Brothers and sisters,

I come not to spread rumours or leaks, nor to cope. I come to bring truth.

Many months ago, in a land called Hammerfell, we too suffered. Every showcase was the showcase. Every insider knew something. Every disappointment cut a little deeper. And then a revelation came to us:

Tomorrow.

Not next year. Neither "soon", nor your "Valve Time".

Tomorrow.

It's a perfect prophecy. It demands faith. It cannot be disproven because when tomorrow arrives, the prophecy simply carries on, until The Fateful Tomorrow has finally come. Some will mock you. Some will say that there is no Half Life 3. Some will tell you to "manage your expectations", to "be patient", or even that there is no such thing as Half Life 3. Pay them no mind. Instead, answer only:

Tomorrow.

Go forth and await with certainty what has always been certain:

Half Life 3 is releasing tomorrow.

So, as another user predicted yesterday, there hasn't been an announcement today. That's OK! There are still 999 other days on which we can expect an announcement. The chances of TESVI being announced tomorrow are still 1 in 1000. That's not so bad! If we had been counting from the release of Skyrim, our odds would be 1 in 6352!

See you all Tomorrow.

Turkish soldiers detain six young men from the Sheladiz sub-district, allowing them to return home after a day of torture.

Yesterday morning, July 1, six young men from the Sheladiz sub-district of the Amedi district headed toward the villages of Bisape and Kukere, near the Kurejaro Mountain behind Sheladiz, to gather wild herbs. While on their way to these villages, they fell into an ambush by Turkish soldiers and were detained.

The Turkish soldiers beat the young men with rifle butts, kicked, and slapped them. After severe torture, they allowed them to return home today, telling them, "If you ever return to this area again, you will not see life with your own eyes; we will kill you."

During the same incident, Turkish soldiers also abused the mule that the young men had brought along to help carry loads. They attacked it with rifle butts and stones, leaving the animal's entire body covered in blood.

The Sheladiz sub-district is one of the areas most heavily affected by the Turkish military's operations in the Kurdistan Region. The livelihood of the majority of its residents depends on farming and gathering wild herbs. To date, 92 villages from this sub-district have been invaded by the Turkish army, preventing residents from returning to their villages.

I was recently reading Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy (highly recommended!). During his discussion of Aristotelian logic, he mentions that Aristotle differentiates between the relationships of things in three distinct ways:

• 'σῠν' (syn) – combining or existing side-by-side
• 'ὁμός' (homos) – belonging to the same group or category
• 'ἕτερος' (heteros) – distinctly different from one another

This caught my attention because my native (Iranian) language, Zazaki, has a morphological system that seems to operate on a very similar logic.

In Zazaki, we have a set of morphemes that the literature variously describes as pronominal adverbs, prepositional pronouns, preverbs, directional particles, or oblique pronouns. They can be combined with adpositions and verbs to create a wide variety of meanings, functioning somewhat similarly to pronominal adverbs in Germanic languages.

What makes this system in Zazaki particularly interesting is that it is built entirely on three single-consonant roots: p, t, and c (last one pronounced /dʒ/).

• P carries connotations of togetherness, of multiple entities uniting under one banner, or of reciprocal action. From it we get words like pa ("with"), pê and pîya (both meaning "together", but pê attaches to verbs to indicate reciprocity), and pêra ("each other" / "to one another").
• T carries connotations of oneness, merging, or a loss of individuality. From this root, we get for example tîya ("same"), tê (similar to pê, but moreso meaning "as one" or "into one"), tede ("in it"), and têde ("all" / "whole").
• C carries connotations of difference and separation. For example, ci is used as a general third-person pronoun, but strictly in the oblique case, keeping it permanently distinct from the subject of the sentence. We also have for example cîya ("different"), cêra ("apart"), cira ("from it", "out of it").

I might not explaining the grammatical intricacies perfectly, but the underlying logic of these three Zazaki roots maps surprisingly well onto the aforementioned Greek concepts. So much so that it'd be pretty easy to create calques of English words that use these Greek prefixes. For example, something like "synergy" would be 'pêgurîyayîş', while "homogeneity" and "heterogeneity" would be 'têcinsîye' and 'cêcinsîye' respectively.

