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Dolphins Recorded Having a Conversation For The First Time (telegraph.co.uk)
For the first time Russian researchers have recorded a conversation between two dolphins -- Yasha and Yana -- who were talking to each other in a pool. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Telegraph:
Scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals' different "voices" [and] have now shown that dolphins alter the volume and frequency of pulsed clicks to form individual "words" which they string together into sentences in much the same way that humans speak...
"This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language... Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people."
The dolphins listened to an entire "sentence" before replying, according to the article, which points out that dolphin brains are larger and more complex than the brains of humans.
"This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language... Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people."
The dolphins listened to an entire "sentence" before replying, according to the article, which points out that dolphin brains are larger and more complex than the brains of humans.
Gary Larson's take on dophin deciphering.
Yeah.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Dolphins are actually ancient aliens.
What's with the quotes around "words" and "language"? Languages and words don't count if they're undocumented? I can understand the quotes around "sentence" maybe, since that implies a grammar which hasn't been verified, but words are fundamental. If they make a noise which has a specific meaning, that's a word.
Also, thumbs up to the editor for the last line there. I laughed, ruefully.
It won't stop me from eating tuna (and I'm not a republican.)
Dolphin 1: I know where we can get some really good fish.
Dolphin 2: Sounds great! Why don't I go get Doris, you talk to Sheila, and we can go there and make a night of it?
Dolphin 1: Works for me. Wanna grab some mackerel afterward?
Dolphin 2: It's like you read my mind!
Dolphin 1: Hey, who's the pink dork with the microphone?
#DeleteChrome
There are a lot of language using animals which are not yet recognized. Humanity is just getting to the point of seeing that there are other intelligences here on Earth.
We have livestock working dogs. They exhibit a lot of language and string up to six words together, use adjectives and have names for each other, us and objects. We have about 300 words we use with them, both from us to them and them to us as well as what they use to each other. It is clear they have a lot more words they use with each other that I don't understand so their language is considerably more extensive than the smattering of pidgin we share.
Realize I'm not talking about Fluffy, a typical domesticated dog that was raised as a singleton isolated from other dog culture. These are livestock large working dogs that are far closer to their wolf ancestors and they grow up in a culturally rich environment of a many generational pack on our farm. They work for a living and know hundreds of individual livestock animals that they tend to on the farm.
Yasha- "The Humans top choices are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump" Yana- "Bwahahahahahaha".
It'd be mighty convenient that, if dolphins actually were to possess language skills, their language and conversation style would mimic that of humans so closely.
There were people who tried to claim similar things about apes for quite a while. They could even learn sign language! That finally (mostly) ended when researchers figured out that apes could learn about 300 words... Roughly the same as a dog.
#DeleteChrome
Even dolphins aren't safe from the KGB listening in.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The intelligence of dolphins has been subject to myth for so long that there are studies galore on this topic. And by any reasonable standard, dolphins are less intelligent than e.g. crows. Guess we'll continue to hear from wanna-be Dr. Doolittles, nevertheless, time and again.
In that case, better come up with a biological differentiator for your own DNA pattern. Probably quickly.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Measuring a brain purely on size is very misleading. At least a fair portion of the relative size difference of brains in different species has to do with body size, perhaps because larger bodies have more sensory cells and larger numbers of nerves, which necessitate more basic processing power for sensory input, as well as sending commands to various parts of the nervous system. Where the brain is larger in comparison to body mass, there is a tendency to find more intelligent animals, so the key here, at least in part, is that ratio.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Back in the 70's and 80's, people recorded dolphin vocalizations, and identified the equivalent of human phonemes, basically just different sound patterns that would occur repeatedly. By collecting a lot of data, and counting up the occurrences of distinct phonemes, they were able to show a phoneme frequency that matches the exact same patterns as human speech (frequency here meaning how often a phoneme occurs, not the frequency of the sound waves).
For instance, "the" occurred 6 times in the paragraph above, "and" occurs 3 times, and words like "vocalization" occur once - far less often. All human languages have this distribution where a small quantity of words makes up the bulk of common conversation, whereas things like bird calls or other vocalizations from less intelligent species follow a more flat distribution.
