Might as well share the picture directly here:

The linked blog post has a good explanation on why this is funny (at least for some people, incl. me).

It's a bit of pop linguistics about the dual number in English, with a few inaccuracies, but it's interesting regardless. I'll provide here some further historical info.

Proto-Indo-European contrasted three grammatical numbers: singular, dual, and plural. With the dual being used mostly for things that come in pairs (like arms or a couple). By Proto-Germanic times, the dual only survived in the pronouns, as you can see in this table:

Note those forms are reconstructed (I didn't want to clutter the table with asterisks). That ⟨θ⟩ is to be read as in "think", ⟨j⟩ as in "yes", and the vowels as in Spanish or Polish, with a mācron making them lōnger (longcat is looooong lōng).

The dual pronouns would survive until Early Middle English (up to 1350), but were increasingly less used. I believe most of the other pronouns from that table survived.

Archive link. It's a 40kyo figurine of a mammoth carved in ivory, marked with crosses and dots. The marks are as complex as proto-cuneiform acc. to the researchers.

Key points:

• The word surzhyk (суржик) ['surʒek] in Ukrainian originally refers to a mix of grains, or a flour made with that mix. It's being used to refer to a "mixed" Ukrainian + Russian linguistic variety. Kind of like Spanglish, but more like Portuñol.
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows people in central and eastern Ukraine using surzhyk more, and Russian less.
• Acc. to the text the surzhyk being used nowadays is markedly different from the one used in the 30s, as if the mix was originally "some Ukrainian with lots of Russian" and nowadays "some Russian with lots of Ukrainian".
• Attitudes towards surzhyk seem to be changing, too; from negative to positive.

Note: there's no way around politics, when it comes to language; it's an intrinsically political topic. However, I'd like to ask other users here to keep any potential discussion on-topic for this community. Also, please do not conflate populations with governments, OK?

Quick summary: excavations from the Boğazköy-Hattusha archaeological site (present-day Turkey) unearthed a tablet. That tablet is written mostly in Hittite, but it mentions an idiom from another language, "of the land of Kalašma", that would be spoken in the northwest of the Hittite empire (also in what's today Turkey).

Said language would be an Anatolian language; so it's a close-ish relative to Hittite (and Luwian, Palaic, etc.), and ultimately related to Russian, English, Italian, Hindi etc. (it's all Indo-European).

EDIT: @[email protected] linked an even better source. Enjoy!

I shared this recipe in another comm, then someone linked me this one, so I'm sharing the recipe here.

Picture stolen from some random site, but the recipe I'm sharing is the one I prepare. And I know the idea of sweet pasta might not be for everyone, but don't rule it out without trying, it's actually tasty.

Ingredients:

• 150g pasta. Short pasta with lots of texture works better; fusilli, farfalle, penne, they all work great, avoid something like spaghetti or linguine.
• water and salt, to cook the pasta. Yes, salt.
• 500g strawberries, washed, chopped into eights.
• around 4 tablespoons of sugar; more or less to taste.
• [optional] a drop of vanilla extract
• 200g sour cream. See the bottom for alternatives.
• [optional] peppermint leaves and/or crushed ricotta, for garnish

Preparation:

1. Boil the pasta in the same way you'd do it for savoury dishes, but use only half the amount of salt you like. It should be around a teaspoon of salt per litre of water.
2. Reserve 1/3 of the chopped strawberries aside. Add sugar and vanilla extract to the rest, then mash them together with a fork. Add the sour cream and mix it well.
3. Add pasta to the plate, then the strawberry/cream mix over it, mix it a bit, then pour the 1/3 of the chopped strawberries you reserved over the pasta. Then any garnish you might be using.
4. [Optional] Chill before serving.

Notes:

I often prepare this recipe with yoghurt instead of sour cream, for health reasons. I never tried using coconut cream but it feels like it might be a good option, for those who'd rather avoid dairy. If your concern is the fat instead, @[email protected] also mentions it being prepare with twaróg = cottage cheese. And, worst hypothesis, it's fine to omit the sour cream, IMO it tastes incomplete but still nice.

You can serve this recipe either warm or chilled. Personally I think it tastes way better chilled.

Raspberries or mulberries also work really well for this recipe.

It might be tempting to sub the salt from the pasta water with sugar, but I don't recommend it, the contrast between the sweet/sour "sauce" and the salty pasta is really nice.

The spiders in question are Stegodyphus dumicola aka African social spiders.

I couldn't find a link to the video in the article itself so here it is. Discretion is advised - it is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

Context.

Interesting short text about the history of Finnish, focusing mostly on its interaction with nearby Germanic languages.

Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

Interesting excerpt:

De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we're likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That's because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. "It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together."

Ah, here's a link to the paper!

