231 posts
Latest Posts by jolzr2 - Page 6
she said what she said
have you ever read a fanfic so good that you wanted to write a fanfic about that fanfic, but was too shy / too intimidated to ask for the author’s permission and too afraid that your writing wouldn’t be half as good as theirs and that it would be an insult to their work that was basically a literal masterpiece, so you just sat there fantasizing about their work and how beautiful it was and how you wished you could just eat it and how you wished canon could write your blorbos half as good as this writer did and how you just wanted to cry because you just loved that fic so much????
when I say writers, fanfic writers are always included — because they’re just as valid and talented as every other writer who writes and sells original works
College friendship is sending one of your friends who's graduating soon a giant list of monster theory and gothic horror academic reading recs so they can download as many PDFs as possible before they lose their university database access
sometimes i watch golden girls and i just tear up remembering everything each cast member did for the queer community
estelle getty lost her nephew to AIDS and moved in with him during the last months of his life to take care of him. she started a foundation that cares for people affected by AIDS that's still there to this day. she saw one of the writers on her show was queer, walked right up to him and said "you're one of us!" and promised to protect him. she put her career on the line to become an outspoken ally of AIDS patients at a time when it would've been career suicide
bea arthur was a staunch gay and trans ally who donated a lot of her time and money to helping homeless lgbt youth. when she died, she left them thousands of dollars to stay afloat after she was gone. she was incredibly socially active in the queer community!
rue mcclanahan was a staunch advocate of marriage rights for gay couples and openly devoted her time and money for the fight for equality. she also openly participated in queer spaces and loved the community with her entire heart. she was intimately aware of gay mens' particular love for her character blanche and she fully embraced it
everybody knows by now about betty white's activism, but i'll say it anyway. not only did she join the fight for marriage equality, but she was a great mother to her lesbian stepdaughter. she participated in anti-bullying campaigns specifically against lgbt youth. she accompanied liberace to events because it wasn't safe for him to be out. she loved us and she fought for us just like the others
all four of them did SO MANY amazing things for us, and it makes me happy that we had people like them -- that we still do in people like dolly parton! we didn't deserve them. i wish i could've met all of them and told them how grateful i am!
It’s crazy and fucked up that being yourself is actually the solution.
reblog if you believe fanfics are as valid as books that were published and sold by authors who write as their main careers. I'm trying to prove a point
has anyone else noticed how having romantic feelings for someone is not the most dignified experience ever
Why are some people so married to textbooks when it comes to language learning how do they think people learned languages before the invention of writing
The rest of the thread is here.
tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids. You won’t like what happens next.
Paris "I can't go to the same college as my boyfriend, that will look like I went there just to be with him— instead I'll go to the same college as my rival and request to be roommates because I think we still have an emotional journey together" Geller
Paris "I'm gonna seek the new girl out on campus to whisper poetry into her ear as an intimidation tactic" Geller
Paris "wow Rory dating would be so much easier if I were gorgeous and talented and charming and wonderful like you" Geller
Paris "going to this concert with you has literally been the best night of my life" Geller
Paris "I told you I didn't want to study in person because there would be no point in just sitting around together staring at each other, then showed up anyway" Geller
Paris "anytime I have a major life event, the first person I tell is Rory" Geller
Paris "we had a fight so now the only reasonable response is a broken-hearted swordfight" Geller
Gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English
In Revolutionary Girl Utena, the main character Utena is a girl (it says so in the title), but very conspicuously uses the masculine first person pronoun 僕 (boku) and dresses in (a variation of) the boys school uniform. Utena's gender, and gender in general, is a core theme of the work. And yet, I haven’t seen a single translation or analysis post where anyone considers using anything other than she/her for Utena when speaking of her in English. This made me wonder: how does one’s choice of pronouns in Japanese correspond to what one’s preferred pronouns would be in English?
