My introduction

[Rifkala]

Hi, I’m Rifkala. I’m a disabled queer trans Ashkenazi woman from the Midwest, currently living in western New York.

I’m extremely obsessed with languages, including artificial ones. I’m fluent in Esperanto, advanced at Toki Pona and Yiddish, OK at Spanish, and I know a good deal of Hebrew. I like to design graphics for Teepublic and similar sites, putting various political slogans (both popular and self-invented) in various languages. Other languages I’m interested in include (this is not an exhaustive list): Arabic, Turkish, Kabyle, Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Guarani, Globasa, Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, Brithenig, Klingon, and Láadan.

I’m a published poet many times over, though it has been years since my last publication.

Lately I’ve been rediscovering leisure reading, and am currently reading Dune Messiah. Before that I read Dune, and before that, The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (highly recommend).

Judaism-wise, I grew up Conservative and was active in BBYO as a teenager. I became estranged from Judaism as an adult because I wanted to “just be a human,” and plus, I was unable to stomach the occupation and its regular atrocities. I started re-evaluating my desire to “just be a human” after the Tree of Life shooting and became more unapologetically Jewish, though I still only rarely go to shul. But I’ve been taking Yiddish lessons since 2019, and my Teepublic store that I started around that time is unapologetically left-wing Jewish. Still, it was only 2016 that I was last yelling at Jews for caring about antisemitism when the Palestinian cause was so much more important.

[nadja]

Hej!
That is quite the list of languages in your ‘interested’ pile there, I’m impressed ^^

[alter_kaker]

Nice to see you here

There’s a whole forum for languages. Although I will never understand your fascination with conlangs, I hope you keep having a good time

[Rifkala]

@nadja Thanks! It’s not really about impressing people, and I don’t really like to list my languages. It’s just that I have difficulty focusing on one thing. I’d probably be fluent in a couple more languages if I could do so.

I should’ve divided them up more… there’s ones I am somewhat capable of forming sentences in (Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, German, Ido, Interlingua, Brithenig, Klingon), the ones I can read without much effort but can’t really form sentences in without help (Catalan, Interlingue) and the ones I have an extremely rudimentary knowledge of (the rest). The one I know the least is Thai.

I also forgot to mention Lingua Franca Nova (I’m capable of forming sentences in this) and some others I thought of over the last 24 hours, then forgot.

@alter_kaker Oh great! Excited about the language forum.

[raf]

There is something refreshing about something like Esperanto. An artificial language that’s easy to learn and puts no culture above another. I think it ended up being a bit of a utopia, but I like the earnestness behind a project like that

[niamh]

I always wanted to vote for the EDE but was somehow always persuaded to make sure my vote doesn’t “go to waste”.
Still it’s nice to see they have a decent fan base in France

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe–Democracy–Esperanto

[alter_kaker]

Esperanto has also the element of “something Jewish but not Jewish” which is less cute, but at the very least there’s one good joke that came out of it

[talya]

@raf this is quickly becoming off-topic, but are you familiar with toki pona? that one is taking the idea of “easy to learn, no culture above another” to a whole other level. though that one doesn’t aspire to be an interlang, and rightly so lol

[raf]

I am. I tried to make a toki pona translator for the sheer challenge!