I genuinely don’t recognize it and I only see it used by nazis. I also have only seen it on tiktok

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    So yeah, this is Tigrinya also spelled Tigrigna, a national language of Eritrea and Ethiopia — in fact tragically earlier this decade Ethiopia carried out genocidal actions against Tigrayans in the northern border region near Eritrea.

    The Tigrinya language is like its Ethio-Semitic relative Amharic, with which it is often confused, a beautiful and overlooked language of a storied region of the world, so I think it is a really damn big shame that your first exposure to this language is Nazis trying to evade social media content filters. In fact I’m sure that’s one part of why these Nazis do it, that if you come to associate the Abugida with Nazis you’ll start to feel uncomfortable seeing that script in general, even when it is perfectly innocuous.

    Now if you want to listen to Tigrinya music — which I would definitely recommend, especially if you commute by train — the magic word is ትግርኛtgrnya ሙዚቃmuziqa. The top result on YouTube is this bop.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      If you look closely you’ll see that it’s the same block of text in both comments. I would assume that this is an attempt to confuse content moderation bots, who might be able to flag obvious antisemitism in English-language comments, but not in comments identified as being in a different language with a less developed content moderation system.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      By the way, not to burst your bubble, but this is Tigrinya, not Amharic. After a lot of straining to recall the letters I managed to read the words ናይnay እርትራErtra which means “of Eritrea”, and the word ናይnay is apparently found in Tigrinya but not in Amharic.

      I really wish I could’ve gotten further in Tigrinya than just basic phrases that I immediately forgot plus the word for “vaccination”, but alas, there’s unfortunately way more resources aimed at Tigrinya speakers learning English or Norwegian than the other way around, so I remain only knowing how to trial-and-error sound out words.

  • pooh [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Here’s my theory:

    TikTok’s language filters are especially aggressive, and so I think in this case they might be using it only because the existing language filters don’t cover that script? And then other nazis can just use google translate or whatever to convert it back. I don’t know for sure, but this would kind of make sense to me.

    • Zrc [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      it’s not about the content, pasting this at the end of their message just let’s them say whatever they want without it getting deleted

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Oh look, fascists are trying another coded message system, getting high off of “duper’s delight” for the very brief time it takes for their extremely clever (and usually stolen) code language to be figured out and for them to move on again. debord-tired

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Ethiopian is not a language. This is text in the Ge’ez script, also known as Fidel and Abugida, and known by Unicode as “Ethiopic text”, however there is no Ethiopian language. The script is rather used to write languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya, spoken in both Ethiopia and Eritrea.

      Call me pedantic but I just think it’s an important distinction to make, that the script is also used in Eritrea and that Ethiopia has way more than one national language, only some of which are written in the Ge’ez script.