HALT! Do You Have Sensory Issues? Overwhelmed By Sound In A Messy Environment? Desperately Wanting To

Someone put the beach beneath my feet and the salty humid air

forget about touching grass, i need to touch THE SEA I NEED TO GO INTO THE WATER I NEED TO DIVE INTO THE SEA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Prof after saying maybe we should be teaching these to first year undergrads, the calculation is really simple but they might struggle with understanding forms - stuck on said calculation for the next 40 minutes of class.

Why are mathematicians* so USELESS at simple arithmetic? You're telling me I possess knowledge that would get me hailed as a lord 2000 years ago, but if I had two bags of wheat in one hand and three in the other, I would say there's six bags? What the fuck

*it's me, I'm mathematicians

If I were writing a math textbook I’d have a section in the beginning called “A Note on Notation” where I introduce all the notation Im using. And everyone would want to fuck me sooooo bad

ADHD is so debilitating and it isn’t talked about enough. Imagine your body doesn’t produce enough of the most essential neurotransmitter. You are constantly seeking this neurotransmitter through any way possible, and it’s why you get addicted to doing things or focusing so heavily on something you forget to meet every single basic need.

You sit there and question what the fuck is wrong with you because it was so easy to study yet you just didn’t do it. It was so easy to do the things you stopped doing but you literally can’t do them.

Like wtf do you fucking mean I was born with a chemical imbalance that makes me incapable of getting up??? Wtf do you mean I have to take stimulants to counteract crippling ADHD symptoms, and then those stimulants actually just make me like everyone else????

Dude. What the fuck.

I have a headache

everything IS like everything else

Tamil Linguistics thread (bc nobody cares but me)

but really, if you are interested in linguistics at all, give this post a read, because this shit really blew my mind ...

have been reading the following paper: https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/public/h_sch_9a.pdf

"The Tamil Case System" (2003) written by Harold F. Schiffman, Professor Emeritus of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture, University of Pennsylvania

Tamil is one of the oldest continuously-spoken languages in the world, dating back to at least 500 BCE, with nearly 80 million native speakers in South India and elsewhere, and possessed of several interesting characteristics:

a non-Indo-European language family (the Dravidian languages, which include other languages in South India - Malayalam being the most closely related major language - and one in Pakistan)

through the above, speculative ties to the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the first major human civilizations (you can read more about that here)

an agglutinative language, similar to German and others (so while German has Unabhängigkeitserklärungen, and Finnish has istahtaisinkohankaan, in Tamil you can say pōkamuṭiyātavarkaḷukkāka - "for the sake of those who cannot go")

an exclusively head-final language, like Japanese - the main element of a sentence always coming at the end.

a high degree of diglossia between its spoken variant (ST) and formal/literary variant (LT)

cool retroflex consonants (including the retroflex plosives ʈ and ɖ) and a variety of liquid consonants (three L's, two R's)

and a complex case system, similar to Latin, Finnish, or Russian. German has 4 cases, Russian has at least 6, Latin has 6-7, Finnish has 15, and Tamil has... well, that's the focus of Dr. Schiffman's paper.

per most scholars, Tamil has 7-8 cases - coincidentally the same number as Sanskrit. The French wikipedia page for "Tamoul" has 7:

Dr. Schiffman quotes another scholar (Arden 1942) giving 8 cases for modern LT, as in common in "native and missionary grammars", i.e. those written by native Tamil speakers or Christian missionaries. It's the list from above, plus the Vocative case (which is used to address people, think of the KJV Bible's O ye of little faith! for an English vocative)

... but hold on, the English wiki for "Tamil grammar" has 10 cases:

OK, so each page adds a few more. But hold on, why are there multiple suffix entries for each case? Why would you use -otu vs. -utan, or -il vs -ininru vs -ilirintu? How many cases are there actually?

Dr. Schiffman explains why it isn't that easy:

The problem with such a rigid classification is that it fails in a number of important ways ... it is neither an accurate description of the number and shape of the morphemes involved in the system, nor of the syntactic behavior of those morphemes ... It is based on an assumption that there is a clear and unerring way to distinguish between case and postpositional morphemes in the language, when in fact there is no clear distinction.

In other words, Tamil being an agglutinative language, you can stick a bunch of different sounds onto the end of a word, each shifting the meaning, and there is no clear way to call some of those sounds "cases" and other sounds "postpositions".

Schiffman asserts that this system of 7-8 cases was originally developed for Sanskrit (the literary language of North Indian civilizations, of similar antiquity to Tamil, and the liturgical language of Vedic Hinduism) but then tacked onto Tamil post-facto, despite the languages being from completely different families with different grammars.

Schiffman goes through a variety of examples of the incoherence of this model, one of my favorites quoted from Arden 1942 again:

There is no rule as to which ending should be used ... Westerners are apt to use the wrong one. There are no rules but you can still break the rules. Make it make sense!!

