i don't know LA well but looks like there's a *bunch* of them

(e.g. numbers, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns go *after* the noun)

Javanese grammar is reasonably similar, but the phonology, phonotactics and especially register aspects are much, much more complex than Indonesian

i would even say the word order is easier, because Indonesian is aggressively head-initial, unlike Cantonese which like English seems to have trouble with where it decides constituent heads go

actually grammar-wise Cantonese and Indonesian are pretty similar—no inflectional morphology, no case marking, etc. basically the semantics are determined by word order.

there's a bit of derivational morphology in the prefixes, but it's not very difficult to acquire

nope!

hint 1: being at the top 10 of this isn't actually ideal, but neither is being in the bottom 10 (which is, arguably, even worse)

big fan of unintuitive development indices. e.g. this is the top 10 of something, try to guess what it is:

🇸🇨🇳🇷🇲🇩🇲🇳🇧🇧🇩🇴🇱🇹🇶🇦🇦🇲🇪🇪

(it's not obscure or trivia, this is a real index that has real-world consequences)

will add hints if nobody gets it

speaking of which, are there any in-depth analyses of Ladino? as in the word-for-word translations of the Jewish Bible into Judeo-Spanish, not normal everyday Judeo-Spanish

we need words that if people put on a partiful invite it would give "hot makeouts" not "talking about theory"

we need new words for the categories "attracted to women" and "attracted to men" (we've already got good ones for both, etc.)

and yes i'm familiar with "gynosexual" & "androsexual" (too clinical) and "sapphic" & "achillean" (too wanky)

once again, the categories of "straight" and "gay/lesbian" are practically useless in everyday discourse. all they tell you is who someone *won't* sleep with, and 9 times out of 10, the more important information is who someone *will*

a fun metagame with this is trying to get it to return a *specific* language

i was able to get it to return Javanese, which was pretty impressive on the quiz's part

i'll try to remember to do it. if i forget poke me

realizing that a significant portion of my followers who would get my dumb linguistics jokes have moved over here

welp that's it. biting the bullet and crossposting to bluesky now

"Paxton Gate? no i think it's called the Khyber Pass"

im gonna start pronouncing it [ˈpʰækstn̩] for full english phonotactic dominance (no unfooted syllables constraint)

cool this way i can also figure out which friend you are again

@bnuyaminim.bsky.social whoops

👋