There are 3 main differences between gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English
Japanese pronouns are used to refer to yourself (first-person), while English pronouns are used to refer to others (third-person)
The Japanese pronoun you use will differ based on context
Japanese pronouns signify more than just gender
Let’s look at each of these differences in turn and how these differences might lead to a seeming incongruity between one’s Japanese pronoun choice and one’s English pronoun choice (such as the 僕 (boku) vs she/her discrepancy with Utena).
Part 1: First-person vs third-person
While Japanese does technically have gendered third person pronouns （彼、彼女） they are used infrequently¹ and have much less cultural importance placed on them than English third person pronouns. Therefore, I would argue that the cultural equivalent of the gender-signifying third-person pronoun in English is the Japanese first-person pronoun. Much like English “pronouns in bio”, Japanese first-person pronoun choice is considered an expression of identity.
Japanese pronouns are used exclusively to refer to yourself, and therefore a speaker can change the pronoun they’re using for themself on a whim, sometimes mid-conversation, without it being much of an incident. Meanwhile in English, Marquis Bey argues that “Pronouns are like tiny vessels of verification that others are picking up what you are putting down” (2021). By having others use them and externally verify the internal truth of one’s gender, English pronouns, I believe, are seen as more truthful, less frivolous, than Japanese pronouns. They are seen as signifying an objective truth of the referent’s gender; if not objective then at least socially agreed-upon, while Japanese pronouns only signify how the subject feels at this particular moment — purely subjective.
Part 2: Context dependent pronoun use
Japanese speakers often don’t use just one pronoun. As you can see in the below chart, a young man using 俺 (ore) among friends might use 私 (watashi) or 自分 (jibun) when speaking to a teacher. This complicates the idea that these pronouns are gendered, because their gendering depends heavily on context. A man using 私 (watashi) to a teacher is gender-conforming, a man using 私 (watashi) while drinking with friends is gender-non-conforming. Again, this reinforces the relative instability of Japanese pronoun choice, and distances it from gender.
Part 3: Signifying more than gender
English pronouns signify little besides the gender of the antecedent. Because of this, pronouns in English have come to be a shorthand for expressing one’s own gender experience - they reflect an internal gendered truth. However, Japanese pronoun choice doesn’t reflect an “internal truth” of gender. It can signify multiple aspects of your self - gender, sexuality, personality.
For example, 僕 (boku) is used by gay men to communicate that they are bottoms, contrasted with the use of 俺 (ore) by tops. 僕 (boku) may also be used by softer, academic men and boys (in casual contexts - note that many men use 僕 (boku) in more formal contexts) as a personality signifier - maybe to communicate something as simplistic as “I’m not the kind of guy who’s into sports.” 俺 (ore) could be used by a butch lesbian who still strongly identifies as a woman, in order to signify sexuality and an assertive personality. 私 (watashi) may be used by people of all genders to convey professionalism. The list goes on.
I believe this is what’s happening with Utena - she is signifying her rebellion against traditional feminine gender roles with her use of 僕 (boku), but as part of this rebellion, she necessarily must still be a girl. Rather than saying “girls don’t use boku, so I’m not a girl”, her pronoun choice is saying “your conception of femininity is bullshit, girls can use boku too”.
Through translation, gendered assumptions need to be made, sometimes about real people. Remember that he/they, she/her, they/them are purely English linguistic constructs, and don’t correspond directly to one’s gender, just as they don’t correspond directly to the Japanese pronouns one might use. Imagine a scenario where you are translating a news story about a Japanese genderqueer person. The most ethical way to determine what pronouns they would prefer would be to get in contact with them and ask them, right? But what if they don’t speak English? Are you going to have to teach them English, and the nuances of English pronoun choice, before you can translate the piece? That would be ridiculous! It’s simply not a viable option². So you must make a gendered assumption based on all the factors - their Japanese pronoun use (context dependent!), their clothing, the way they present their body, their speech patterns, etc.
If translation is about rewriting the text as if it were originally in the target language, you must also rewrite the gender of those people and characters in the translation. The question you must ask yourself is: How does their gender presentation, which has been tailored to a Japanese-language understanding of gender, correspond to an equivalent English-language understanding of gender? This is an incredibly fraught decision, but nonetheless a necessary one. It’s an unsatisfying dilemma, and one that poignantly exposes the fickle, unstable, culture-dependent nature of gender.