My question for the linguists here: Could this underlying "logic" be something both languages inherited from Proto-Indo-European? Or is it simply a common cross-linguistic tendency for languages to grammatically codify the distinction between these three specific concepts (togetherness, sameness, and separation)? Or, of course, it might just be a coincidence. I understand that most languages in the world have ways of expressing these concepts, but, as far as I can tell, this is usually done awkwardly or by borrowing words from other languages.

Standardkerdişî sera, zuwanê ma nika be çekuyê newa pirrê; zafên nêmendo ke ma nêeşkenêm raberêm. Reyna ke, pê miletê ma û Rocawanî mîyan de pêresnayîşê vêşkerdoğa, ma ge-ge fikir û vateyê newî vênenêm ke ma tam nêşenêm be zuwanê maya bikerêm eşkera. Zafane rey, ma geyrenêm tepeya, ve bin û binaşedê zuwandê ma ya ke konseptî pê vateyîya vecenêm, û ge-ge ma zî ney nêşenêm. Zazakî de, çekûda «probably»ya Engilizkî rê, çekuyên raşta çinîyo; tayên viraştişê cumleyî estê—mavajî: «aseno ke ...»—nê zî tam nêyenê menaya «probably» ser.

Persê min yeno piro ke ez wazenan bieşnawîn zuwanê Kurdkîyê bînî senên vanê «probably». Çekuyê Turkkî û Erebkîyê ke ê zî tam menaya «probably» nêdanê bera, mi torrman de çîkên nêdîyo.

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Thanks to standardisation, our languages now contain many new words, and there is very little that we cannot express in them. However, as our people increasingly come into contact with the West, we encounter new ideas and expressions that we cannot fully convey in our native languages. Most of the time, we can rely on the idiomatic foundations of our languages to express these concepts; sometimes, however, we cannot. In Zazaki, for example, there is no single-word equivalent for the English word "probably". We use some sentence structures instead, such as "Aseno ke..." ("It appears that...") — but these don't fully capture the meaning of "probably".

So, I would love to know how other Kurdish languages express the word "probably". Aside from Turkish and Arabic words that don't quite capture the meaning of "probably" either, I wasn't able to find anything online.

Tl;dr: I am a (now fluent) heritage speaker of an "endangered" (Ethnologue) and "vulnerable" (UNESCO) language that has not yet been successfully standardised. Instead, several groups are developing distinct standardised forms of the language, but I am displeased with these projects as the groups developing them are motivated primarily by differing political positions rather than by real love for the language. I want to at least attempt to create my own standardisation. What can I do to be able to at least attempt this?

To give some more backstory: the language in question is Zazaki, a language related to Kurdish and Persian, originating from Eastern Turkey.

The most prominent Zazaki standardisation group is called the "Vate Group". Their standardisation is strongly based on the Southern dialect (group) of Zazaki, and as is common in the regions that that dialect is spoken in, they see themselves as Kurds. But this group takes it a bit farther: this group, a joint project by non-Zaza Kurds and southern Zaza intellectuals, claims that Zazaki is a mere dialect of Kurdish, and their work is heavily influenced by this. They almost always pick those dialectal variations of our words that closest resemble that of their Kurdish neighbours, and they even fill their Zazaki dictionaries with borrowings taken straight from Kurdish—these words are not calques or even made to fit our phonology, no Zaza can understand them! In their analyses of Zazaki grammar, vocabulary, even our idioms, they come at all these things from the perspective that we speak a dialect of Kurdish, and that everything that does not fit that mold is foreign influence that has to be purged.

The other major standardisation group is the Zazaki Institute. It's made up of Zazas that hold the position that we are an independent nation, and that Zazaki is an independent language. They work with actual linguists and are capable of putting out some great work, but they let themselves get too polarised by the current political situation. As much as that the Vate Group's standardisation is rooted in Kurdish ethno-nationalism, the Institute's standardisation is rooted in contrarianism against the Vate Group. And just as how the members of Vate Group predominantly come from Southern Zazaki-speaking areas and base their standardisation on their local dialect, the Institute is in the same boat with Northern Zazaki. Northern Zazas, due to their more remote geography and distinct religious loyalties, also have a strong regional identity that is commonly valued above any other kind of identity, and this sentiment is also visible within the Institute's work.