The point being, we've known for a long time that dolphins communicate using something very similar to human speech. This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The brain size is easily examined by opening the skull and making some measurements with rulers and weighs.
The idea that brain size correlates with intelligence level held sway during the Victorian era... not so much now. However your point regarding the complexity required to manage "3D Sonar" is well made - but, unless we think they're doing manual calculations conciously in their heads, it's not really a proxy for intelligence.
#DeleteChrome
Are we humans so self-centered that we did not expect other intelligent animials to talk with each other?
To converse, both sides have to want to talk.
Dolphins show little or no interest in actually teaching us their language, so it's more akin to learning a dead language from the last native speaker - one who hates your guts. It's not simple thing.
Then there's the assumption that we can have any kind of meaningful discourse with them, that they think in any way similar to us. That's just unproven.
Then there's the assumption that just listening is enough to learn anything at all. Even listening-and-playing-back does nothing. The dolphins know it's a recording and don't respond in the same way, even if they show interest.
To be honest, I see little point in trying. Dolphins aren't sitting those solving the maths equations that we can't. They are probably talking about where the fish are, where their friends are, and where the danger is. Not something we can usefully use, especially if they are bright enough to know recordings and ignore them.
The reason we don't yet have communications is because it's a lot of effort for almost zero gain.
Premise: Dolphins have "human-like" intelligence and communicate through a sophisticated language.
Observation: Despite decades of human effort trying to decipher it, Dolphins have made no attempt to try to help us understand their language.
Conclusion: Dolphins don't actually want to talk to us.
Because dolphins can misquote too.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Measuring a brain purely on size is very misleading. At least a fair portion of the relative size difference of brains in different species has to do with body size, perhaps because larger bodies have more sensory cells and larger numbers of nerves, which necessitate more basic processing power for sensory input, as well as sending commands to various parts of the nervous system. Where the brain is larger in comparison to body mass, there is a tendency to find more intelligent animals, so the key here, at least in part, is that ratio.
This is probably to what you're referring: Encephalization quotient
Encephalization quotient (EQ), or encephalization level, is a measure of relative brain size defined as the ratio between actual brain mass and predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size, which is hypothesized to be a rough estimate of the intelligence or cognition of the animal.
This is a more refined measurement than the raw brain-to-body mass ratio, as it takes into account allometric effects. The relationship, expressed as a formula, has been developed for mammals, and may not yield relevant results when applied outside this group.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yup. There was even a Scooby-Doo episode based on that subject: "Scooby's Night with a Frozen Fright". It first aired October 3, 1970.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
"You're trying to insight dysentery among the fishes, aren't ya?"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The analysis of numerous pulses registered in our experiments showed that the dolphins took turns in producing [sentences] and did not interrupt each other, which gives reason to believe that each of the dolphins listened to the other's pulses before producing its own. Now if they could just teach that to my spouse...
They live in 3D, Mr Flatscreen. It's 3D gestures all the way down. Using wavefronts. The echoes of which they can reconstruct into 3D maps on the fly. Er, swim.
Cower before your superiors. Oh, wait, you can't -- no flippers. Also too slow. Limited range of hearing. Weak. Small.
Wow, you just suck.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lends new meaning to 'click-bait'.
Hook them up to a brain to robot interface complete with VR goggles .. maybe they can do the same things humans can. Maybe we can outsource work to them. I doubt there are any implications to doing something like that.
Maybe stop because of the slavery: http://www.alternet.org/labor/...
That's not a problem with Tuna. It's a problem with protection of humans (and the lack thereof) by other humans.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
hey, so what happened to Fred again?
He tried that thing, you know, crawled out of the water to see if we could escape our aquatic existence.
WTF! To live with them??
Quit looking their way! Talk about something else! Uh, yeah, them tunas is great...er, mackerels, I mean...why are they still staring at us
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Look, they may or may not make the playoffs this year but I am pretty sure that the coaches are at least talking to their players in Miami. Wait, what are we talking about?
Isn't that an Americanism, i.e. optional?