Notes and References
¹ Usually in Japanese, speakers use the person’s name directly to address someone in second or third person
² And has colonialist undertones as a solution if you ask me - “You need to pick English pronouns! You ought to understand your gender through our language!”
Bey, Marquis— 2021 Re: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender
Rose divider taken from this post
seeing taylor say “we did it” and letting out a massive sigh of relief before taking her final bow at the last london show hits so hard after her instagram caption. i don’t think any of us can begin to fathom what she’s been grappling with in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack in vienna, what weight it must feel like to have the health and safety of thousands of people resting squarely on your shoulders. for her to get back on the eras tour stage in london this week and put on a brave face for everyone — knowing that just one wrong action, one wrong comment, could “provoke those who want to harm the fans who come to [her] shows” — took an incredible amount of courage. idk about you guys, but i just feel so overwhelmingly proud of her and i hope that her, the dancers, the band, and her crew can get some well-deserved rest now.
Old woman yuri
its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/
💀 my brother in christopher
❤️🩷🧡💛💚💙
Reminder
Taylor made Paper Rings (a song about marrying someone even if it isn’t showy) track 8 on her seventh studio album Lover
And made the title track, Lover (A SONG SHE MADE TO PLAY AT WEDDINGS THAT INCLUDES WEDDING VOWS) track 3
8.3 is Karlie Elizabeth Kloss’ birthday
How did she get away with this?
How did she make it out of the Lover era still straight to some fans?!
Some internet language things I really like:
Phrases like “that’s certainly a thing”, “it’s so shaped”, or “one of the most animals” (is there a name for this?)
when people write with little to no punctuation like they are just so done
More specifically, asking questions without punctuation i.e. ‘what’ or ‘why’. It’s like, you want to know but also you are resigned to the answer?
When people capitalise The Thing for emphasis - particularly if they add a trademark symbol to really drive The Point™ home
How we use both bold and italic text for emphasis, but they convey it in different ways and I can’t quite explain how
Responding to things exclusively with punctuation, because sometimes words fail you and all you can say is !!!
people understand that Spanish speakers speak different dialects of the Spanish language but don’t understand that black people speak a dialect of the English language
I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here. Its a long read but crazy. Its from Erik Painter
They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.
The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.
The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).
For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.
Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.
A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.
Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.
The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.
For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.
Here is an example of a coded message:
béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh
When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:
“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “
You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”
“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.
Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.
The Japanese language is one of the most indirect languages in the world. There are the obvious examples of this, such as when some customers try to enter a busy restaurant without a reservation and the staff say 難しいですね (”this is tricky…”) instead of simply telling them that there are no seats. However, I've noticed that Japanese’s indirectness may go much deeper than simple euphemism.
Japanese seems to come built-in with ways of avoiding directly addressing your conversation partner.
The Japanese way of expressing things often involves voicing your internal monologue, which means people will say things ostensibly to themselves, even though what they really want is to communicate to the other person. When I first noticed it, I thought it was a bit similar to how some (western) cartoons occasionally handle exposition by having a character mutter something to themselves so that the audience can hear. This can be seen in the following extremely common forms of expression:
Using adjectives as an exclamation
うま！Literal translation: “Delicious!” Semantic translation: “Wow, this is really good”
怖い！Literal translation: “Scary!” Semantic translation: “I’m scared!” or “This place is giving me the creeps”
It could be argued that these single word exclamations may not always be “talking to yourself”. But imo more often than not, they are spoken with the vibe of “I felt this adjective so strongly that the word just slipped straight through my internal monologue and out of my mouth”.
Wondering aloud (かな)
雨降るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will it rain or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if it’s gonna rain.”
今夜来るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will [they] come tonight or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if they’ll come tonight.”
Compared to the adjective examples, this is less ambiguous. There’s no direct translation for the verb “to wonder” in Japanese - you just wonder aloud! The literal translations sound funny because they only make sense if the speaker is talking to themself.
