Why & When Is This Happening?

To make Reddit faster, simpler, and easier to use, we needed to unify our messaging platforms. This consolidation helps us focus on improving one system instead of maintaining multiple. Plus, Reddit Chat’s infrastructure is built for the future, unlike the PM system which is about as old as Reddit itself.

We’re sharing this change early because we want your feedback! We’ve spent months talking to mods, developers, and users to ensure this migration works for everyone (shoutout to u/RemindMeBot fans). But there might be scenarios we’ve missed, and we need your input to address them. You can share feedback directly with the team working on this project in the comments below.

My sides went into orbit. They aren’t even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?

• If the concern was to make Reddit “faster, simpler, and easier to use”, they’d ditch chat and keep DMs
• “muh futchure” fallacy (appeal to novelty)
• pretending that they want/care for user feedback

…I think that the reason is twofold: 1) it’s easier to plug advertisement into the new chat system, and 2) chat only works in new.reddit so they can use it as an excuse to deprecate yet another old.reddit system.

I was finally able to cross pollinate two pepper varieties! They are:

• yellow bell pepper - just some market variety.
• dedo-de-moça - Capsicum baccatum, red, 5k~15k Scoville heat units (hotter than a jalapeño, milder than a cayenne), great flavour.

I want the breed to be: yellow, large, mild but not heatless, finger-shaped. And hopefully more resistant to insects than bell peppers are.

In the meantime I’m still waiting for my chocolate-coloured habanero to grow flowers, so I can cross-breed it. Likely with dedo-de-moça too, I like the shape.

Shameless plug to !linguistics@mander.xyz . This sort of question is welcome there.

Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:

• if you were born in Roma, you’d be romanus (“Roman”)
• if you were born in Eboracum (modern York), you’d be eboracensis (“Yorkese”)
• if you were born in Gallia (roughly modern Belgium and France), you’d be gallicus (“Gallic”)

In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:

• that -anus was originally just -nus. Inherited from Proto-Indo-European *-nós; you’d plop it after verbs to form adjectives.
• that -icus was originally just -cus; from PIE *-kos, but you’d plop it into nouns instead.
• nobody really knows where -ensis is from but some claim that Latin borrowed it from Etruscan.

Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and… left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn’t enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.

And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔

There’s some awareness among English speakers that “[$adjective]istan” means roughly “country where the [$adjective] people live”, so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.

That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.

In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It’s from the root *steh₂- “to stand”, and also a cognate of “to stand”. So etymologically “[$adjective]istan” is roughly “where the [$adjective] people stand”. (inb4 I’m simplifying it.)

Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain…

Note that India doesn’t simply have different “languages”; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.

That said:

• “India” ultimately backtracks to Greek Ἰνδός / Indós, the river Indus; and Greek borrowed it from Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢𐏁 / Hindūš. That ending changed because it’s what Greek does.
• “Hindi” comes from Hindi हिंदी / hindī, that comes from Classical Persian هِنْدِی / hindī. That hind- is the same as in the above, referring to the lands around the Indus (India), and the -ī is “related to”.

Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don’t do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as “India”, showing no aspiration.

Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the “Ph” and decided to use an “F”? 🤔

So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there’s that convention that royalty names are translated, so “Felipe II” ended as “Philip II” in English. And so the “Islas Filipinas” ended as “Philippine Islands”.

…but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.

Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego… just no -ish).

Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn’t enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia “Galicia” → galego “Galician”) and -co (see: Áustria “Austria” → austríaco “Austrian”).

Then there’s cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it’s dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).

Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it’s the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.

There’s also the weird case of “brasileiro” (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.

For positive guidance, here’s my approach in bars:

• Casual environment. Preferably full of people, it’s safer for both.
• Good hygiene, and clothes that show self-care. You don’t need to LARP as rich, but don’t pop up with a spaghetti-stained T-shirt either.
• Find some excuse to start a conversation. Plenty of times I’ve approached women outright saying “hey, I’m drinking alone and up to a chat. Are you waiting for someone?” (implied: “is it OK for me to sit with you?”)
• Offer a drink. Make sure that the waiter/waitress brings it, don’t bring it yourself.
• Find some topic that both of you enjoy to chitchat about. Avoid divisive ones.

It works well enough here in Latin America to break the ice.

Important: be assertive but don’t be pushy. It’s fine to show interest, it’s not fine to insist. If you notice that she’s uncomfortable with your presence, just leave. And some people will be only up for the chat, but won’t be willing for anything sexy or romantic, that’s fine too as long as you don’t push boundaries.

As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:

Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.

It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.