You'd better hope they don't eliminate people who don't know that the terminating period for that sentence belongs inside the quotes, sparky. :)
The position of a period relative to an ending quote mark depends on which country you speak (or learned) English in.
I've always been told it depends on where the period belongs. That is to say if you're quoting an entire sentence (e.g. the end of the quote is the end of a sentence) the period goes inside to denote this, otherwise it goes outside. According to this source, placing the period inside the quote regardless of logic is an "American" thing; though I'm American and follow the logic provided there.
Literally every other source I bothered to look at (all American style guides) say the period (or comma) goes inside the quote unless there is a parenthetical citation, in which case it follows that. After a dozen or so sources, I gave up on trying to find one representing a country other than the US; if anyone can provide me one or more, that would be greatly appreciated.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The dolphins listened to an entire "sentence" before replying, according to the article, which points out that dolphin brains are larger and more complex than the brains of humans.
This is the best summary. My ex-girlfriend never listened to an "entire" sentence before replying. I need to start dating dolphins.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
I believe he's referring to Matthew 8:28-34.
I believe you're confusing phonemes (distinctive sounds, like English 'p', 'u' etc.--the sounds, not the letters we use to represent them in writing) with morphemes and/or words. I don't know what study you're referring to, so I don't know which one you mean. But there's an awful lot of interpretation going on. With human speech, it's pretty well known what the range of variation in human languages is, and we can verify it by learning the language. (A similar story can be told for signed languages, written languages, languages transmitted with Morse code, even encrypted languages.) But we don't have any way to verify that a sequence of sounds in a dolphin's utterance represents some concept, or that there's any grammar to the way such sequences are put together in utterances--things which are reasonably straightforward, if not easy, to verify with any human language.
So paint me skeptical, until they create a dictionary that shows the same (under some criterion of "same") sequences being used by multiple dolphins to refer to an identifiable concept.
The dolphins listened to an entire "sentence" before replying, according to the article...
So, they're both males?
Do you have ESP?
CMoS apparently refers to "The Oxford Style Manual". Haven't seen that one yet, though.
Ezekiel 23:20
A lot of animals are a whole lot smarter than many humans give them credit for, Cats, dogs, birds, horses. You just have to know how to listen. That Porpoises have meaningful communications other than simple alarm noises is nothing new.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Dammit man, it's hard enough to find without you telling more people about its existence!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Learning the American style of trying to stuff all punctuation inside quotes always seemed like a sort of madness to me.
Here is an interesting read that might broaden your stylo-linguistic horizons.
There are so many instances when placing punctuation outside the quotation punctuation makes infinitely more sense, 'style guides' be damned.
Actually, not really. Among most species bigger brains = bigger neurons, so that the number of neurons increases far more slowly than you would expect. One of the major evolutionary leaps among primates was that neuron size remains relatively constant across species, so that larger primates have dramatically more neurons than their smaller cousins.
Which is largely responsible for the fact that, despite the fact that dolphins have larger brains than us, they have only ~20 blllion neurons, compared to our ~100 billion.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The "dolphin language?" So what is the "human language." There isn't one. There is no species language. A language, as we understand it with mammals, is developed over generations, and taught from parent to child. So were these wild caught animals? From what pod? How big is that pod? These are the interesting questions.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
since I read the entire article before replying.
Brain surface area and cortical thickness seems to be more significant. The ability to measure surface area is improving (US National Institutes of Health PubMed):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
And the relationship to intelligence is an ongoing study. Here's one approach:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
As the Martian says, brain size can be a factor but it's complicated.
...omphaloskepsis often...
No it does not. The period is for the whole sentence, which is not a quote. The quoted words are just a list.
No, quoted words are a string. The end of a list can be implicit, or if the list has only one element, you can denote it with a trailing comma.
Or were we not talking about python?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The problem is context. You have to assume that a dolphin, if they have a language, has hundreds of words for fish. But without semantics, all you can do is guess. For all anyone knew, Egyptian's hieroglyphs were just pretty pictures till the Rosetta Stone came around. Even then it took 20 years before anyone could confidently say what were drawn on those walls. We still aren't confident on how you say some of the phonemes either. It could be a "finding out dinosaurs had feathers all this time" event.
