. You had a nice little rhythm when saying la silla roja and it sounded pretty, but if you force articles and adjectives that don't belong, you've lost the alliteration you had going. As I said above, I feel this makes the language poorer, but I'm not sure what it's accomplishing.

    There are things that are hard about Spanish, but there are things that Spanish is better at than both English and Japanese by far. For example. There is only a single way to read and say la silla roja. On the other hand, English has words like through, tough and though with three entirely different sounds represent the gh. It also has words like the and think where again the th represents two different sounds, which in Greek are separate syllables (δ and θ), but in English are represented by the same combination of letters. And God, Japanese was created to torture foreigners! You can't just wrote 私はすしを食べます and expect anyone to read that without learning two separate syllabic alphabets, and then a huge registers of thousands of symbols. In my biased opinion, grammatical gender (which you can gauge 90% of the time by seeing if a word ends with a or o) sounds like baby mode! You honestly can get by the vast vast majority of the time by seeing which vowel the words ends on, and if it's neither a or o, assume masculine. You'll be wrong a tiny minority of the time.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    I think if you're purposefully building a language (for fiction, perhaps) I suppose the use would be in determining an in-group and an out-group. I really do think the best example is the Celtic...

    I think if you're purposefully building a language (for fiction, perhaps) I suppose the use would be in determining an in-group and an out-group. I really do think the best example is the Celtic do in English. Asking "do you want some cake?" and "you want some cake?" conveys the same meaning, and indeed, is a mistake people attempting to learn English on the ground without formal education make, and not using that do makes them sound uneducated. And if you were constructing a language, you probably wouldn't use it that way, right?

    I think every labguage I'm familiar with has things like that. The kana は in Japanese makes the sound 'ha', except if being used as the topic particle, in which case it sounds like 'wa'. Even though Japanese does have a kana that makes the 'wa' sound, わ, this is not the one used for that particle. It's something you just have to know.

    Similarly in Greek, you have eight vowels, α, ε, η, ι, ο, υ and ω. η, ι and υ make the same exact sound, 'ee'. Additionally, the combination ει also makes the 'ee' sound. So you will hear a word in Greek with the 'ee' sound and it can be any these symbols. The word for 'is' is είναι , which is pronounced 'eeneh'. You could in theory spell it as ινε, that would make the same exact sound. But you don't, and if you spell it like that, you look like you don't know Greek.

    That's just languages, right? Evolution over millennia and millennia. They're all weird and clunky!

    1 vote

  3. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    That does make a lot more sense to me! In that context, I might same that removing grammatical gender would make a language simpler. I would still argue that you risk making it poorer and...

    That does make a lot more sense to me! In that context, I might same that removing grammatical gender would make a language simpler. I would still argue that you risk making it poorer and unmooring it from itself. But I don't think I would add grammatical gender to a new language, no. And I did, I'd probably add 3, not 2.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Raistlin
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    A few weeks ago I beat Xenosaga Episode 1, and last week I beat Xenosaga Episode 2. I think you can guess what game I moved onto... That's right, Xenosaga Pied Piper, the Japan-only mobile game...

    A few weeks ago I beat Xenosaga Episode 1, and last week I beat Xenosaga Episode 2. I think you can guess what game I moved onto...

    That's right, Xenosaga Pied Piper, the Japan-only mobile game that contains Ziggy's back story. Or more specifically, the fan remake on itchio. The story was surprisingly good. Very Matrix-y setting, and though the romance is rushed, it was still nice. But man, the villain was so obvious, it immediately recalls the ProZD Lysanderoth skit. Like, is none else listening to this guy?

    Also, I don't think the Joachim here and Joachim Mizrahi are the same person?? But who knows with Xenosaga.

    The game only took 5 hours, so I was able to quickly people to Xenosaga Epis-- nah, I needed to watch the janky English translation of A Missing Year on YouTube, which I think started as an audio drama. It turns out that it's really easy to make cry after becoming a dad. All you have to do is have a little girl cry a lot, and that's it, you've done it.

