I'm just saying --- videos

Here are some pro tips for doing videos to post on the web, say on Youtube.

NO TTS. If you are too fing lazy to do the voiceover yourself, after learning how to say foreign names or phrases right, we don't owe you our time.

NO urban legends. If you are too fing lazy to do the homework and avoid the lies, we don't owe you our time.

Repetition is not detail. If you don't have enough facts to fill out two hours, tell them only once unless you need them to bolster other facts, or only do a one hour video. We don't owe it to you to sit through a repetition of the same info or phrases every ten minutes.

GRAPHICS. If you can't find enough relevant graphics to match your text, draw them yourself. Also, I don't want to see somebody wearing a Jacobean collar when you're talking about some period before the death of Elizabeth I. That means you think we're too stupid to tell the difference. We don't owe it to you to let you insult our intelligence.

The same thing goes for repeatedly showing the same graphics as for repeating the same phrase in your text.

AI. Read the terms and conditions of your AI app carefully. I've heard announcements that when you take advantage of the AI in your app, the company that made the app claims copyrights. 

Besides, AI is an idiot child. It doesn't know a valid source from something that has been debunked. It lies sometimes. It contradicts itself. AI does not make you smarter. 

And finally, pick your subject properly. The only people watching your Kennedy videos are stans or people who literally never heard the name before. But the videos on the Bantu expansion are few, and have the faults I list above, and yet this was one of the major population movements in the world, which played out for thousands of years of world history.

I am no hypocrite. Every post on my blog, I wrote myself, after years of research. One string of 50 posts was 40 years in the making, because I wanted a solid string of facts, not just he said/he said, and some of the best facts I used only showed up on Internet Archive in 2014. If you're not even going to try to do some percentage of the work I did, * shrug * you're wasting my time.

I'm just saying...

21st Century Classical Greek -- it's not accusative

I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative".

As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature.

The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..."

Wait a minute.

In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative.

But the case used in Arabic is the same as for Scripture, which we WOULD call accusative, since it's the direct object.

Welp in LSJ a bunch of entries have the note "c. acc. pers. et rei." One example is lissomai, which has this notation in meaning 2. And it means pray to a god (the pers.) about something.

And we would expect the god to be in dative as well. Classical Greek did have a dative (modern Greek does not), but it's not used here.

Also liteuo has the same note, but the pers. is somebody you entreat, and the rei is what you entreat on behalf of. And that is "for" which usually takes the dative in Greek.

I said all through my Greek thread that using case names turns out to be confusing because we keep thinking in Grenglish and Greek doesn't work that way. It turns out Arabic has the identical issue, only Quranic Arabic has already dropped the dative that Classical Greek kept.

I may do an Arabic thread to give examples of all the problems as well as give citations. You can read my Biblical Hebrew and Greek threads for a sneak peak at the kind of things grammarians have been screwing up for 25 centuries.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- maybe it's just me

When you use a verb that needs a preposition, do you struggle with where the preposition goes relative to the predicate?

The farther you put the preposition from the verb, the harder it is for your reader to know what you meant. 

But sometimes it is uncomfortable to put the preposition between the verb and predicate.

Maybe it's just me. I grew up west of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and had schoolmates who were Mennonite or at least "plain". I was used to phrases like the classic "throw the cow over the fence some hay". (tossed plenty of hay in my time too)

In that case the syntax should be "throw some hay over the fence to the cow", because "over" is part of a prepositional phrase, not a complement to the verb. In German, "to the cow" would be in dative and "some hay" would be accusative and there would be no doubt what you were throwing.

Even if you grew up immersed in the language you write in, you can make mistakes. I'm working on Arabic for a project on Samaritan scripture, and James Price assures us that kids are prone to a specific mistake if they grow up with parents who speak Arabic, but the kids don't. (Had to edit that one a couple of times)

So cut yourself some slack, but EDIT EDIT EDIT.