Still we should try. I don't think its disheartening because people are trying HARD at this. The lessens we learn in decoding the raw speech patterns of our planet's creatures will help us on truly alien species. I just hope when we do discover alien artifacts, that they aren't passed around as pretty door stops like alto of the Egyptian's ones were.
"Hey fred! That black monolith looks great behind my flat screen TV!"
Good bye and thanks for all the fish.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This line of thinking perplexes me. Yes, they may be talking about things that we don't necessarily care about, but we almost certainly can tell them things they would like to know. Such as where danger is. We could possibly introduce new vocabulary and through the power of giving something a name, give them a new concept that they can relate to each other. We can make smarter dolphins to eat.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How's this?
From http://www.thepunctuationguide...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"bwayno dee-us"! https://thenexttobestblogever....
Have you read my blog lately?
Yes old fashioned nets kill dolphins. No, the dead dolphins are not canned and sold as Tuna. Old fashioned nest are now banned in many jurisdictions, modern nets allow most Dolphins and seals to escape, a large proportion of canned Tuna now comes from open water fish farms. Some companies source Tuna only from fishermen who use a feathered hook on a rod (a common practice here in Oz). Some governments will only allow rod fishing for Tuna, those companies who insist fishermen use rod or are forced by size and geography to operate in rod only jurisdictions will heavily advertise their "dolphin friendly" status (even though most of them fought against the introduction of the laws).
CONservation : It might confuse you to know that I am an old fashioned "liberal" who has fond memories of working on farms, fishing boats, and old growth sawmills, let me know when you have managed to locate my political pigeon hole on your simple minded left/right axis of human behaviour.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Perfect, thanks. :)
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"Hey Dan"
"What"
"Remember what I told you?"
"About what"
"How to hold it"
"No"
"Laces out!"
"Yeah, yeah, got it. Laces out."
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
People didn't take him seriously because he was a bit out there. He said dolphins communicate and as soon as we figure that out the next step will be high level inter-species communication, resulting in dramatic changes akin to contact with extraterrestrials. Interesting guy. I over simplified his views considerably. There's a lot more there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
American politics largely runs on that left-right axis because the effectively two party system forces everyone to either pick a side or be excluded from politics altogether.
They also have a higher ratio of glial cells to neurons. This is probably an adaptation to maintain homoeostasis in an organism which can face very sudden transitions in environmental temperature and pressure.
(US) I was taught to always put the period inside the quote marks. After some careful consideration, I said, fuck that. Logic supercedes some kind of retarded language tradition. Also I was programming computers when I was 7 and the thought of putting shit inside the quote marks that didn't belong there really bothered me.
Is there any actual reason for putting the comma inside the quotes ? As a programmer, it makes me want to throw up.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
To spit in Britain's face, I suppose. Doesn't make sense to me, so I do it the logical (British) way.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
printf("why would that bother you?);"
for it is and always shall be...
Between the French and American revolutions there was a whole lot of symbolic "Insult the monarchy" bullshit that got made into traditions by deliberately changing what has come before. Some places embraced these, others kicked back hard against them. America did a lot of that with punctuation and spelling for example, but the pattern goes much wider - so for example about half the world is left-hand-drive and the other half is right-hand-drive, mostly because the French revolutionaries changed which side of the road they travelled on (and this was still horse-drawn vehicles) to snub the old monarchic rules and the countries that followed them also copied that change.
All of which are little more than historical oddities that explain how some really weird things came to pass but utterly fails to provide a sane justification for keeping them. "It's tradition now" is not a justification, indeed it's a fallacy. But it can be an extremely tempting fallacy that readily convinces a great many people of really bad ideas... otherwise the US would not *still* be one of only two countries in the world (and the other is one of the worst third-world hellholes on earth) that has *not* embraced the metric system.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Between the Telegraph and Russia's online propaganda, I would expect Russia to make grand scientific claims and the Telegraph to sensationalize them.
Sad, given Russia has a history of being a leader in science, and England has a history of being a leader in journalism.
"Matthews .... we're getting another one of those strange 'aw blah es span yol' sounds ..