    And finally after all of that, I started Xenosaga Episode 3 yesterday. Given that the game immediately started hitting me with macrophages and Doctus, I'm already glad I did my homework with those two spinoffs first.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    I just feel that that would remove a lot of pretty words from the language, but I don't see what it would accomplish. Say you remove feminine completely. Now instead of saying las manzanas ricas...

    I just feel that that would remove a lot of pretty words from the language, but I don't see what it would accomplish.

    Say you remove feminine completely. Now instead of saying las manzanas ricas and have that nice -as ending in every word, a bit like rhyme, you have los manzanas ricos. That sounds really ugly to my ears, you've lost the repetition. What would we be trying to do by doing this? You're not making simpler, since manzana already carries the gender (feminine, since it's a standard -a ending).

    I think this is where I'm getting stuck in this conversation. What does are we trying to accomplish by removing grammatical gender?

    1 vote

  6. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    I suppose. I guess to me, that's a bit like asking why doesn't English drop the Celtic do. Instead of asking "do you like it", why not ask "you like it". That do is a remnant that doesn't really...

    I suppose. I guess to me, that's a bit like asking why doesn't English drop the Celtic do. Instead of asking "do you like it", why not ask "you like it". That do is a remnant that doesn't really add anything. Or insisting that English standarise its plurarisation rules. No more oxen or geese, only oxes and gooses. And no more silly terms like murder of crows, only flock of crows. And so on. But to what end? It feels to me that this sort of top-down standardisation only serves to make a language poorer, don't you think? Legitimately I'm asking you, would the language be better for it?

    Grammatical gender has been part of Spanish since before Spanish existed as a language and harkens back to the misty days before Romulus. You're asking to change a feature that's been there for millennia, but I don't really understand why.

    I understand bring frustrated by it. I'm frustrated that the Japanese haven't standarised their phonetic language. But I think that's different from wanting them to change it.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    But then I have the same question as above, what would be the point of having a gender neutral article but no other changes? You still have to say manzana roja, so you still need to know the...

    But then I have the same question as above, what would be the point of having a gender neutral article but no other changes? You still have to say manzana roja, so you still need to know the gender of any noun you're playing with. At that point, is there any difficulty in saying la once you already know the gender of the noun? If the difficulty is knowing what noun an águila is, I get it. But removing gender from just articles and leaving it for adjectives and everything else seems... I don't know, odd to me. You've already done the difficult part of identifying the gender, it feels like picking between el and la is the simple part at that point, no? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding!

    In regards to your example, yup, you're exactly right, depends on the region. Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish (my own) aren't identical. It's just one of those things that would make those countries unique. Well, partly. We do have a Real Academia Española which will eventually wade in, and we do listen to it when we write in proper castellano. But languages are living things.

    As a Puerto Rican, we probably have more English loanwords than most other Latin countries. So we have palquin (parking), and that's masculine (el palquin). El friser (freezer). El jambelger (hamburger).

    I'm actually having trouble writing these because we never write these words, we would actually write parking, freezer and hamburger. But they're part of our regular Spanish parlance and that's how we would say them. There are Spanish words for these, estacionamiento, congelador, hamburguesa. But they're not as commonly used, and for the last example, never used at all.

    The vast majority of loanwords default to masculine, I'm looking at a loan word list right now because I couldn't think of a feminine one too of my head. Ganga (gang) is feminine. Membresía (membership) is feminine. They both end with -a, and I'm not 100% these aren't just real Spanish words that started as English. Essentially, the rule probably is that if ends with -a it's feminine, and everything else is masculine, as the neuter in Spanish is masculine.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    Oh, no worries, I'm just going through my logic on my end! I dunno! In your example, it's because the verb already carries the person. Quiero already has the first person baked into it, so the yo...

    Oh, no worries, I'm just going through my logic on my end!

