Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

So has Champions. And they've "overhauled" the game so much that its unrecognizable to me now. Crafting is completely impenetrable to me, and appears to be a core part of the game now. And so much shit is premium now... 

[FearfulJesuit]

I wrote a Facebook rant this morning about something rather important to me. Since I liked the introduction, I desisted from rewriting it for the board and am just going to put the whole thing in spoilers.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Warning: rant (and a fairly specific one) ahead.

I very rarely write Facebook rants; indeed, I can't remember the last time I wrote a status that was more than a paragraph long or contained the slightest trace of unironic sincerity. I also generally don't complain about people who can't or refuse to know better, or most current events; the rest of my news feed contains more than enough outrage about the crise du jour.

What I'm about to complain about is the fault of very, very smart people who really DO know better, go to whole conferences to trumpet how much better they know, and somehow can't (or won't) see entire lumber mills in their own eyes. I am talking, of course, about academics.

Specifically linguists. Those of you who have been burdened with knowing me for a while know that I have a soft spot for historical linguistics, particularly the older Indo-European languages. A few weeks ago I had the idea (which was probably never going to come to fruition) of creating a chart or spreadsheet of the major (and some minor) IE languages with major isoglosses, shared innovations and branches marked, from 4000 BC to the present day. The books I own and can get my hands on easily mostly deal with the European branches of the family, so I asked around on /r/linguistics if anybody had a few papers lying around on the classification of and innovations in Indo-Iranian.

I received a single, solemn reply informing me that Indo-Iranian historical linguistics (especially that of the modern period- there is more than enough material on Sanskrit's relation to Latin or Greek, but little on Nepali or Sinhalese) is in a woefully sorry state, that there are whole branches of the family (Dardic and Nuristani) whose position is entirely uncertain, that most of the papers I am looking for have never been written, and that there isn't even a decent etymological dictionary of any Indo-Aryan language. Let's reiterate that: the entire field of linguistics, over its hundred and fifty-year lifespan, has done so little research on a language family spoken by over a billion people that it can't even tell you how its major member languages developed. And of course Indo-Iranian is hardly a minor language family spoken in a recently discovered corner of the earth: we have written records stretching back almost three millenia; Sanskrit's written corpus is estimated as being at least a thousand times larger than Ancient Greek's; and Persian has been a lingua franca longer, and for a larger proportion of the world's population, than English or French ever have. We are not dealing with an unattested, unwritten family spoken by small bands of hunter-gatherers in Amazonia or New Guinea.

Of course, the great irony is that these same linguists who have opted instead to write the fifty-first book on California English phonology within the context of theory X like to atone for their sins by banding together with the anthropologists and attending diversity conferences where they wail about the lack of subgroup Y's representation in academia. In many cases they are right to do so. But it is, to say the least, rich to trumpet how much you are doing about diversity, and then go back and publish papers that aren't actually diverse at all. A quick search through JSTOR provides a third more results for "Estonian language" (native speakers: 1.1 million) than for "Marathi language" (native speakers: 73 million), more for Slovak (five million) than Bengali (seventh most spoken language on Earth), more for Icelandic than Hindi. An unrigorous survey, maybe- but a telling one. If we were really serious about diversity and balance in what gets studied and published, wouldn't we be asking ourselves whether the umpteenth study on morphological change in Los Angeles AAVE or L2 acquisition of German by African immigrants is really the best use of research grants? In light of the situation with Indo-Iranian, or the shamefully spotty work on Amazonian or New Guinean languages, it smacks strongly of tokenism. (I am not calling for yet another conference to exorcise the Eurocentric boogeyman within our regrettably Western souls; we have if anything a few too many of those. I AM asking that, since we have decided that it must be exorcised, we do so honestly.)

I realize budgets are short and Western linguists who know mostly about Western languages will naturally write papers about them. I don't really have a problem with a bias in what gets published and researched- it happens in every field, and it's unavoidable. But I do have a problem with the dishonesty and hypocrisy; I can't help but conclude that this microcosm of cognitive dissonance is representative of larger problems in the academic left.

[Dutchling]

Sounds like you have enough to do for the rest of your life

Makes me wonder what all the Iranian linguists are doing though...

[FearfulJesuit]

Sounds like you have enough to do for the rest of your life

Makes me wonder what all the Iranian linguists are doing though...

Yeah, I think I've found my dissertation topic.

[smjjames]

Theres apparently a new shooting, at a high school in Portland Oregon. When the fuck will this kind of shit stop.

Its breaking news on CNN, so, not a whole lot of details yet........

[Dutchling]

I thought shootings in the US stopped being breaking news quite a few years ago.

[smjjames]

I meant 'breaking news' as in NEW news that is happening right now, not in the 'ooh lets use it for nearly every new bit of news and update' sense that CNN does........

[Darvi]

I thought shootings in the US stopped being breaking news quite a few years ago.

Need something to vent the constant stream of moral outrage.

[smjjames]

I can't tell whether you guys are misunderstanding my usage of 'breaking news' or are mocking me (probably not) or mocking something else

[Darvi]

I was mocking CNN by parsing "breaking news" literally.

And now I'm mocking you by outrisght stating that I'm mocking you.

[smjjames]

I wasn't really saying you WERE mocking me (and most likely wasn't anyway), just didn't know what the heck you were mocking.

[nenjin]

By the time I saw it, it wasn't even breaking news. Just an under-detailed article in the main heading, right next to "Top 50 list we recycle any time something relevant to it happens" and a cute animal video.

CNN is basically a mash up of the Youtube front page and Twitter, now.

[Akura]

I think I threw up in my mouth a little last night, woke up around midnight with painful acid burning in the back of my throat. It might also have had something to do with a dream that might have indicated I've been playing to much Kingdom Hearts and Kerbal Space Program lately.

[Putnam]

When the fuck will this kind of shit stop.

It's not like it's somehow a feature of the modern age.

[nenjin]

When the fuck will this kind of shit stop.

It's not like it's somehow a feature of the modern age.

I'd argue it is. There were not weekly instances of people/kids opening fire in places full of defenseless victims in the 50s.

And no, that isn't a "Golden Age" argument. It's a retort to people who want to dismiss the violence we're experiencing as normal, because it's that kind of apathy that assures nothing ever changes.