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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The problem with saying “X language is not indigenous to Y place” is that it just depends how far back you go. France, Spain, Portugal and Romania had Latin enforced upon them, and what about Patois and Nigerian Pidgin where they’ve developed to the point of being different languages, spoken only in the place they developed, or Singlish where nobody forced English due to the circumstances surrounding Singapore’s colonisation, but it was a common language spoken by all of the various ethnic groups there and picked up features from some of the other languages spoken there?

    If Indian people don’t refer to themselves as Indian when speaking English, then that’s just a characteristic of Indian dialects of English.





  • Yes, I was referring to someone in the top 50% of earners, still half of all people in the US.

    To get to most countries if you’re on that demographic, you just need to have a job.

    To get to the US historically, you needed to either get a H1B visa, which last I heard had a 9% chance per year, enter the green card lottery, which has a 0.3% chance per year, or transfer within your company after getting promoted to a managerial role via an L1A visa, which is a slow process and very dependant on who you work for, and on your origin country for acceptance rates.

    For people in the bottom 50%, I agree it’s historically been easier to go the US with the green card lottery, fairly accessible visas if you have immediate family living in the US, and even for illegal immigration with birthright citizenship, as then you can get a green card through your children.

    I was basing my comment on the fact most people on Lemmy are going to be nerds working in IT/Sciences/Engineering, but even then, if you take a mean “ease for a random sample to move” then it’s still harder to move to the US than out of it.






  • Essentially: it’s not designed as a change from North/East/South/West, it’s designed as a from-scratch way to refer to those directions.

    The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, so let’s say East is “Sun” and West is “Setting-Sun.”

    Polaris/The North Star is in the North, so let’s call that direction “Star” and the other direction “No-Star.”

    When you say “Setting-Sun-Sun-Star,” you’re saying the direction is more similar to the path the sun takes through the sky than it is to the North Star, and in the direction the sun sets.

    16 directions is pretty arbitrary anyway though, usually 8 is enough and then you don’t have the confusion of repeated words.