Large bodies have exactly the same number of degrees of freedom and muscles as an equivalently shaped smaller one. Saying stuff like 'dinosaurs needed huge brains to control their huge bodies but were still dumb' as if brain density plays a factor in intelligence has always seemed like an unconvincing argument.
Social insect brains are fucking TINY (250k neurons) yet allow the creature a huge repertoire of behaviour.
Think if you had 250k nand gates to build the control logic for something that can walk, fly, build a nest, explore, gather food, herd other creatures, fight, flee, communicate, follow a trail, cut leaves, balance and carry things, and mate, you could do it?
The reason we don't yet have communications is because it's a lot of effort for almost zero gain.
The methods used to learn how to talk to dolphins, even if it is to chat about their next meal, can be expanded to other things.
The most fun one is the idea of talking to another lifeform from another planet. Highly unlikely, I know.
However, the lessons learned in this can help human to machine and reverse conversations. Getting a better universal translator, etc.
Finally, I can also see another direct benefit related to food and danger for dolphins: "Warning! We're taking your food and it is dangerous to you in this area. Stay back or you will be hurt."
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
In none of which you'd end a sentence with a preposition.
Yes, you do. This has been a standard feature of English language for centuries, until prescriptive grammarians hell bent on adapting English to Latin began saying it shouldn't be done. Ignore that nonsense. Ending sentences with prepositions is one of the beautiful features of English, and one I, as an English as second language speaker, use as much as I can, as it provides for compact sentences that remain fully intelligible.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Isn't that an Americanism, i.e. optional?
I've read originally, in handwriting, the punctuation used to come below the quotation mark, both forming what nowadays would be considered a single character. When people transitioned to print, there was no easy way to do that, so some began placing the punctuation before the quotation mark, others began placing the quotation mark before the punctuation, and over time either style became the standard in print. Most countries went for quotation-then-punctuation. The USA went for punctuation-then-quotation. And that's it. There's no right or wrong option there, just an arbitrary usage that eventually became normative.
By the way, if we were to do it "right", as in, to become historically accurate, we should ask the Unicode Consortium to provide us ligature version of the different end-quotation marks with the different punctuations available, then have word processors replace them when typed, as they sometimes do when you type three dots and those get replaced by the single ellipsis symbol. Maybe those already exist? After all, there's no technological reason for keeping them separate anymore.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
For now. I refuse to conform to a stupid way of doing things when doing otherwise makes more sense. It seems that for the English-language, moves to enforce standards to the point where people are imposed upon to do things that hinder the language evolving usefully is fairly recent.
I mean really? You think they talk about fish food?
No. I've talked with trainers. They know what's on the dolphin's minds. The conversation Dolphins have are far more likely to sound like this:
Dolphin 1) You seen the flippers on that babe? Man, I'd like to swim with her, if you know what I mean.
Dolphin 2) That's a Killer Whale, not a dolphin.
Dolphin 1) That don't matter. We're both cetaceans - besides once you go whale, you don't bale.
Dolphin 2) I don't know, that human keeps giving me food. I think she's into me.
Dolphin 1) Definitely. You should get all into that!
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's to support legacy hardware.
Printing presses using physical typeset would have problems with a tiny period or comma in the middle of open space (away from text and under the quote marks) - it would tear paper or break off the typeset. The get around that, they moved the dot closer to other text - to the left of the quote mark.
Somehow that hack implemented for hardware support changed the language structure to become official, even though that's not logical or even the original standard.
Think of it as an IE6 of the English Language.
Or, as Winston Churchill purportedly said to a publisher who admonished him on ending a sentence with a preposition, "This is something up with which I will not put!".
They must speak in Perl
Table-ized A.I.
"So Long, and thanks for all the fish" we'll know we're all in deep shit.
Also, as I learned via another excellent slashdot user, not all animals have both hemisphere of their brain connected. For example, koalas do not have a connection between their brain hemispheres, which can be pretty limiting.