    I dunno! In your example, it's because the verb already carries the person. Quiero already has the first person baked into it, so the yo is only necessary for emphasis. Funnily enough, identical to Greek. You would say θέλω αυτό to say I want this (quiero esto), but you can emphasise the first person by saying εγώ θέλω αυτό as well. In that case, you can drop the gender pronoun. You could say quiere esto as opposed to ella quiere esto.

    But I don't think you can drop the articles like that. Quiero manzana. Ok, do you want an apple or the apple, or maybe that apple over there, or maybe a specific apple in your hand? La, una, esa and esta give you all those meanings. I feel that you've lost a feature of the language, but I don't really see what you've gained in return.

    In your last example, there's nothing inherently wrong with a language doing that, but since you already know what the gender for those words is, is it really a burden to use la for the feminine nouns? I get that not knowing the gender puts you in a bind (e.g. el agua), but if you know the gender of the words hermana, hija and esposa, there's not a big issue, right? The same way you wouldn't write "hte sister", you wouldn't write "el hermana". Both get the meaning across, but they're not grammatically correct.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on What's the best Pikmin game? in ~games

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    All I can add to your description of 3 is that I don't play Pikmin at all, and when my wife wants to play 2P, I always steal her victory macaron and she gets very very angry with me for winning...

    All I can add to your description of 3 is that I don't play Pikmin at all, and when my wife wants to play 2P, I always steal her victory macaron and she gets very very angry with me for winning that way.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    Well, to be fair, my language didn't really decide it, Latin did. Latin had three genders, neuter (-um), masculine (-us) and feminine (-a). In Spanish (and many other romance languages), neuter...

    Well, to be fair, my language didn't really decide it, Latin did. Latin had three genders, neuter (-um), masculine (-us) and feminine (-a). In Spanish (and many other romance languages), neuter and masculine were merged into one (-o), which is partly why masculine is default, as its taken the place of the neuter.

    Even if you removed the articles, you would still struggle because what are you going to do with adjectives? Say you invent a gender neutral article that stands for the. Ok, now say the red wall. The pared... what, rojo or roja? You still need the gender there. And what of you need to say the red wall is hard? The red what is... duro or dura?

    The entire language is gendered top to bottom, because the language is just Latin with one less gender. And if you know pared is feminine, then it's not an issue; it's la.

    I dunno, it feels entirely normal to me!

    1 vote

  11. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    That's a really cool thing to know! It wasn't covered by the material I was reading, it just suddenly showed up as an example sentence. One misconception cleared up, 1000 to go 🤣

    That's a really cool thing to know! It wasn't covered by the material I was reading, it just suddenly showed up as an example sentence.

    One misconception cleared up, 1000 to go 🤣

  12. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    As a native Spanish speaker (and therefore biased), is it that hard? Masculine words tend to end with o, and feminine with a. There's exceptions to that, but it'll probably get you 90% of the way....

    As a native Spanish speaker (and therefore biased), is it that hard? Masculine words tend to end with o, and feminine with a. There's exceptions to that, but it'll probably get you 90% of the way.

    Of course there's words like pared (feminine) where you'll stumble. And día and noche and sol. Actually now that I think about it, good luck.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    As someone who only knows about 150 kanji, I just want you to know that you're scaring the shit out of me. It's like being on a queue for the roller coaster and seeing everyone leaving it puke...

    As someone who only knows about 150 kanji, I just want you to know that you're scaring the shit out of me.

    It's like being on a queue for the roller coaster and seeing everyone leaving it puke their guts out.

  14. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    Thank you so much for the explanation, that's much better than the shrugs I was getting! Yes, I still find the concept of the topic vs subject confusing. I was thinking of は as the primary subject...

    Thank you so much for the explanation, that's much better than the shrugs I was getting!

    Yes, I still find the concept of the topic vs subject confusing. I was thinking of は as the primary subject and が as a secondary one, but it's not that.

    So in my example I would be saying something like, today I (and not another person) etc? Like, is the main function of multiple wa's emphasis?

