Relief depicting the pharaoh Merneptah being greeted by the god Ra-Horakhty, detail of a wall carving from the Tomb of Merneptah (KV8). New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty, ca. 1292-1189 BC. Valley of the Kings, West Thebes.
That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.
These
are more genetically compatible than These
and that’s why morphology-based phylogeny has Issues
The problem is perspective. People always think dogs are the ‘standard’ animal, the metric to use for whether or not two organisms “look like” they’re related. When in fact they’re a massive outlier due to the fact that we fucked up this lineage of wolf beyond recognition with selective breeding. It’s why people always say “breed” when they mean “species”, especially when talking about groups like lizards which can’t even be defined cladistically since some of them are closer to snakes than each other. To say nothing of fish.
I once read an article that emphasized there is no such thing as a fish. Sharks and rays, lamprey, lobe-finned fish like lungfish and coelacanth, bichir and sturgeon, and of course the multiple infraclasses of more “modern” fish groups are all only very distantly related to one another. They’ve maintained semi-similar body structures only because there are limited ways to efficiently move through water as a vertebrate.
This
And this
Are more distantly related from one another than you and I are from a lungfish
Which is absolutely fuckin wild.
Not only that, but all of us air-breathing land vertebrates, all the lizards and chickens and people and frogs, are closer to one another than those three “fish” are to one another as well.
these
are genetically closer than these
and…
these
are genetically closer than these
and my personal favorite, it really fucks with people…
these
are more genetically similar than these
COOL.
just the other day, one of my friends mentioned this book, “Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History,” which apparently has a (tongue in cheek) chapter that argues that Cows are actually Fish.
If you were to make the word “fish” refer to a monphyletic group, it would include cows, as well as humans, since we all share the same common ancestor. It would be equivalent to calling an animal a vertebrate.
Excavated from a tomb in Sanam, Lower Nubia. Made out of Egyptian faience. Third Intermediate Period, 25th Dynasty, ca. 744-656 BC. Now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Chinese Boost grammar: This page has a list of different levels of Mandarin grammar for you to explore. What you do is choose your level and then pick a grammar pattern from the articles under that level. Each article is clearly written and gives multiple examples to help you understand what you’re learning.
Just Learn Chinese: This website has so many things. There’s vocab/idiom explanations, grammar, and best of all stories/novels. The stories are divided into different levels of difficulty and, when reading the actual stories, have a popup dictionary when you hover over a word. The website is run by a native Mandarin speaker.
Carl Gene: Carl Gene is a professional translator and this is his blog. I’d say the stuff he posts is a little more advanced but it’s certainly worth looking around. He posts about Chinese language and history, as well as his experience working as a translator and interpreter. Really interesting stuff.
中外对话 China Dialogue: China Dialogue is a website dedicated to stories about China’s environmental issues and the articles can be read in either Mandarin or English. This is a much more advanced reading source and it is not divided into levels of difficulty.
The Chairman’s Bao: This is an online newspaper that has stories for each HSK level. When you go to an article, you can highlight words you don’t understand and the definition will appear to the right of the text. There’s a wide range of topics covered in their articles so you’re bound to find something you like.
Read 漫画 Manhua Online: All of the manhua are written by native speakers (at least i think they are) and they’re free to read. The whole website is in Mandarin so it might that a little bit of legwork to figure out how to find what you want. I just leaf through the manhua that are at the top of the page.
Read Chinese: This website offers a huge number of texts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners in both traditional and simplified characters. After reading each passage there are a few questions you answer to test your comprehension of what you just read. Each passage also has pinyin, but rather than putting it with the characters it is put underneath the passage so you are forced to focus just on the characters while reading.
Hanzi Grids: Here you can make your own printable grids for practicing hanzi. To get started you just have to quickly make a free account on the website using your email. After doing so you can start working on your grid. There are some features that you have to pay for but you can still make a basic grid without the subscription.
Easy Mandarin Books to Read: This is just a short list of suggestions for simple books to read in Mandarin. Most of them are children’s books or books of tales.
Mandarin Weekly: Mandarin Weekly is a weekly newsletter that includes loads of resources for Mandarin for all levels. The weekly emails include resources for vocab, grammar, culture, and much more. 10/10 would recommend subscribing especially since it’s free.
Ninchanese: This is a fun little website full of games and an entertaining story to help you learn basic Mandarin. There’s also an app for it so you can play both on your phone and on your computer.
Phonetic Sets of Characters: As the name suggests, this is a list of characters that have similar pronunciations. In this list they cover characters that have the same pronunciation for everything including tones and characters that have the same initials and finals but different tones. There are two other categories of similarity, but this list only covers the two.
