Can My Fellow Transmascs In Christ Please Stop For A Minute To Consider Why It Is That Rowling And Her

i love you and we will make it thru this together

the short answer is that babies are just goated at phonology. the working theory is that in order to acquire language as fast as possible, our brains need to be receptive to any and all phonetic information from birth (and possibly even earlier; there's some evidence that prenatal infants pick up on rhythm and pitch information from the sound waves that travel from the parent to the womb). linguists have been testing them on this for a long time, and until they're about 6 month babies can distinguish phonemes from languages they've never been exposed to and who's phonology is completely different to their own. eventually the brain starts to lose that ability in order to focus on correctly articulating those sounds, which is an incredibly complex task, not to mention once you have to start arranging them into patterns to form words and sentences. basically to do takes up lot of cognitive effort that then can't be used to maintain such a massive inventory of sounds.

as for adults, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that it's impossible to learn phonology, since in order to fluently speak a second language you have to be able to understand and produce all the sounds, even if they're not 100% perfect. but in terms of why it's so much more difficult to perfect than something like syntax, it's partly of your brain not being as flexible anymore and, consequently both having a worse memory and a deeply engrained phonemic inventory, to the point that it's difficult for non-native speakers to even "hear" the difference between contrasting sounds your not familiar with (to be clear it's not that you physically can't hear it, it just doesn't register phonologically). this is also why people have consistent accents instead of making pronunciation errors at random; they're still following a set of structural rules, most likely very similar to the ones of native speakers, but with the influence of their first language changing it slightly.

so like. as i understand it, at any age, if your exposure to language is restricted to a single language, you will learn that language. like it just sort of happens, your brain figures out its grammar, semantics, etc, formal training HELPS but is not required. but this is *not* the case with the language's phonology! people will live in a foreign-phone country for years, primarily exposed to its language, they will understand it perfectly, generate it perfectly, and yet will still have a strong "accent" if not trained how to avoid it. that's weird, right? why doesnt the brain learn the phonology? (and why does it learn it perfectly as a baby?) is it too "low level", muscular-level, and that stuff gets "hardened" while higher level stuff is more flexible..?

i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

part 2 was also pretty bad :( I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with exploring a more at-face-value right wing reading of Nietzsche, and it's pretty silly to insist that that reading isn't supported by his work. But it's still an odd choice to not acknowledge any leftist/deluezian analysis, since imo there's a lot of interesting stuff there! anyway shout out to Liv Agar's podcast ep about contrapoint's equally disappointing Nietzsche takes that made me interested in his work to begin with

philosophytube really pissed off the deluezeheads this time huh

"oppression olympics"

let’s groove tonight, share the spice of life

this piqued my interest so I went to read the story and oh my god you weren't lying it's actually abysmal

why is it so unnecessarily spiteful?? what did Le Guin ever do to her?!??

the isabel fall event was, of course, fueled by transphobia but its genuinely pathetic, looking back, at how much of it appeared to be fueled by petty professional jealousy over the mere concept of being completely overshadowed by something and someone novel to the field

please look at this picture junji ito drew of his moms crusty white dog

once every 2 million babies, a “strong baby” is born. That baby has the strength of one hundred regular babies. I am that baby, and I wish you a merry christmas