@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

kechpaja

@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com

Conlanging/Linguistics/Polyglotism/Linux/Sometimes music

Dual US/FI citizen who doesn't really do gender. Trans as in transhumanist, transatlantic and transfluvial.

I'm "kechpaja" pretty much anywhere you see that username.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

abdalian, to linguistics
@abdalian@lingo.lol avatar

Is there a term for an interlocutor saying the last word of the previous speaker’s sentence in unison with them? Not just occasionally or when the previous speaker is having trouble recalling a word, but nearly every sentence, possibly even when that sentence is not the end of a turn? I’m looking for articles or research about this out of personal curiosity.

@linguistics

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@abdalian @linguistics Would this not just be a subcategory of backchanneling?

skinnylatte, to 11ty
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

Just posted: my 'now' page, which I have changed into 'just now' https://popagandhi.com/now/2024-04-17/

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@skinnylatte The date is showing up as an error: "Published on Invalid DateTime".

I'm ten hours ahead of you, in case you end up suspecting a time zone issue.

cidney, to random
@cidney@social.city-of-glass.net avatar

Do I know any software developers who aren't in games who like and feel good about what they're doing?

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@cidney At the moment, what I'm doing is taking time off to deal with burnout, so technically yes?

In the bigger picture, I like the company a lot, but the projects usually require a tradeoff on one of those things, and I have a growing suspicion that statistical code generation will make software development intolerable for me.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

:: The story of a child housekeeper who works for ‘Mnimal’ a cleaning tech company that claims their robots systems can bring your home to a state of “elevated minimalist cleanliness” via “smart targeted cleantech interventions” neither robots nor software can deliver any of this effectively, so an army of young workers must either laboriously attempt to clean via remote control or simply sneak in to the house on guise of ‘a routine service call’ and do it by hand. 1/

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@futurebird Oh, so they use armies of trained ants?

Alon, (edited ) to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

What's worse?

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@Alon @acb The Normans of Normandy are another option. And normalization.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

These cursed "ants" can be ordered for your child's playground... no wonder people grow up fearing bugs. I'm scared of them after seeing this.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@futurebird Somehow this is reminding me of that Archie McPhee life-sized (and more or less realistically shaped) plastic ants that my mother would sometimes put around the house in various locations. I think I have a few in a bag somewhere.

kechpaja, to random
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

Proposal: all dogs — or at very least, all small dogs — should adopt cat as a universal auxlang for communicating with humans.

This entails, among other things:

() Slow blinking is used to indicate trust, like it should be
() Barking is kept to an absolute minimum
() Untrusted strangers are met with skepticism or fear, rather than aggression

It would be so much easier if all the animals you ran into walking around the city and on trails could communicate in a language that was intuitive and easy to understand. Maybe once dogs are fluent, we can then work on corvids and pheasants.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Fedi: cis men call me a mansplainer when my pronouns are right there and then refuse to back down

Bluesky: anti-Zionists who are (or say they are?) Jewish ask me what my grandparents did in WW2 when my username is my obviously Jewish real name and then don't engage when I bring up the Kaunas ghetto

(A five-minute video fragment of my grandfather's testimony, with English subtitles, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK2aBS_aYJY; one of the turds on Bluesky went eerily silent when I posted the link)

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@Alon When I created a Bluesky account, one of the first things I saw on the (completely fresh and un-personalized, and following nobody) feed was a very thinly veiled antisemitic thread. This unfortunately tracks.

(I'm not meaningfully active on Bluesky, I just wanted to make sure I got the username.)

kechpaja, to random
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

Brb, designing an alien race who genuinely do not use pronouns, just to own the transphobes.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

I have an alt history of what-if-the-US-stays-British; in the timeline, Zionism didn't do much, and the entire Levant is one Syrian state, ~5% Jewish.

Dear followers, please persuade me to write it up as a normal narrative and not as live updates (like @ww3real) by the Jewish-Syrian-British protag.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@Alon @ww3real If you're looking for concrete arguments: the biggest downside of the WW3Real format is that it's hard to maintain context for the overarching narrative when it arrives in tiny pieces spread throughout the day. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but it is a bit more challenging to read than a regular book.

(This is reminding me of the hypothetical I sometimes revisit where Europeans in the New World saw themselves as immigrants rather than conquerers; in that world I might be a native speaker of Anishinaabemowin.)

kechpaja, to random
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

Alright, that's the second time I've been profiled as a potential thief for wearing a (clearly medical) mask in a store. FFS.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

I have a simple rule: if someone asks me a question that can be a Google query, don’t answer them.

