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[Dunamisdeos]

SCREW OOG AND HIS TRIBE OF PIGFOLK. BUNCH OF GREEDY INGRATES.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

[Tawa]

We must never forget his theft of the wildebeest meat his ancestor Tronk stole from our great first chief Glonk.

[TheBiggerFish]

I am once again seriously considering starting a competing group to my university's orchestra.  Or at least a chamber group or something.

What on earth is going on, brain?

[Calidovi]

WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

im awake jesus christ stop yelling

[Dunamisdeos]

WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

im awake jesus christ stop yelling

Seriously though if they worked harder they'd have their own wildebeest meat instead of taking the portions of my hunt that I'm forced to give by tribe chief.

Also fire and the wheel cause autism.

[Flying Dice]

You know, we really need a good sitcom about prehistoric humans. And it needs to be utterly fucking incomprehensible on the surface level, to the point of the characters mostly communicating with grunts and gestures. Good enough directing and acting would get the point across and make it even more effective.

[BlackFlyme]

I think the online debate class fell to the trolls. Or to people who know nothing of Canadian politics. Grammar and spelling barely resemble English at this point.

More and more Highlanders saying that all that stands between Canada and world domination is the Queen and that we must destroy the other Commonwealth countries.

One person said that Britain had already left the monarchy through Brexit, and has become incomparably better since.

Claims that the Queen has enslaved billions of people, and Democracy must be toppled so that Canada can become a country and people could be given equal rights, which we apparently do not any of.

Apparently most of our tax dollars go directly to the royal family, and in return they vacation or just visit Canada from time to time.

Someone saying that abolishing the monarchy would mean we could elect our own Governor General.

A few people were asking who this 'Queen' we are talking about is.

[Truean]

Yeah....

Very recently history lesson people: Seriously, Matthew Shepard wasn't 20 years go. Being gay and having sex was a criminal offense less than 15 years ago. All of these and far far worse were in the United States and I lived through all of them. I'm not even that old.

I grew up when being gay or not straight got you beaten the living hell out of or killed. Sadly, there are still a lot of places in the US where this is still true, or where conditions just straight out drive people to suicide. I was once told "You're fired you fucking faggot," and there is still no legal recourse for that (in a great many states). I really don't want to get into the crap I've gone through in the last couple years that has been based on orientation. Granted, it is based in part on geography, even within the US. but still.

I am VERY glad that the world is changing. I am very glad that "Gay!" isn't a pejorative insult you can get away with calling someone derrogatorily in front of your mom anymore as much. It used to mean completely stupid, undesirable, etc. I am incredibly glad this little gay kid gets to hang out with girls as one of them and feel accepted.... I really would've enjoyed that back when I was his age. Instead, I got repeatedly beaten, multiple hospital visits, and eventually got good at fighting back by pure, horrid necessity. I've been in hundreds of fights, which is to say the first couple hundred were me getting beaten half to death.

I mean come on. It hasn't been a year since gay people could even marry in the US, and the opposition to that is still quietly grumbling and looking for any way to practically beat us right out of that.

I'm honestly quite astonished at even the implication that things are just kinda solved or on their way to being solved. My life is largely a pile of fear from these things, and I wish it weren't justified.

It's wonderful that there are places of acceptance, and that those places are growing, but they are far, far from everywhere.

[Amperzand]

You know, we really need a good sitcom about prehistoric humans. And it needs to be utterly fucking incomprehensible on the surface level, to the point of the characters mostly communicating with grunts and gestures. Good enough directing and acting would get the point across and make it even more effective.

Interestingly enough, the "grunts, gestures, and no complex language" image of early hominids may be very incorrect. The further back into history you go, the more complex languages seem to get.

[Neonivek]

So I am watching a Batman parody (a cartoon movie made in the Adam West Batman Style)

And I have to say... even though it is a parody... There is something refreshing about the lack of deaths that occurred. No incidental deaths at all...

[Calidovi]

You know, we really need a good sitcom about prehistoric humans. And it needs to be utterly fucking incomprehensible on the surface level, to the point of the characters mostly communicating with grunts and gestures. Good enough directing and acting would get the point across and make it even more effective.

"dundufa"

laugh track plays amused snickers

"khoraj?" -dul the elder shakes his infant son at the intruder, likely causing a preventable organ disorder- "watanug kifa"

an alarmed gasp plays through the laugh track

"dodo, kaballa hung" -gorbo looks away coyly- "ford"

-dul the elder slaps the leather wall of the tent, collapsing it on both himself and the infant he was once carrying-

raucous laughter erupts from the audience

-the camera zooms in on the mutilated child's face as a record scratches-

"ee karo bana fia, ka?"

-The footage begins rewinding back to the Quaternary extinction event-

-"Kids in America" starts playing-

My Life With Oog

[Avis-Mergulus]

You know, we really need a good sitcom about prehistoric humans. And it needs to be utterly fucking incomprehensible on the surface level, to the point of the characters mostly communicating with grunts and gestures. Good enough directing and acting would get the point across and make it even more effective.

Interestingly enough, the "grunts, gestures, and no complex language" image of early hominids may be very incorrect. The further back into history you go, the more complex languages seem to get.

