https://twitter.com/ClarityInView/status/1663464384570576896

To Preserve and Restore the Best of Classical Liberal Western Civilization, where Individual Liberty is the Foundation of the Social Compact in Free Societies.

  • Antoine_St_Hexubeary [none/use name]
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    1 year ago

    One which the West rejected thousands of years ago

    China already had a rich literary tradition while the Germanic peoples were still in the "this foreigner is carrying leaves covered in squiggles, we'd better kill him" stage, but okay.

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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    1 year ago

    english is so fucked up in terms of its phonetics that it's genuinely hardly different in practice, if vastly in form, from traditional Chinese calligraphy anyway. you're not sounding out english words as you read them, if you're a comfortable or native speaker. you're processing each word as its own unit. it's why you didn't even notice the the second word there for a second. that second "the." the one right back there. because you're brain isn't processing this one letter at a time, it's doing so one word cluster at a time, and discarding the extraneous content.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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      1 year ago

      maybe someone with more familiarity can correct me, but also aren't a lot of chinese characters essentially treated as like a syllabary anyway? like how the characters in "ni hao" are those syllables?

      • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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        1 year ago

        mandarin speakers, in addition to distinguishing between 4 different tones, also distinguish between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants, and also has three different series of fricatives/affricates at points of articulation that range roughly between the english sounds "s/ts" and "sh/ch"; so that's a total of 6 different consonantal sounds that english speakers can't differentiate, in addition to distinguishing between P'eijing (with a puff of air, written in pinyin as Peijing) and Peijing (without that puff of air, feels soft to a native english speaker, like a "b" but not vocalized, written in pinyin as Beijing).

        in short, the english brainpan could fucking never

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology

          • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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            1 year ago

            :amerikkka: i'm just joking around, languages are obviously pretty universally complex in unique ways. i just wanted to post some mandarin fun facts and make fun of anglos.

            also, no one asked me anything?

  • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
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    1 year ago

    one could argue that, if one was a dipshit racist that had no idea what one was talking about

  • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]
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    1 year ago

    One could argue that civilization in China has existed for thousands of years. Its writing system has existed for a similarly long time and there was no material reason to change as it was part of the cultural hegemony of the region. You could further argue that written language is not phrenolgy

  • buh [she/her]
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    1 year ago

    I pray that one day Katherine evolves past a very primitive form of communication

  • MalarchoBidenism [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    One could :debatebro-r: that :eu-cool: :amerikkka: continued use of an alphabet instead of :hexbear-retro: emotes is a sign that it has not :darwin: past :monke-beepboop: One which :sicko-hexbear: :bugs-no: years ago. :thinkin-lenin: One might :debatebro-l: this difference in language makes :sicko-hexbear: more flexible in poop and pee than :lmayo: can ever be

  • muddi [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    Chengyu are 4 letter idioms which often have a cultural or historical tie.

    There aren't a lot of 4 letter acronyms which English speakers across all dialects and closely-related-yet-separate languages like Frisian would recognize the meaning and context. Maybe just something like RSVP. Not very flexible at all

    • Antoine_St_Hexubeary [none/use name]
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      1 year ago

      I think a more general way to describe this phenomenon might be: the English language didn't develop any completely-natural-sounding poetic forms until very recently.

      E.g. due to some combination of "inferiority complex" and "pathological obsession with tradition" (probably more of the latter), Anglos spent the Renaissance writing poetry in iambic pentameter, which was borrowed from ancient Greek, a language whose prosody has nothing in common with English prosody. Thanks to Bill Shakespeare and the Anglo education system's obsession with him, everyone reading this probably knows a couple of stock phrases in iambic pentameter, but they're not that useful in everyday conversation, are they. Part of the reason for this is they do not sound like normal English.

      Ironically (or not), the earliest example of a poetic form that is exceptionally well-adapted to English might be blues lyrics. This might explain why Blues-derived (or, if you prefer, "Blues-appropriated") musical genres have had such staying power in the Anglo world, and why their lyrics often seem so quotable.