One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence

Example: silk moths as a base species

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.

everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see

Compilation

Forgetting another good one

never not thinking about Poison Jr

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

@dispatchrabbi @jenesaispourquoi

Thank you @startedwellthatsentence. And English is NOT the only language to do this, either. Spanish words like Alhambra, alcalde, albóndiga, alcohol, etc. all take el or la in the definite, but you know what? All these words come from Arabic where the al means “the”. So if you say el alcalde, you’re saying “the the mayor”—etymologically, anyway. But it doesn’t matter, because alcalde is the Spanish word now that has a specific meaning used in Spanish. Same thing with “chai” in English—or “sushi” or “burrito” or “salsa”. Seriously, in Spanish, salsa means “sauce”, so saying “salsa sauce” in English is redundant. But listen. That’s what happens when languages borrow words. A language doesn’t get to decide to take a word back if a language has borrowed it incorrectly. It just happens. And after a while, the “borrowing” isn’t a borrowing anymore: It’s now a word. And the language of origin can’t change the meaning any more than we can change the modern meaning of Japanese サラリーマン (from English “salary man”). It’s their word now.

doomer "none of the math I do has applications to th real world lmao" vs wonder experiencer "all the math in the world has amazing applications we haven't even found yet"

Hello welcome my ADHD themed gameshow, "So you were holding it literally moments ago but now it's gone" the where YOU look for whatever you were just holding while going increasingly mad

I'm just trying to get the mood right

Reblog if you didn't notice the missing words

Young me was like "I love maths because there's no needless memorisation or arbitrary rules. Everything that is true can be deduced in the exam if you forget how it works." and now it's like Cauchy-Schwartz Gale-Stewart Knaster-Taski Church-Turing If-You-Didn't-Learn-These-Names-You're-Going-To-Have-A-Bad-Time

This is accurate

our friend's daughter is at the age where she is extremely chatty and speaking in full sentences, and i love kids' use of language.

apparently all strangers used to be "ladies," but now they are "neighbors." since they speak english exclusively at home, "neighbors" speak german; it was very distressing to hear her mom speak german once, because, in her words, "you're not a doctor or a neighbor!"

When learning how to talk, each one of my 3 sons went through a phase where I was the only person they said "She" for. Obviously, SHE was Mom, and HE was the rest of the world

Three sons, and I was the only female in the household (dog was male too).

i love the idea of a mode of language where the human noun classification system is “one’s own mother” and “everyone else”

I had a period as a small child when my mum (Mama) and sister (Lala) had unique identifiers, as did this one random family friend. He was Baba (Albanian for Dad). No-one else was ever Baba. Both me and my dad were Dada, which caused much confusion.

I apparently mostly only pointed at other people, except sometimes other adult men were also Dada.