In October 1776, Wilkinson contracted an epidemic disease, most likely typhus, and was bedridden and near death with a high fever. The future preacher's family summoned a doctor from Attleboro, six miles away, and neighbors kept up a death-watch at night. The fever broke after several days. The Friend later reported that Wilkinson had died, receiving revelations from God through two archangels who proclaimed there was "Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone". Accounts by the doctor and other witnesses state that the illness was real, but none of them say that Wilkinson died. The Friend further said that Wilkinson's soul had ascended to heaven and the body had been reanimated with a new spirit charged by God with preaching his word, that of the "Publick Universal Friend", describing that name in the words of Isaiah 62:2 as "a new name which the mouth of the Lord hath named". The name referenced the designation the Society of Friends used for members who traveled from community to community to preach, "Public Friends".

From that time on, the Friend refused to answer to the name "Jemima Wilkinson", ignoring or chastising those who insisted on using it. Hudson says that when visitors asked if it was the name of the person they were addressing, the Friend simply quoted Luke 23:3 ("thou sayest it").  Identifying as neither male nor female, the Friend asked not to be referred to with gendered pronouns. Followers respected these wishes; they referred only to "the Public Universal Friend" or short forms such as "the Friend" or "P.U.F.", and many avoided gender-specific pronouns even in private diaries, while others used he. When someone asked if the Friend was male or female, the preacher replied "I am that I am", saying the same thing to a man who criticized the Friend's manner of dress (adding, in the latter case, "there is nothing indecent or improper in my dress or appearance; I am not accountable to mortals").

The Friend dressed in a manner perceived to be either androgynous or masculine, in long, loose clerical robes which were most often black, and wore a white or purple kerchief or cravat around the neck like men of the time. The preacher did not wear a hair-cap indoors, like women of the era, and outdoors wore broad-brimmed, low-crowned beaver hats of a style worn by Quaker men. Accounts of the Friend's "feminine-masculine tone of voice" varied; some hearers described it as "clear and harmonious", or said the preacher spoke "with ease and facility", "clearly, though without elegance". Others described it as "grum and shrill", or like a "kind of croak, unearthly and sepulchral". The Friend was said to move easily, freely, and modestly, and was described by Ezra Stiles as "decent & graceful & grave".

Can't find either the title or the year of painting.

Skrepetsky (Семён Скрепецкий) was a Russian [I assume, amateur] artist who painted grotesque neo-primitivist caricatures of modern Russia, and built up a bit of a fame online. He has been shot and killed yesterday in Biała Podlaska, Poland, where he has lived since 2021.

Thinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investigate languages in fresh way, but against the background (and often on the basis) of a centuries-old tradition.

Could it be that these traditional and stereotypical ways of thinking sometimes get in the way of approaching our objects of study in a fair way? Few linguists would deny this possibility, so here I will list four ways in which this may have adversely affected morphosyntactic descriptions and general theories:

– the word stereotype (1)

– the grammar/dictionary stereotype (2)

– the building-block stereotype (3)

– the speaker directionality stereotype (4)

My really bad TLDR: words don't exist, grammar is like words and words are like grammar, language isn't done by putting things one after the other, and we study too much how we make language and not enough how we make sense of language. Bonus sub-point: we like to say A is made of B but we could also say B is made of A.

Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia's "Vital Articles" are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)

The decline isn't even across topics. Mathematics, physical sciences, and technology are down 43% to 85%; biographical articles and geography are down less than 10% in half the languages I looked at. The per-topic ordering (which have declined the most or the least) is nearly identical in every one of the eight languages.

Freshness of article content matters, but not as strongly as topic.

– Luis Villa

https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/524

Despite decades of scholarship on lexical borrowing in post-Conquest England, the vocabulary of the medieval countryside has remained largely outside the lens of contact linguistics — an oversight shaped by the long-standing assumption that French influence was confined to elite domains. At the same time, the multilingual reality of medieval England has made monolingual lexicography an increasingly inadequate tool: the Anglo-French, Medieval Latin, and Middle English lexicons of the period cannot be studied in isolation, yet no single trilingual resource has existed to study them together.

This book provides that resource. Drawing on the historical dictionaries of all three languages and grounded in cognitive semantics, it constructs an onomasiological thesaurus of the vocabulary associated with the medieval English manor — concepts and referents attested from 1100 to 1500, arranged in conceptual groupings modelled on the structure of the Historical Thesaurus of English and the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England.

The findings reframe received assumptions. Language contact shaped the rural lexicon far more deeply than the literature has claimed: French- and Latin-origin vocabulary dominates the terminology of manorial society, while native English holds its ground in the vocabulary of familiar locations. The asymmetry illuminates the social mechanics of borrowing in non-elite environments and carries implications for the history of English into the present day.

Most people, including many competent software developers, think of a digital document the way they think of a sheet of paper: an inert object that holds words and pictures, indifferent to the tool used to open it. This intuition is wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong shape everything from vendor lock-in to cybersecurity to the long-term readability of public records.

First place: The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on October 9, 2023, leaving widespread destruction in the Rimal area.

Attribution: WAFA

Second place: Baby cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) sleeping at Cape cross, Namibia.

Attribution: Giles Laurent

Third place: A gigantic jet [a kind of upper-atmospheric lightning] photographed from the International Space Station by astronaut Nichole Ayers.

Full results here

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3105440/view/703267074116420198

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is now available in Early Access!

Set in the fantasy world of Enroth, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is a brand new entry in the legendary series of turn-based strategies. Lead one of six available factions to victory by building magnificent cities, defeating countless armies, and obtaining powerful artifacts.

In case there's anyone here who hasn't been notified elsewhere :D

The Wikimedia Foundation said Saturday it has found a compromise with the Indonesian government, which had threatened to block Wikipedia over domestic registration rules the foundation feared were overly invasive.

According to him, the country’s economy “hit rock bottom” in the first quarter, which could lead to a crisis.

Zyuganov also suggested that the situation this fall could resemble the events of 1917, when the communists came to power.

Video with English subtitles available here: https://bsky.app/profile/antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3mk3d7tu6m22v

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45719790

The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one.

Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it.

The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one.

Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it.

Ovdje Noć knjige, tamo sumrak čitanja. Ovdje Dua Lipa preporučuje Margaret Atwood, tamo Sarah Jessica Parker žirira Bookera. Ovdje luksuzni književni salon Chanela, tamo se Nina Obuljen Koržinek druži s klincima. Ovdje internetski slop, tamo #BookTok. Novosti donose specijalni izazov – možete li uopće pročitati ovaj tekst do kraja?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45228666

A new episode of LibreOffice/Collabora drama.

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, the presence of company representatives on the Board of Directors (BoD), who were elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members, caused further delays to finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

A new episode of LibreOffice/Collabora drama.

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, the presence of company representatives on the Board of Directors (BoD), who were elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members, caused further delays to finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.