A linguist shares the story of his study with the last remaining speaker of South Tsimshian As shared to r/linguistics in 2013: "Today, Violet Neasloss, aka Nanny Violet, passed away. she was the oldest resident of Klemtu BC, 99 years old, and also one of the happiest, quickest, and most caring. With her death, the South Tsimshian, or SgüüXs language is now sleeping, but because of her, and the hundreds of hours of exhausting mental work she committed to over those months, at some point in the future, members of her community will have the option to wake it up again, and some have already started.

here is a video link of us recording - she upbraids me for my lack of knowledge about the kitchen, and finishes by showing the care she took over what knowledge she shared with the recordings, always careful that never a bad word was said about anybody, though she wasn't so careful when talking about things she felt were hurting her community"

See how a translator carries a book from one language to another, line by line. Much like a crossword, a translation isn't finished until all the answers are present and correct, with each conditioning the others. But when it comes to literature, there is rarely ever just one solution, and my job is to test as many as possible. A word can be a perfect fit until something I try in the next clause introduces a clumsy repetition or infelicitous echo. Meaning, connotation and subtext all matter, but so does style. Below are two attempts to show the thought processes involved in the kind of translation I do. Sophie Hughes for the New York Times.

Romance Writers of America continues its slow crawl towards oblivion, filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, blaming 'disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community'. Meanwhile author Courtney Milan continues to live her best life, organizing the next round of the Romancing the Vote fundraiser, self-publishing (extremely well reviewed) historical romances featuring diverse characters, and writing a chatty weekly newsletter about tea for her fans.

as summarized in a 2022 r/HobbyDrama post previously 2015, Nazi romance nominated for awards previously Dec 2019 the beginning of the scandal.

Adorable knitted frogs

frog Mr. Darcy frog has birthday frog and toad hang out frog paints pond Music on for full effect I literally feel a cuteness high after watching this

The Banksy Museum does not own or display any actual Banksys but rather 167 decent-enough reproductions of them, life-size murals and paintings on panels treated to look like exterior walls that stretch through an exhibition space, designed to resemble the street. Max Lakin for the New York Times

Isabella Gomez Sarmiento for Morning edition:Museum founder Hazis Vardar says, "Banksy changed the rules. If you want to organize something about Banksy, you have to change the rules also," he said on a recent walk through the exhibit. Natasha Gural at Forbes supplies a more in-depth review: 4 Ways To See Beyond Graffiti At The Banksy Museum In New York Banksy Museum website

The G-Word: The Fight for Roma Rights in America by Caren Gussoff Sumption A five minute live talk at Ignite Seattle in Town Hall Seattle from March 2022.

What is Ignite? "Each speaker gets 20 slides, which auto-rotate every 15 seconds, to share their experiences and passions." Wikipedia entry on Romani history for further reading.

TL;DR I used a custom-trained Large Language Model (T5) to create the world's largest online corpus of translated cuneiform texts. It's called the AICC (AI Cuneiform Corpus) and contains 130,000 AI translated texts from the CDLI and ORACC projects.

Also of interest: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative - By making the form and content of cuneiform texts available online, the CDLI is opening pathways to the rich historical tradition of the ancient Middle East. In close collaboration with researchers, museums and an engaged public, the project seeks to unharness the extraordinary content of these earliest witnesses to our shared world heritage. Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus - Oracc is a collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.

Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren't as embedded as we think. Madeleine Schwartz for the NYT: "For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called "language attrition" has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?"

When desegregation came to Harlan County, Ky.: An oral history. Karida Brown for the Washington Post. "As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education this month, let us not forget: It was Black children who did the work of desegregating our schools.... The narratives in this piece come from oral histories I conducted from 2013 to 2016 with African Americans who, like my parents, remember the "colored schools" of Harlan County, particularly those in two small Appalachian coal towns, Lynch and Benham. Their experiences — revisited from the vantage point of their 60s, 70s and 80s — give texture to a complex transition from a pre- to post-civil rights era."archive.is link

In his memoir, "The Way of the Hermit," Ken Smith dispels myths about the solitary life off the grid. Review by Laurie Hertzel The first half of this book is a rip-roaring read, filled with death-defying adventures — fighting off grizzly bears; avoiding a charging bull moose; nearly freezing in an ice-encrusted tent. Smith falls into a raging river, loses his supply pack and nearly drowns. Still, he loved it all: "It was intoxicating, invigorating, and utterly liberating."

(2014) WaPo (archive) article about Gregg Deal's performance art piece in which he dresses up in stereotypical costume in public. Last spring, Deal came up with his own performance concept in which he'd dress up in a brash getup to physically embody what he believes many non-indigenous people envision when they think of a Native American. The mostly prefabricated outfit is a costume, not authentic regalia; is intentionally over-the-top; and holds no personal significance for Deal. (...) Suspicion is (...) displayed by a security officer at Potomac Mills mall who demands to know what Deal is doing (Deal's response of "Shopping" irking the officer all the more).

2020: Colorado Spring mural honoring missing Indigenous 2021 Exhibit: Gregg Deal's Paintings Challenge Stereotypes And Champion Visibility Of Indigenous People 2022: Biking the Tahoe-Pyramid Trail in Bicycling Magazine. 2023: Exhibit guest curated by Deal at Longmont Museum. "I accidentally started a band": Dead Pioneers.

long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids: Geological survey reveals the remains of a major waterway that ancient Egyptian builders could have used to transport materials (Freda Kreier for Nature). Satellite images and geological data now confirm that a tributary of the Nile — which researchers have named the Ahramat Branch — used to run near many of the major sites in the region several thousand years ago. The discovery, reported on 16 May in Communications Earth and Environment1, could help to explain why ancient Egyptians chose this area to build the pyramids (see 'Ancient river').

Full article in Communications Earth & Environment, authors Eman Ghoneim, Timothy J. Ralph, Suzanne Onstine, Raghda El-Behaedi, Gad El-Qady, Amr S. Fahil, Mahfooz Hafez, Magdy Atya, Mohamed Ebrahim, Ashraf Khozym & Mohamed S. Fathy.