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rhysiana:
Once upon a time, in a land about twelve hours north of here, I was in the second year of grad school and really regretting all my life choices. Because the professor of the sociolinguistics class I was taking was a post-doc living several states away from her fellow-academic husband, she felt the same and gave our class completely free rein in picking our final paper topic. Since watching Firefly was the only thing that had given me joy that semester, I decided to examine the pidginization of Chinese and English in that universe.
(Tl;dr version: The actors’ inability to use tones is actually probably accurate, and here’s some evidence to back that up. Also, Chinese was used by characters from all walks of life and in a wide variety of social settings, showing a nicely non-stratified mixing of cultures that we unfortunately didn’t get to see much of in rest of the show.)
Introduction (abridged because I don’t have to explain the concept of fandom and conlangs to you, people of the internet)
Note: Skip to “The Realities of the Firefly Universe” for where the real linguistics stuff starts.
Keep reading
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rhysiana:
Once upon a time, in a land about twelve hours north of here, I was in the second year of grad school and really regretting all my life choices. Because the professor of the sociolinguistics class I was taking was a post-doc living several states away from her fellow-academic husband, she felt the same and gave our class completely free rein in picking our final paper topic. Since watching Firefly was the only thing that had given me joy that semester, I decided to examine the pidginization of Chinese and English in that universe.
(Tl;dr version: The actors’ inability to use tones is actually probably accurate, and here’s some evidence to back that up. Also, Chinese was used by characters from all walks of life and in a wide variety of social settings, showing a nicely non-stratified mixing of cultures that we unfortunately didn’t get to see much of in rest of the show.)
Introduction (abridged because I don’t have to explain the concept of fandom and conlangs to you, people of the internet)
Note: Skip to “The Realities of the Firefly Universe” for where the real linguistics stuff starts.
Keep reading
(Your picture was not posted)
