lvxferre

Key points:

• The word surzhyk (суржик) ['surʒek] in Ukrainian originally refers to a mix of grains, or a flour made with that mix. It's being used to refer to a "mixed" Ukrainian + Russian linguistic variety. Kind of like Spanglish, but more like Portuñol.
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows people in central and eastern Ukraine using surzhyk more, and Russian less.
• Acc. to the text the surzhyk being used nowadays is markedly different from the one used in the 30s, as if the mix was originally "some Ukrainian with lots of Russian" and nowadays "some Russian with lots of Ukrainian".
• Attitudes towards surzhyk seem to be changing, too; from negative to positive.

Note: there's no way around politics, when it comes to language; it's an intrinsically political topic. However, I'd like to ask other users here to keep any potential discussion on-topic for this community. Also, please do not conflate populations with governments, OK?

Quick summary: excavations from the Boğazköy-Hattusha archaeological site (present-day Turkey) unearthed a tablet. That tablet is written mostly in Hittite, but it mentions an idiom from another language, "of the land of Kalašma", that would be spoken in the northwest of the Hittite empire (also in what's today Turkey).

Said language would be an Anatolian language; so it's a close-ish relative to Hittite (and Luwian, Palaic, etc.), and ultimately related to Russian, English, Italian, Hindi etc. (it's all Indo-European).

EDIT: @chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world linked an even better source. Enjoy!

I shared this recipe in another comm, then someone linked me this one, so I'm sharing the recipe here.

Picture stolen from some random site, but the recipe I'm sharing is the one I prepare. And I know the idea of sweet pasta might not be for everyone, but don't rule it out without trying, it's actually tasty.

Ingredients:

• 150g pasta. Short pasta with lots of texture works better; fusilli, farfalle, penne, they all work great, avoid something like spaghetti or linguine.
• water and salt, to cook the pasta. Yes, salt.
• 500g strawberries, washed, chopped into eights.
• around 4 tablespoons of sugar; more or less to taste.
• [optional] a drop of vanilla extract
• 200g sour cream. See the bottom for alternatives.
• [optional] peppermint leaves and/or crushed ricotta, for garnish

Preparation:

1. Boil the pasta in the same way you'd do it for savoury dishes, but use only half the amount of salt you like. It should be around a teaspoon of salt per litre of water.
2. Reserve 1/3 of the chopped strawberries aside. Add sugar and vanilla extract to the rest, then mash them together with a fork. Add the sour cream and mix it well.
3. Add pasta to the plate, then the strawberry/cream mix over it, mix it a bit, then pour the 1/3 of the chopped strawberries you reserved over the pasta. Then any garnish you might be using.
4. [Optional] Chill before serving.

Notes:

I often prepare this recipe with yoghurt instead of sour cream, for health reasons. I never tried using coconut cream but it feels like it might be a good option, for those who'd rather avoid dairy. If your concern is the fat instead, @kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de also mentions it being prepare with twaróg = cottage cheese. And, worst hypothesis, it's fine to omit the sour cream, IMO it tastes incomplete but still nice.

You can serve this recipe either warm or chilled. Personally I think it tastes way better chilled.

Raspberries or mulberries also work really well for this recipe.

It might be tempting to sub the salt from the pasta water with sugar, but I don't recommend it, the contrast between the sweet/sour "sauce" and the salty pasta is really nice.

The spiders in question are Stegodyphus dumicola aka African social spiders.

I couldn't find a link to the video in the article itself so here it is. Discretion is advised - it is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

Context.

Interesting short text about the history of Finnish, focusing mostly on its interaction with nearby Germanic languages.

Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

Interesting excerpt:

De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we're likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That's because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. "It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together."

Ah, here's a link to the paper!

I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.

I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.

Interesting video on the stone that allowed researchers to decipher Ancient Egyptian. Check comments for a few notes.

Additional links with press coverage: ArcheologyMag, Oxford.

For context:

The Huns were nomadic people from Central Eurasia; known for displacing a bunch of Iranian (e.g. Alans) and and Germanic (e.g. Goths, Suebians etc.) speakers, that ultimately invaded the Roman Empire. They reached the Volga around 370 CE, and one of their leaders (Attila) is specially famous. Often believed to be a Turkic people, but if the study is correct they're from a completely different language family instead.

The Xiōng-Nú are mentioned by Chinese sources as one of the "Five Barbarians" (i.e. non-Han people). They would've lived in Central Eurasia between 300 BCE and 100 CE or so, and eventually became Han tributaries.

The Paleo-Siberian language in question would be an older form of Arin, a Yeniseian language. Yup, that same family believed by some to have relatives in the Americas.

For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.