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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • also as a swedish person i think by far the most notable aspect is how level the playing field is when it comes to respect, primarily in schools and the like but even in other spaces.

    its the norm that students and teachers are on first name basis and honorifics are almost never used anywhere. the plural 2nd person pronoun “ni” has largely fallen out of use in its other meaning as a singular 2nd person formal pronoun, being replaced with its informal counterpart “du” most of the time.

    students and employees alike can freely and commonly do criticize and talk back to teachers and employers/bosses if theres a genuinely valid reason to do so and the general dynamic between different social positions is so relaxed to the point of it being fascinating. i think meeting the literal king of the country would for many people not warrant that big a change in behaviour other than obviously just being particularly nice.

    as a result of this i think people have an easier time seeing each other as people rather than just as cogs of society, and being a person who struggles a lot with reading social cues its an enormous relief to so far in my professional life never had to worry a single time whether i should refer to someone as mr. or ms. or if i should be speaking in a particular register



  • Late because I only discovered it first now but this is quite interesting. When I first read this post my initial thought was also to investigate Basque and other language isolates, but by coincidence I just happened to stumble upon the Ainu (language isolate (according to popular consensus from what i can gather anyways) that’s native to Hokkaido and parts of the easternmost islands of Russia) word for The Earth while looking through wiktionary: aynumosir (アィヌモシㇼ) which roughly means “the land of the humans.” Compared to the Nahuatl example it also seems that the word for “land” (mosir (モシㇼ)) does not have much to do with the word for dirt/soil on its own and seems to more explicitly refer to land as in territory/country, meanwhile the word for dirt/soil would be “toy” (トィ). As far as I know this would be the word for The Earth that is the furthest removed from having with earth/soil to do. Additional fun fact is that the Ainu word for the equivalent of heaven is “kamuymosir” (カムイモシㇼ ) which roughly means “divine territory/country.”