Explaining stuff to yourself (んだ)
あそこにあったんだ！(context: the listener has just shown the speaker something they were looking for) Literal translation: “There it is!” Semantic translation: “There it is!”
In this example, the literal and semantic translations are the same, because this is a case of talking to yourself in English! If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to say “there it is” when the person you’re talking to clearly already knows that’s where “it” is. Instead, the phrase serves to convey satisfaction and surprise.
まだ20歳なんだ！(context: the speaker has just found out from the listener that a friend of theirs is younger than they expected) Literal translation: “[She’s] only 20!” Semantic translation: “She’s only 20? That explains so much!”
In this example, んだ is used to mark the sentence as an explanation of something. The listener already knew the friend was only 20, so the aim of the sentence is not to convey new information, it’s to show that some sort of internal reasoning is happening within the speaker’s mind.
In the immortal words of Carly Rae Jepsen:
🎶 Do you talk to me, when you're talking to yourself? 🎶
For every Japanese speaker, the answer is yes!
Sources for Research on English Linguistics, Literature, and Culture
-> links to databases, archives, corpora, encyclopedias, and more
The following sites are for English studies, linguistics, and anglistics.
I could also do another list like this one for other related studies, such as classic philology, German studies, Scandinavian studies, Romance studies, and Slavic studies, in case that’s something you guys are interested in.
All of these sites should allow free access for everyone. Most of them are from Great Britain, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, and Germany.
(Please let me know, if any of the links don’t work)
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Collections / Databases / Archives / Anthologies:
About the USA (information about the US, including holidays, history, society, art and entertainment, media, government, politics, travel, sports, economy, and science)
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century (database of 50 works by African American women of the 19th century)
American Memory (digitalised material from the Americana collection of the Library of Congress)
American Song Sheets (collection of 1,800 song sheets from the 19th century)
American Verse Project (archive with American poetry until 1920)
Archive of Early American Images (7,000 images about North and South America from primary sources between 1492 and 1895)
Arthurian Fiction in Medieval Europe (information about the Arthurian tale and the scripts which spread it around Europe)
Atlas of Surveillance (records surveillance technologies used by US law enforcement agencies, including drones, body cameras, face recognition, etc.)
Australian Poetry Library (over 42,000 poems by over 170 Australian authors)
Bartleby.com (texts of (English-speaking) world literature with reference material; over 370,000 sites)
Bibliography of the International Arthurian Society (literature about the Arthurian tale)
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads (over 30,000 ballads from the 16th to the 20th century)
Bodleian Library Pre-1920 allegro Catalogue (printed matter in European languages and writings published before 1920 or purchased before 1989 by the Bodleian Library)
BookPage: Issue Archive (monthly information about new books and book reviews)
British Cartoon Archive (over 200,000 cartoons from comic books, newspapers, magazines, and books about British history)
British Fiction 1800-1829 (2,272 texts by about 900 authors of the early 19th century)
British Library Online Gallery: Virtual Books (virtual access to rare / old books of the British Library)
British National Bibliography (bibliography of books and periodicals of the British Library)
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (database about the life and works of Ben Jonson, a well-known Renaissance writer)
Cambridge History of English and American Literature (online version of the books)
Canadian Literature Archive (texts by Canadian authors)
Canadiana Online (over 200,000 texts of historical publications)
Casgliad y Werin Cymru = Peoples Collection Wales (document collection by 9 Welsh museums and libraries)
Collect Britain (over 90,000 images, photos, maps, and audio material from the British Library)
Contemporary Writers in the UK (biographical information about the most important contemporary authors of Britain and the Commonwealth)
Digital Collections / Harry Ransom Center (access to over 7,000 objects from literature, photography, film, and art, including manuscripts, letters, posters, photos, and drawings since the 16th century)
Digital Comic Museum (access to Public Domain Comics from the ‘Golden Age of Comicbooks’)
Documenting the American South (14 collections of primary sources about history and culture of the Southern States)
DraCor (collection of dramas in several languages published between 472 BC and 1947)