That's... not really true. All languages that we have record of are equally developed and suited toward expression of any idea, and their complexity (learning-wise) is a entirely dependent on the learner, while structure-wise complexity seems to be relatively impossible to measure since a very wide variety of means of expression is used in languages across the world, and the complexity of these means relative to each other is hard to define.
Even if there are hard parallels between two languages, say, they both have grammatical tense, and one has two tenses while the other has five, the first one likely compensates with an aspect system, or some aktionsart-based bullshit, or ridiculously unintuitive lexical constructions to express the grammatical tense meanings of the second one.

It's actually a major point in theoretical linguistics that we have no record of a defective or incomplete language (with the possible exception of pidgins, which aren't really an exception because they're only defective while used in a narrow range of contexts, but rapidly develop all the nuances of 'real' languages once they gain native speakers who use them in everyday communication. See: creole languages).
A proto-language is something that linguists would very much like to discover, because it would answer a lot of theoretical questions about the development of language in the human race (a topic that is currently treated about the same as perpetual motion or other hackery since there's literally nothing to base serious research on). But it is estimated that the human language system has been in its current state (and therefore all of its products equally complex) for a very long time. Like, start with a hundred thousand years, add more until satisfied. Again, very conjectural since there's literally no data.

[BlackFlyme]

Ah, not quite what I was referring to. Sorry for that, Truean.

There is always room for improvement, of course, and is still not what it is even supposed to be in some places. Hell, in Canada a little over 20 years ago, there were still Residential Schools in operation.

People in this 'debate' are making claims of world-wide slavery of citizens in Commonwealth countries in the name of the Queen.

[Flying Dice]

Look at you two, ruining humor with facts. 

--
Sorry for implications, Truean. I try to maintain an outward veneer of optimism about such things, since I tend to fall too readily into nihilistic misanthropy if I do otherwise and I've gotten the impression that that is vastly more grating. Helping to reinforce the impression that hateful shitheads are on the wrong side of history is less depressing than concluding that we're never really going to be rid of them, IMO. :|

Maybe it is genuinely a generational thing. I'm not sure exactly how much older you are, but when I was going through school (in the South, mind) nobody gave two shits about people being gay, bi (or black, or Muslims, or Jews, or latin@; nothing about trans folk since that hadn't really hit the public eye yet) -- or if they did, they kept their mouths very tightly shut. Even going to uni on a rural Southern campus in a county with one church for every two or three hundred people the only times I ever encountered or heard word of open bigotry was from a loony evangelical preacher who got shouted down, and one [context stripped of identifying information] shut-in older person who was reluctant to hire a black guy because "he seems kinda scary" (I know right? Jesus fuck, that was jarring  ).

I mean, it was the sort of place where one of the notable athletic teams was the rodeo team, where people unironically listened to songs with lyrics saying shit like "camouflage is the new Stars and Bars", and if anybody was a racist or a homophobe or something, they damned well didn't breathe a word of it. much less harass or attack anyone because of it.

It certainly hasn't disappeared, but the last decade or two has been a transitional period in which it quite abruptly was made clear to the people old enough to give two shits (and the unfortunates who were raised on that line of bullshit) that it wasn't publicly acceptable to express such views, that the law couldn't bow to them. Trump's campaign is the dead cat bounce for bigots on the right, and by the time I'm in my thirties the last of the people who were raised when the old sorts of hate were acceptable will be stumbling into retirement homes. By the time I'm that old, who fucking knows what people will be hating each other for.

Yet another artifact of the god damned religious right that we needed to shatter long ago, but by gosh by golly we're breaking their spines one vertebrae at a time.

[Amperzand]

You know, we really need a good sitcom about prehistoric humans. And it needs to be utterly fucking incomprehensible on the surface level, to the point of the characters mostly communicating with grunts and gestures. Good enough directing and acting would get the point across and make it even more effective.

Interestingly enough, the "grunts, gestures, and no complex language" image of early hominids may be very incorrect. The further back into history you go, the more complex languages seem to get.

That's... not really true. All languages that we have record of are equally developed and suited toward expression of any idea, and their complexity (learning-wise) is a entirely dependent on the learner, while structure-wise complexity seems to be relatively impossible to measure since a very wide variety of means of expression is used in languages across the world, and the complexity of these means relative to each other is hard to define.
Even if there are hard parallels between two languages, say, they both have grammatical tense, and one has two tenses while the other has five, the first one likely compensates with an aspect system, or some aktionsart-based bullshit, or ridiculously unintuitive lexical constructions to express the grammatical tense meanings of the second one.

It's actually a major point in theoretical linguistics that we have no record of a defective or incomplete language (with the possible exception of pidgins, which aren't really an exception because they're only defective while used in a narrow range of contexts, but rapidly develop all the nuances of 'real' languages once they gain native speakers who use them in everyday communication. See: creole languages).
A proto-language is something that linguists would very much like to discover, because it would answer a lot of theoretical questions about the development of language in the human race (a topic that is currently treated about the same as perpetual motion or other hackery since there's literally nothing to base serious research on). But it is estimated that the human language system has been in its current state (and therefore all of its products equally complex) for a very long time. Like, start with a hundred thousand years, add more until satisfied. Again, very conjectural since there's literally no data.

You're probably right, I'm basing my opinion solely on a book I read once.