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    I think I saw a sentence the other way that went something like 今日は私は etc etc, and I was like you can have two was? That's not a thing in anything else I've read anywhere. I guess because 今日 is...

    I think I saw a sentence the other way that went something like 今日は私は etc etc, and I was like you can have two was? That's not a thing in anything else I've read anywhere. I guess because 今日 is always followed by a は and never a に, even though it's referring to a time, but if you're still the topic of the sentence, then watashi has to be followed by one as well.

    It's such a confusing language.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    It's all fucking vibes too! Sometimes my wife will say, well, へ just feels better than に in this context, and I'm like, fuck you!

    It's all fucking vibes too! Sometimes my wife will say, well, へ just feels better than に in this context, and I'm like, fuck you!

    4 votes

  17. Comment on What is your pet peeve with language acquisition? in ~humanities.languages

    Raistlin
    Link
    I can only speak to the languages I've attempted to learn. Greek: surprise motherfucker, there's two versions of every verb we've covered so far, have fun going back to the beginning! Japan: I'm...

    I can only speak to the languages I've attempted to learn.

    Greek: surprise motherfucker, there's two versions of every verb we've covered so far, have fun going back to the beginning!

    Japan: I'm sorry my Japanese friends, you cannot have the particle で do literally everything. I can't deal with it.

    17 votes

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    There's obviously something good about it, because I don't always (or usually!) finish old RPGs that I don't already have nostalgia for. Like, I've sat on Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn for a...

    There's obviously something good about it, because I don't always (or usually!) finish old RPGs that I don't already have nostalgia for. Like, I've sat on Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn for a year now,.on disc 2. And I do eventually want to finish it and move on to the next game, but I do have to push myself into doing so. With XS1, I just played every day.

    I'll be frank, I don't think I fully understand every aspect of the combat in XS2. I think in theory you're meant to stock up and then down or air after breaking the enemy, and then wail on them. But it turns every single random encounter into a fully engaged fight, and I hate it. Dungeons are already stressful with puzzles and enemies and bosses and how long they are, it doesn't help to turn every encounter into a high stakes fight. The only thing saving this game for me if the fact that you can break the level curve with the Shion dungeon, and the fact that I have save states so I can stop playing whenever. I also really dislike the class and skill system. In XS1, every character had their niche and upgrade path. Here, it feels a lot of characters are pretty aame-y.

    The story feels less coherent than the first game, but the highs are still pretty high. I like the URTV storyline, and every scene with Albedo is still amazing. I've reached the Labyrinthos (is that the name?) core now.

    Stat Ocean Till the End of Time is probably my favourite JRPG of all time, so when I compare the games, it's a high compliment for me! I beat SO1, and never finished SO2 (it's also on my list of games I mean to finish). Beat 4, fell out of the series after that game.

    Oh man, I love hokey early 00s English anime voice acting. Hearing that kind of voice direction sends Cupid arrows straight into my heart.

  19. Comment on I want an RPG with reverse leveling in ~games

    Raistlin
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    This isn't quite what you're thinking for, but Lost Dimension is an RPG where you started with your fall party of 11, and by the end, it gets whittled down to 6. The conceit of the game is that...

    This isn't quite what you're thinking for, but Lost Dimension is an RPG where you started with your fall party of 11, and by the end, it gets whittled down to 6. The conceit of the game is that there's a traitor in every floor, and you have to figure out which one. The traitors are always randomised (which makes sense in the world, once you know how the story goes), so you won't know what your final party will be by the end of the game. People you kill will give skills to other characters, including special skills only some characters know if using the skills from the dead ones, so it's a really fun game to play.

    Your characters level up, so it's not the same as your request, but it's an interesting implementation of losing access to tools you started with little by little.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Raistlin
    Link Parent
    Man, I might wait a little bit to start after the news, huh?? Sounds like it'll be a great place to start!

    Man, I might wait a little bit to start after the news, huh?? Sounds like it'll be a great place to start!