This is because I don’t like doing Google queries on someone else’s behalf.

And if they really wanted to know the answer, they would do the work themselves.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@atomicpoet That worked up until this year. The problem is that now, more and more, Google returns junk. (And so do other search enginges — it's not just a problem with Google.)

More and more, I find myself wanting to ask my questions of an actual human, because I can't trust the internet at all.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@atomicpoet I agree that you shouldn't demand people's time and energy for nothing, but there are lots of ways to "pay" — the most obvious being the "karma" or "favor" system that has always existed informally for many people, and has been formalized on some internet platforms. You can also get a surprising amount of mileage out of just having a social norm of trying to answer at least as many questions as you ask (regardless of whether those answers are to the same people).

kechpaja, to linguistics
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

What's the equivalent of a mad scientist, but for lingustics?

Asking for a friend.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

My mom was the head of a math department at a community college and I have fond childhood memories of the crazy mail she got. I think all math departments get this kind of mail. Basically people who think they've proven the Riemann hypothesis and such. She'd have me look for math errors in them because they always had SO MANY errors.

So, the idea of writing about biology scares me because I don't want to be "one of those guys" for some poor biology department head.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@futurebird Wait, but who should I email about the Voynich Manuscript? I think this time I've genuinely managed to decipher it.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@eribosot @futurebird Linguistics, Uralic linguistics, and conlang Twitter were very much a thing (and may still be; I don't log in there anymore), and it makes me a bit sad that you never found (enough of) them. But it sounds like you found as much of those communities as you wanted to on here?

exocomics, to random
@exocomics@mastodon.world avatar

small sample 💖

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@futurebird @exocomics The galaxy brain version is when it's tea.

andrewfeeney, to HashtagGames
@andrewfeeney@phpc.social avatar

The dog ate my train.


kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@andrewfeeney I once had a linguistics professor who used the sentence "Tutankhamun ate my dog" as an example of something that would not be contextually appropriate to say in a particular context. I don't remember what the rest of the example conversation was, but that line stuck.

gombang, to random
@gombang@social.nancengka.com avatar

If you speak other languages than English, which language do you choose for your phone or computer interface?

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@gombang I've a native English speaker who still uses English, but I'm pretty confident (as much as I can be when it hasn't happened) that if the world's technical infrastructure had been built for and documented using Finnish, I would be using that instead.

(I'm not sure I'm a useful case, though; I have a fairly atypical relationship to both computers and languages.)

kechpaja, to random
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

Today, the only audio (albeit digital) conversation I had with real life human beings was in Klingon.

I'm not sure if this is an accomplishment or just means I need to get out more.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@Alon It would be magh yIHot.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

My headcanon for Over the Hills and Far Away is that the protag's friend knew he was cheating on him with his wife and that's why he framed him for robbery; the protag's choice not to reveal the affair as an alibi out of a misplaced sense of love was for nothing.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@Alon Which piece of media are you referring to here? Searches turn up a gazillion different things, and my first association with that line is a children's rhyme about ducks.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Spanish: hormigas
Malay: semut
Arabic: "alnuml" النمل
Chinese: "Mǎyǐ" 蚂蚁
Hawaiian: ʻanane
Latin: formicae
Yiddish: "murashkes" מוראַשקעס
Finnish: muurahaiset
Igbo: ndanda
French: fourmis
Czech: mravenci
Maltese: nemel
Danish: myrer
Quechua: ankakuna
Dutch: mieren
Filipino: langgam
Haitian: foumi
Swahili: mchwa
Korean: "gaemi" 개미
German: Ameisen
Samoan: loi
Greek: "myrmínkia" μυρμήγκια
Yoruba: kokoro
Maori: popokorua
Irish: seangáin
Vietnamese: kiến
Italian: formiche
Xhosa: Iimbovane

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@futurebird

Nitpick: German Ameisen is always spelled with a capital letter.

Also in Welsh it's morgrug (at least if Wiktionary is to be trusted), with the singulative form morgrugyn.

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

It's funny, the whole superhero trope where heroes are obligated to use their powers for the good of humanity rather than live their lives for themselves.

Why don't we hold ordinary people to that standard? We do have some limited power in the world around us --- not superpowers, but the ordinary day-to-day power that comes from a place of empathy, care, and advocacy.

kechpaja,
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

@xgranade I mean, that's basically the premise of the Utopian Hive from Terra Ignota (that, plus some more stuff that's a spoiler).

kechpaja, to random
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

Challenging someone to a cook-off to settle a score, aka trial by nom-bat.

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