{ "id": 5151814208, "name": "Tux", "description": "The penguin Tux is the mascot of the Linux operating system. Its white belly has been replaced with light blue, pink, and white stripes, as a reference to the Transgender Pride flag.", "links": { "website": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_flag" ] }, "path": { "48": [ [ 61, 139 ], [ 60, 138 ], [ 55, 138 ], [ 54, 137 ], [ 53, 137 ], [ 52, 136 ], [ 51, 135 ], [ 49, 135 ], [ 49, 133 ], [ 50, 132 ], [ 50, 131 ], [ 48, 129 ], [ 48, 125 ], [ 47, 124 ], [ 47, 123 ], [ 46, 123 ], [ 44, 121 ], [ 40, 121 ], [ 39, 122 ], [ 38, 122 ], [ 36, 124 ], [ 36, 132 ], [ 35, 133 ], [ 35, 137 ], [ 34, 138 ], [ 34, 140 ], [ 33, 141 ], [ 33, 147 ], [ 34, 148 ], [ 34, 149 ], [ 35, 150 ], [ 35, 151 ], [ 37, 151 ], [ 37, 153 ], [ 38, 154 ], [ 39, 155 ], [ 39, 158 ], [ 37, 158 ], [ 36, 159 ], [ 37, 160 ], [ 38, 160 ], [ 39, 159 ], [ 40, 160 ], [ 41, 160 ], [ 42, 159 ], [ 43, 160 ], [ 43, 159 ], [ 42, 158 ], [ 40, 158 ], [ 40, 155 ], [ 48, 155 ], [ 48, 157 ], [ 49, 158 ], [ 49, 159 ], [ 50, 160 ], [ 51, 159 ], [ 52, 160 ], [ 54, 160 ], [ 55, 159 ], [ 54, 158 ], [ 50, 158 ], [ 50, 156 ], [ 49, 155 ], [ 49, 154 ], [ 50, 153 ], [ 50, 151 ], [ 51, 151 ], [ 51, 148 ], [ 52, 148 ], [ 52, 144 ], [ 51, 144 ], [ 51, 141 ], [ 53, 141 ], [ 53, 142 ], [ 58, 142 ], [ 59, 141 ], [ 60, 141 ], [ 61, 140 ] ] }, "center": { "48": [ 42, 144 ] } }

I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.

I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.

{ "id": 3782328005, "name": ""Fuck flags" statement", "description": "The original version of the text says "Fuck flags. Fuck nations. We're on the same Earth.", as criticism against the huge flags found in Canvas and similar games. However, last minute edits replaced "Earth" with "fart!!".\n\nIt's placed where the aussie.zone intended to place the canton of a rather large Australian flag.", "links": {}, "path": { "48": [ [ 0, 24 ], [ 48, 24 ], [ 48, 0 ], [ 0, 0 ] ] }, "center": { "48": [ 24, 12 ] } }

{ "id": 4060099283, "name": "Purple Sus", "description": "A joke character created in the 2024 edition of Canvas, by drawing a crewmate (aka amongus; from the game "Among Us") with features from ponies (from the "My Little Pony" franchise), and the crewmate getting a tail.\n\nThe name is a play on typical pony names, plus the word "Sus" (suspicious), often used in the game.", "links": {}, "path": { "48": [ [ 89, 499 ], [ 89, 496 ], [ 87, 496 ], [ 86, 497 ], [ 84, 497 ], [ 83, 498 ], [ 85, 498 ], [ 85, 499 ] ] }, "center": { "48": [ 88, 498 ] } }

Interesting video on the stone that allowed researchers to decipher Ancient Egyptian. Check comments for a few notes.

Additional links with press coverage: ArcheologyMag, Oxford.

For context:

The Huns were nomadic people from Central Eurasia; known for displacing a bunch of Iranian (e.g. Alans) and and Germanic (e.g. Goths, Suebians etc.) speakers, that ultimately invaded the Roman Empire. They reached the Volga around 370 CE, and one of their leaders (Attila) is specially famous. Often believed to be a Turkic people, but if the study is correct they're from a completely different language family instead.

The Xiōng-Nú are mentioned by Chinese sources as one of the "Five Barbarians" (i.e. non-Han people). They would've lived in Central Eurasia between 300 BCE and 100 CE or so, and eventually became Han tributaries.

The Paleo-Siberian language in question would be an older form of Arin, a Yeniseian language. Yup, that same family believed by some to have relatives in the Americas.

For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.

Era só um trote.

The main idea behind this language is to become evolutionary food for other languages of my conworld. As such I'll probably never flesh it out completely, only the necessary to make its descendants feel a bit more natural.

Constructive criticism is welcome.

