I'm at the #PolyglotGathering in Prague, for the first time since right before the pandemic (2019).
One highlight so far: "If you think Indonesian and Malay are easy, you haven't met the rest of the family" - Brian Loo, in his talk on comparative phonology and grammar of Austronesian languages. This also holds if your primary exposure to Austronesian languages was Polynesian (Hawai'ian, Māori, etc).
Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person trying to wear a mask in indoor spaces, even at an event with over 800 people. I haven't gotten any pushback on this, but the combination of mask + queer hair + bad at pretending to be neurotypical does occasionally draw looks.
Overall, the feel of the event is definitely different from when it was 200-some people jammed into a youth hostel in Berlin, but similar to the Bratislava years (I never got to the Polish instances).
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.
Alexander Stubb will be the next President of Finland.
This is not the outcome I had hoped for, but given the relatively small margin, I can at least take comfort in knowing that almost half of the country supported Pekka Haavisto, and will hopefully continue to vote those values in the future.
I do, however, wish I didn't have to ask myself whether the outcome would have been different if fewer people were homophobic — a recent poll found that around 40% of Finns felt that Haavisto's sexual orientation disqualified him from serving as president. But that's the world we live in, and the best we can do is try and change it.