For the record, the dialect of my hometown belongs to the third major sub-group, Central Zazaki. But I'm not fluent in the local dialect; what I speak is basically a mismatch between the Northern and Southern dialects, because most resources of the language are written in these dialects. This, combined with the fact that I grew up in the diaspora, means that I get to enjoy an inherent detachment from the regionalist/dialectal, religious, and political squabbles pervasive in the homeland. I view Zazas as a separate ethnicity, but I see myself as a Kurd nationally (though I believe that what nation a Zaza belongs to is an individual matter; there are Zazas of Kurdistan, Zazas of Turkey, Zazas of Zazaistan, and even Zazas of Germany or the Netherlands!). I am not an ethno-nationalist; I do not believe that Zazaki is a dialect of Kurdish or that Zazaki must be made more similar to the other Kurdish languages for political purposes, but I also do not believe that my language must be "cleansed" of its "non-native" elements, or anything like that. I do not view my local dialect as superior to the other ones, either. I simply want a Zazaki that all Zazas can understand, something that is structurally sound, and that sounds good. I want to help modernise it to where people can write academic papers in it (that nobody will read, of course); that people can dirty talk in it during sex instead of defaulting to Turkish or English; that a government could write tax reminder letters in it (even though that would somewhat sully the language..); that online influencers could do their shitty street interviews in it, etc. etc. What I'm trying to say is, I think the language as it exists right now is beautiful and intricate, it just needs to have some love put into standardising it. The organisations that are supposed to be doing this job are not doing it; instead, they are more interested in pushing their awful politics.

I did not study linguistics, but I make up for it by being extremely (diagnosed!) autistic. Basically every politically-active young Zaza in the diaspora is an amateur linguist and I am no less of an amateur than the others, but I am certainly far more interested in these things than most others. I have tried my best to contribute to the standardisation of the language through the already existing organisations—I've argued with many Vate/Institute-affiliated Zaza """linguists""", have made many suggestions and corrections—and while much of those contributions were compelling enough to where they had to be taken seriously, these efforts of mine are still fundamentally constrained by these institutions that I have to work with, specifically their political motivations.

For this reason I want to try and do something on my own. This is not going to be a full-time thing, but then again, these organisations also don't do it full-time. I am also fully aware that even if I do end up creating a proper standardisation of the language, it will not be accepted by these organisations or the (Turkish) state. If whatever I create ends up being nothing more than a hobby project, I would be content with even that. I just want to do something.

To be clear, I'm asking if anyone has any resources they could point me to that could help me achieve this. Even just some tips would be appreciated. For example: I have read enough to know that the most important thing to do first is to put together a corpus, to collect data on the language that could then be drawn from when the actual standardisation work is taking place. I have already been working on this, but what do I do afterwards, or alongside it?

Please excuse any grammatical errors or awkward phrasing; English is not my native language.

Weş û war bê! (Be well!)

I find it to be a far more enjoyable way to have this conversation than having to read through the millionth thread asking the same exact questions.

Hey there! I've recently been interested in having a separate OS on my PC dedicated to my studies, away from Windows where I game on. After doing some (admittedly cursory) research, Pop!_OS seemed like the best option to me because it does not seem complicated to install and my PC has an NVIDIA GPU.

After browsing this subreddit for a bit, I've gotten the impression that people are either unhappy with the current state of Cosmic or are experiencing issues they expect to be fixed soon. It's worth noting that this mostly seems to pertain to gaming, which I do not plan to do on it. Given that I only plan to use it for studying and productivity, would you recommend Pop!_OS in its current state to me?

Also: I understand that this is a subreddit dedicated to this particular distro, but if anyone with more experience with these matters could recommend me other distros they believe might fit what I want more, that would also be appreciated. Clinging as close to the Windows experience as possible is not something I care about, though I would like something that is easy to install and begin using.

Your knowledge is appreciated!