Early Americas Digital Archive (historical texts in regard to America, published between 1492 and the 19th century)
Early Modern Festival Books Database (over 3,000 texts about festival culture, published between 1200 and 1800 in 12 languages)
Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (interactive database about the morphosyntactic variation in spoken English)
English Broadside Ballad Archive (English ballads of early modern times with transcriptions of the texts and sometimes recordings of the music)
English Poetry Anthologies (English poems from 1250 to 1943)
English-Corpora.org (collection of English corpora)
Environmental History of the Americas Database (2,000 international texts about the environmental history of North and South America)
European Views of the Americas (32,000 European printed texts about America until 1750)
Familiar Quotations (online edition, includes 11,000 quotes of English literary history)
Fontes Anglo-Saxonici (all sources in English or Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England (until 1066) or Anglo-Saxon authors)
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS, 1861-1993) (official documentation of foreign-policy decisions of the USA)
Gender Inn (database with more than 8,400 texts about feminist theory and gender studies)
Grand Comics Database (database of all comics about North America published world-wide)
Hamnet : Folger Library Catalogue (online catalogue of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
HANSARD 1803-2005 (British parliamentary sessions from 1803 to 2005)
Hartlib Papers (database with all the letters of Samuel Hartlib)
Heroic in Victorian Periodicals (analyses the motive of heroism in Victorian Great Britain)
Historical Thesaurus of English (800,000 words from Old to Modern English with meanings, synonyms, etc.)
IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana (sheet music from the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society)
Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (index of 3,900 anthologies from before 1984)
Internet Shakespeare Editions (database about the life and works of Shakespeare)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (database of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror Literature)
IntraText Digital Library (texts about religion, philosophy, literature, and history in 39 languages)
ipl2: Information You Can Trust (catalogue of examined, evaluated, and commentated links to American websites)
Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator (2,000 peer reviewed journals about Japanese research in science, technology, and medicine)
John Johnson Collection (one of the largest collections of printed documents from British history)
Johnsons Dictionary Online (web version of Samuel Johnson’s ‘A Dictionary of the English Language’ (1755))
Joyce Papers 2002 (digitalised collection of the National Library of Ireland in Dublin)
Language in Australia and New Zealand (bibliography of 6,200 titles about Australian and New Zealand languages and language families)
Lecturing Women in Victorian Periodicals Database (Feminist lectures in Victorian England (14 periodicals))
Library of Anglo-American Culture & History
Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters (locations of English literature from the 18th century to today in Great Britain and Ireland)
Luminarium (English literature and history from the Middle Ages to the 18th century)
Making of America (primary sources of American history from 1859 to 1877 and secondary literature from 1840 to 1900)
Melville Electronic Library (online editions of the works of Hermann Melville)
Middle English Collection (database of 60 works and collections of works of Middle English literature)
MIT Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive (online access to Shakespeare performances from around the world)
MLA Language Map (map of the linguistic characteristics of different regions of the USA)
Modernist Journals Project (database of texts about modernism from 1890 to 1922)
New Face of Fiction (modern fiction of Canadian authors from Random House Canada)
OLC Anglistik - Online Contents (articles about anglistics / English studies)
Oxford Journals (by the Oxford University Press; collection of journals)
Oxford Languages (collection of language dictionaries)
Papakilo Database (database about history and culture of Hawaii)
Papers of Abraham Lincoln (database with handwritten papers and documents by Abraham Lincoln)
Pascal / Francis (database of journals and conference proceedings)
PEN America Digital Archive (archive of audio and video materials since 1966)
Perseus Digital Library / Renaissance Materials (collection of 80 texts of English Renaissance literature)
Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (corpus of all manuscripts of the poem ‘Piers Plowman’)
Polish Diaspora in the UK and Ireland (databank on how Polish immigrants influenced British literature and culture)
Popular History in Victorian Magazines Database (database of how popular history was presented in Victorian magazines)
Project Gutenberg (53,000 free ebooks and other texts)