A neuron isn't an nand gate, not even close. A neuron is a living microprocessor. You're vastly underestimating just how much raw computing power even insects really have.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
At this point some of the modern language cracking tools just might make it possible to converse with the dolphins. If the animals really are as intelligent as suspected they might have things like a religion or numerous abilities that we do not expect to find. Do they have any form of mathematics that might be useful to humans? Just what advantage does their intelligence provide for them? Can whales understand dolphins? What are the goals of a pod of dolphins? The real mysteries may be quite shocking to us.
Nope... it's the Chicago Manual of Style
Why is the British style "more sensible"? I can't find any logic or reason to either method. It would appear to be just a specific custom.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
It isn't an American-centric thing, though Lewis Carrol did rail against it and maybe helped the British off it a bit earlier. It's a "make typeset text pretty" thing. "To the wall," she sad - just makes for more legible text (less fatiguing to read), and in a non-technical context, that's fine. It's only when you try to use English as a formal language, where the order of punctuation might possibly resolve some ambiguity, that it matters. "Makes more sense" isn't important here - typesetting isn't about coddling geek OCD.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That wouldn't make it optional, that would make it correct when using American English, such as on an American website like this one or other writing for an American audience. If you are commenting on the BBC it is correct to spell it colour, if you are commenting here it would be a spelling error. If writing for no audience in particular correct is probably whatever way you originally learned and if writing for youself correct is whatever you say it is at any given moment.
The quote is intended to isolate everything inside it, and by definition, the punctuation is not part of what is quoted. Living in the US, I rebel and put the punctuation after the quote all the time.
Your solution, to bug the Unicode Consortium, is the best solution I've ever heard.
Obviously, what is the question?
It depends on whether or not the punctuation is part of the quote. If a piece of punctuation belongs to what you quoted (such as a complete sentence) then it logically belongs in the quote. You don't go shifting part of a string outside the quotes.
Just as predators make herds of animals more healthy by killing the slow and weak, beer makes your brain more healthy by killing the slow and weak brain cells.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Interesting. But then why was this a problem only in the US ? None of the other countries implemented this kind of solution, and yet they had the same printing presses, no ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Probably a's much rea'son a's putting an apo'strophe before every "'s" that you encounter.
Fixed that for you...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Since British English makes little sense in spelling, perhaps in this case, color, the American spelling is correct? After all, how do you pronounce "colour"? Is the second syllable pronounced as the "our" in the words our, hour, flour, etc? If not, besides other words like the "labour" which in american english are all spelled with "or" instead of "our" does "our" get pronounced like "or"?
And don't worry about American English being the better version, we have lots of our own special spelling mistakes, some inherited from British English, some not. In the case of color, labor, etc, we did not adopt the phonetically illogical spellings current British English perpetuates. It's been too long since I studied how languages fluctuated and differentiated combined with when semi-stable spellings were instituted and became "standard" for a specific branch. It's interesting to me but nothing I can devote any time to currently. Maybe in retirement I'll become some ivory tower academic who spends their time on totally useless ponderings...
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
When it comes to language correct has nothing to do with better or worse. It is correct to communicate using the protocol best understood by the party you are trying to communicate with to the best of your ability, this insures the highest degree of fidelity in your communicatation. Ultimately fidelity of information exchange is the point and language is nothing more than a tool used to accomplish it.
(more sensibly)
As an American, I have always agreed with putting the punctuation where it belongs, but it is funny to see it said that way.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Right hand driving makes more sense as most people are right handed and it puts your right hand on the gear shift which is the more agility based control than the steering wheel.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I've always wanted the upside down question mark that Spanish uses. Can we steal that one?
I tried to add one to that question above, but Slashdot doesn't like Spanish speakers.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Actually, what studies there are, suggests left hand-driving is safer because it puts your right side facing oncoming traffic and gives the right-handed majority slightly faster reflexes when responding to problems from oncoming traffic.
That said, there is no really definitive answer either way, nothing has been proven concretely. It's true that the average accident rate is lower in left-hand-driving countries, it is also true that we can't definitively rule out other causes. It's not a question that can be easily answered and no hypotheses lends itself to really rigorous testing as you have overlaps from biology, neurology and about half the social sciences involved.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
P.S. No space before a question mark.
I know but I like it a more this way: it's a lot more readable. But it should be a non-breaking space !
Non-Linux Penguins ?