Context and basic info

The conworld I'm building has three classical languages, spoken 2~3 millenniums before the conworld present: Old Sirtki, Classical Tarune, and Mäkşna. And scholars in the conworld present are reconstructing their common ancestor, that they call "Proto-Sitama".

What I'm sharing here, however is none of their fancy reconstructions. It's the phonology of the language as it was spoken 7 millenniums before the conworld present. Its native name was /kʲær.mi.'zɑst/, or roughly "what we speak"; the language itself had no written version but it'll be romanised here as ⟨Cjermizást⟩.

Its native speakers were a semi-nomadic people, who lived mostly of livestock herding. They'd stay in a region with their herds, collect local fruits and vegetables, and then migrate for more suitable pasture as their animals required.

It was quite a departure from the lifestyle of their star travelling ancestors, who were born in a highly industrialised society in another planet.

Grammar tidbits

Grammar-wise, Cjermizást was heavily agglutinative, with an absolutive-ergative alignment and Suffixaufnahme. So typically you'd see few long polymorphemic words per sentence. Those morphemes don't always "stack" nicely together, so you often see phonemes being elided, mutated, or added to the word.

Consonants

Cjermizást features a contrast between "soft" and "hard" consonants. "Soft" consonants are palatalised, palatal, or post-alveolar; "hard" consonants cannot have any of those features. Both sets are phonemic, and all those consonants can surface outside clusters.

Palatalised consonants spawn a really short [j], that can be distinguished from true /j/ by length.

Although /j/ and /w/ are phonetically approximants, the language's phonology handles them as fricatives, being paired with /ɣ/ and /vʲ/ respectively.

/r rʲ/ surface as trills or taps, in free variation. The trills are more typical in simple onsets, while the taps in complex onsets and coda.

The contrast between /m n/ is neutralised when preceding another consonant in the same word, since both can surface as [m n ŋ]; ditto for /mʲ nʲ/ surfacing as [mʲ ɱʲ ɲ].

Coda /g/ can also surface as [ŋ], but only in word final position; as such, it doesn't merge with the above.

Liquids clustered with voiceless fricatives and/or stops have voiceless allophones.

Vowels

Proto-Sitama's vowel system is a simple square: /æ i ɒ u/. They have a wide range of allophones, with three situations being noteworthy:

• /ɒ u/ are typically fronted to [Œ ʉ] after a soft consonant
• /æ i/ are backed to [ɐ ɪ] after a hard velar
• unstressed vowels are slightly centralised

Accent

Accent surfaces as stress, and it's dictated by the following rules:

1. Some suffixes have an intrinsic stress. If the word has 1+ of those, then assign the primary stress to the last one. Else, assign it to the last syllable of the root.
2. If the primary stress fell on the 5th/7th/9th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 3rd-to-last
3. If the primary stress fell on the 4th/6th/8th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 2nd-to-last.
4. Every two syllables, counting from the one with the primary stress, add a secondary stress.

Phonotactics

Max syllable is CCVCC, with the following restrictions:

• complex onset: [stop] + [liquid]; e.g. /pl/ is a valid onset, */pw/ isn't
• complex coda: [liquid or nasal] + [stop or fricative]; e.g. /nz/ is a valid coda, */dz/ isn't

If morphology would create a syllable violating such structure, an epenthetic /i/ dissolves the cluster.

Consonant clusters cannot mix hard and soft consonants. When such a mix would be required by the morphology, the last consonant dictates if the whole cluster should be soft or hard, and other consonants are mutated into their counterparts from the other set. For example, */lpʲ/ and */ʃp/ would be mutated to /ʎpʲ/ and /sp/.

Stops and fricatives clustered together cannot mix voice. Similar to the above, the last consonant of the cluster dictates the voicing of the rest; e.g. */dk/ and */pz/ would be converted into /tk/ and /bz/ respectively.

Gemination is not allowed, and two identical consonants next to each other are simplified into a singleton. Nasal consonants are also forbidden from appearing next to each other, although a cluster like /nt.m/ would be still valid.

Word-internal hiatuses are dissolved with an epenthetic /z/. Between words most speakers use a non-phonemic [ʔ], but some use [z] even in word boundaries.

Romanisation

As mentioned at the start, the people who spoke Cjermizást didn't write their own language. As such the romanisation here is solely a convenience.

• /m n p t b d g s x w z l r/ are romanised as in IPA
• /k ɸ ɣ/ are romanised ⟨c f y⟩
• "soft" consonants are romanised as their "hard" counterparts, plus ⟨j⟩
• ⟨j⟩ is omitted inside clusters; e.g. /pʲʎ/ is romanised as ⟨plj⟩, not as *⟨pjlj⟩
• /æ i ɒ u/ are ⟨e i a u⟩