Instead of sticking to this system of 7-8 cases which fails the slightest scrutiny, Dr. Schiffman instead proposes that we throw out the whole system and consider every single postposition in the language as a potential case ending:

Having made the claim that there is no clear cut distinction between case and postpositions in Tamil except for the criterion of bound vs. unbound morphology, we are forced to examine all the postpositions as possible candidates for membership in the system. Actually this is probably going too far in the other direction ... since then almost any verb in the language can be advanced to candidacy as a postposition. [!!]

What Schiffman does next is really cool, from a language nerd point of view. He sorts through the various postpositions of the language, and for each area of divergence, uses his understanding of LT and ST to attempt to describe what shades of meaning are being connoted by each suffix. I wouldn't blame you for skipping through this but it is pretty interesting to see him try to figure out the rules behind something that (eg. per Arden 1942) has "no rule".

On the "extended dative", which connotates something like "on the behalf of" or "for the sake of":

I especially find his analysis of the suffix -kitte fascinating, because Schiffman uncovers a potential case ending in Spoken Tamil that connotes something about the directness or indirectness of an action, separate from the politeness with which the person is speaking to their interlocutor.

Not to blather on but here's a direct comparison with Finnish, which as stated earlier has 15 cases and not the 7-8 commonly stated of Tamil:

What Schiffman seems to have discovered is that ST, and LT too for that matter, has used existing case endings and in some cases seemingly invented new ones to connote shades of meaning that are lost by the conventional scholar's understanding of Tamil cases. And rather than land on a specific number of cases, he instead says the following, which I find a fascinating concept:

The Tamil Case System is a kind of continuum or polarity, with the “true” case-like morphemes found at one end of the continuum, with less case-like but still bound morphemes next, followed by the commonly recognized postpositions, then finally nominal and verbal expressions that are synonymous with postpositions but not usually recognized as such at the other extreme. This results in a kind of “dendritic” system, with most, but not all, 8 of the basic case nodes capable of being extended in various directions, sometimes overlapping with others, to produce a thicket of branches. The overlap, of course, results from the fact that some postpositions can occur after more than one case, usually with a slight difference in meaning, so that an either-or taxonomy simply does not capture the whole picture.

How many cases does Tamil have? As many as its speakers want, I guess.

bitches will love magic systems and then dread studying stem because its hard. Like, your mind IS the magic! Physicists, biologists, and chemists are literal wizards. They can transmute substances and cure diseases and predict the future. Engineers have made structures that stand for millennia and rocks that think and enchanted clothes and wonders we can barely imagine. Mathematicians are eldritch creatures that can peer into the fabric of reality and will reveal what they see if only you learn their language.

So yes, stem is difficult and esoteric and maybe can’t be mastered, but its literal magic and its everywhere and if you can’t appreciate that, I don’t even know how you get through the day.

this is also a reminder to take care of your mind. Magic runs on your mind and sheer willpower. If you’re studying late and getting drowsy, go to sleep. Consider meditating if you’re stressed out. Exercise regularly. It’s definitely not easy, but the benefits are real.

“ok is this math really useful though what’s the point of it existing does it matter or is there no practical application” alright. if you write a poem does it matter? Is there an application? What if I killed you

I just watched a beutifull and and emotionall video by Patricia Taxxon on youtube and it reminded me of something I used to be very close to but have since stopped doing, and that is to just look at math and play! Math is inherently arbitrary! By definition math is art! It's a way to grasp at the world, yes, but it's also a vehicle into creating entierly new worlds! New dimentions! New, novel kinds of logic and causality! You can take any single operation, map it to an arbitrary unused symbol, and just! Use it! In different eqasions! In different contexts! You can stretch you conceptions of what is a number, a value, space itself, and it's all so fun and inventive, and you can draw fractals! So so so so many fractals!

And it can be hard to see it that way. Especially after going through public education, especially after being beaten into the ground with incomprehensible notation of lond dead professors, after being offered only the most optimised and abstracted of formulas with no basis on which to place them but! Math is a jurney! To discovery of not only reality but yourself! What compells you; what you see with ease and what just does not compute, what is the rjeason for all of that notation, what would happen if you just assumed something stupid! And that stupid thing can sometimes be revolutionary to your understanding of numbers! Math and notation is an art form and I'm heartbroken people aren't seeing it for that! Because it's too esoteric or intimidating or because they've been made to feel like they could never succseed at it! Becouse someone hurt you in an attempt to teach you how to fill out a standardised test.

My plea is, to give math a try, look for something that resonated with you, or just draw some triangles and sqares; make a fractal; define how it's built and try to see what comes of it, there's so many things to discover. Try to proove a simple formula. Visualise! Solve a simple problem! It's intimidating; but it doesn't have to be! It's impossible to fail at mathematics, you can only learn from your mistakes, I beg of you, try.