Questia (5,000 free books)
REED Online (database of early English dramas from the Middle Ages to 1642)
Shapell Collection (collection of media about the history of the US in the 19th and 20th century)
SSSL Bibliography: A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature (secondary literature of more than 1,000 authors from the US south)
Swedish American Newspapers / Svensk-Amerikanska Tidningar (database of 300,000 newspaper pages from 28 different daily newspapers published in the US from 1859 to 2007)
TEAMS Middle English texts (online editions of Middle English texts with annotations and bibliographies)
Trove / National Library of Australia (search engine for media relating to Australia)
Vetusta Monumenta : Ancient Monuments, a Digital Edition (digital edition of ‘Vetusta Monumenta’ from 1718 to 1796 with scans of copperplate engravings and scientific commentary)
Victorian Dictionary (sources about life in Victorian London)
Vision of Britain Through Time (historic-geographic information about Great Britain)
Walt Whitman Manuscripts (archive of the manuscripts of Walt Whitman)
Welsh Journals Online (archive of 50 Welsh journals/magazines)
Wright American Fiction (digital library of American novels of the 19th century (1851 und 1875))
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Language Corpora:
British National Corpus (100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century)
corpora.unito (linguistic corpora for Italian, French, Spanish, English, and German)
Corpus of Early English Correspondence
Corpus of Electronic Texts (database with texts of Irish literature and literary history in Irish, English, Hiberno-Norman, and Latin)
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
Middle English Grammar Corpus (corpus of Middle English texts)
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Dictionaries / Encyclopedias:
Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Dictionary of Irish Biography (contains about 11,000 articles)
Dictionary of the Scots Language
EDD Online 3.0 (based on Joseph Wright’s ‘English Dialect Dictionary’, 1898-1905)
Encyclopaedia Britannica (general encyclopedia with over 90,000 editorally reviewed articles by 4,300 authors)
Encyclopedia of American Studies (800 texts about US history, politics, culture, society, and economy from precolonial times until now)
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (records the cultural movements and their influence on cultural communities in Europe in the wake of the Romantic period)
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (16,350 entries about Science Fiction authors, artists, and filmmakers, as well as entries about films, radio and TV productions, periodicals, and other publications)
Glottopedia (free editable encyclopedia by linguists for linguists)
Green’s Dictionary of Slang (dictionary by Jonathon Green)
Irish Dictionary Online (English - Irish dictionary)
Linguee (translation database by DeepL for word contexts)
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online (monolingual English dictionary)
Macmillan Dictionary (monolingual English dictionary)
Merriam-Webster (dictionary and thesaurus)
Oxford Learners Dictionary
Thesaurus of Old English (Old English (Anglo-Saxon) dictionary)
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Facts about the English language
English was invented in the year 927 by Lord English of England. Because 927 was a long time ago, he called it "Old English." Lord English of England was German, so the language was mostly just German with a dash of the language spoken by the original inhabitants of England, the Romans.
It became popular to speak English until 1066, when English Island was taken over by a French guy named Norman. Norman insisted everyone speak French, but they didn't know French so he just dropped some French words into the middle of the language and called it "Middle English."
After Middle English, trade patterns and technology such as the printing press and podcast allowed the infusion of numerous other languages, which all melted into English in their own way. Because they melted with each other, the new language was called Modern English. Several sounds and phonetics changed over the years as well, so this was called the era of the Colossal Vowel Movement.
About this time, England did its usual bullshit and colonized pretty much every place on Earth that it could. English thus spread like a linguistic coronavirus across America, Africa, Australia, and Atlantis, which managed to purge the English influence by sinking to its total destruction and thereby avoiding the horrors of having to speak English.
Today, English is the most spoken language on Earth, not because the most people speak it, but because those who do just never shut the fuck up. Several books have also been written in English, including "Fifty Shades of Grey," "A Weasel in My Meatsafe," and "Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly But In Reality Is Just A Natural Part Of The Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides."
If English were a dress, it would be purple.