I'm still on Win7, and at home I use LibreOffice. But the latest from MsOffice (on my work PC) is "We did(n't)...", like "We didn't find anything" when I do a search for some text in Outlook. This is like the stereotypical nurse. Why can't they just use passive voice? "Nothing found."
Yeap, I understand: as a computational linguist I'm rare and definitely not the main target of these fontmongers. For instance, I do Python or fst programming in which I occasionally need to embed non-ASCII (and non-Latin) characters in the code, such as Bangla (Bengali) or Arabic script characters. In Python, there are ways of dealing with such characters without embedding the characters themselves (e.g. by referring to their code points)--but it's often simpler to just use the characters. For instance if I want to write out a multi-character affix it's easiest to do so using a string consisting of the characters. And in the fst programs (xfst/lexc and more recently sfst), afaik I have to write out the individual characters.
Why do you think MightyMartian is a fake name? I thought everyone knew they had a climate crisis on Mars centuries (if not millenia) ago, and the subsequent drought is why they dug the canals. The CO2 in their atmosphere was a too-late attempt to increase the temperature before global cooling, er climate change, took over. The canals and the oases that Schiaparelli and Lowell saw in the late 19th century dried up during the early 1900s, giving rise to the dust storms that confronted the Soviet Mars 2 and 3, and American Mariner 9 probes in the early 1970s. MightyMartian is doubtless one of the survivors, sent to warn us about climate change. (The notion that Mars was attacking was due to a bug in their translator.)
Yeah, I'm wondering about that premise in the original article: (all?) dry areas will get drier, and (all?) wet areas wetter. How do we know it won't be the other way around? This can only be the prediction of a model, and the predictions from models, even the short term/ local ones, thus far don't strike me as very good. In particular, predictions about winter snowfall and hurricane seasons seem to have been way off for the last 10-20 years.
The only people who disbelieve climate change is a problem are corporate stooges, religious nutjobs, and people who can't grasp the notion that they could possibly be doing anything wrong.
Actually, it's the Earth that moves. Which brings up a thought: why not stop the Earth's rotation? Then we could have continuous solar power here [insert your location], and those awful people [insert the antipodes] can be kept in the dark.
Ah, yes, when I was a child... accurate data points, I'm sure.
I recall that the ground was soft enough to sleep on when I was a boy scout. Now the ground is definitely too hard to sleep on. All because of the degree (F) or so of global warming we've had since then.
I hope they can pronounce it. It's s.t. like [yotebur], at least that's what I recall from when I was there ten or twelve years ago. If English speaking people pronounce it the way it's spelled, the Vikings may start raiding our coasts.
Ok, just found it in the Wikipedia article, and it's [jtbrj]: that's a front rounded vowel in the first syllable, and a sort of [i] ('ee') on the end. I guess my pronunciation was/is pretty bad. But not as bad as it would be if I tried to use the spelling (and my English pronunciation) as a guide.
I've always used Verizon (for several years now via Straighttalk), because on paper their coverage outside of cities looks better than the rest, including AT&T. But on several recent road trips between Baltimore and West Virginia on I-70 and I-68, I've had zero (as in zilch, none, nada) Verizon coverage from Hagerstown MD west to and including Fairmont WV, while my daughter's AT&T (Straighttalk) has fine coverage almost all the way. So I'm wondering whether the on-line maps I've found are really accurate. http://opensignal.com/ does seem to show Verizon disappearing past Hagerstown, and AT&T continuing, which at least in this case seems to match reality.
How reality is outside of the couple areas I've traveled, I don't know. Along the interstate is usually good, off that...YMMV.
Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!
"LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast". I don't know about that, but LibreOffice has menus, not a Ribbon, and that's why I use LO at home. (At work, I'm forced to use MsOffice, and hate it. Lots of commands I don't need, and missing some that I need. And while there are islands of mnemonic keystrokes to call menu items, mostly it's just bizarre. I'm looking at you, bold/italic/underline (and lots of other commands).
"English is perhaps the most vocal language among all existing languages on Earth, it has far too many words which sound like the object being described."
Huh? I have no idea what you mean by "vocal", nor what that has to do with onomatopoeia, nor what those English words are that sound like the object being described--I'd probably grant you 'moo' and maybe 'meow', but beyond that?
Yeah, I went there before even reading the comments here. But as a poster pointed out above, the actual article (as opposed to the press release) is much more measured.
"you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary" Thank you!
As for the iconicity: I don't doubt that language in its origin was iconic to some extent; modern signed languages are to some degree iconic, the more so the more recently they grew up. But I do think that tens of thousands of years of sound change have pretty much erased the iconicity in languages like English, with rare exceptions (mom, flit/fly/flutter/flip), and more prevalent ideophones in some languages.
'Chomsky was looking for a single, unitary "language acquisition device", while it now looks as though language is a complex interaction of multiple parts of the brain.' There is no inherent contradiction between a "language acquisition device" that deals with syntax (Chomsky's domain, apart from his detour with Morris Halle into phonology) and the notion that language is an interaction between multiple parts of the brain, in fact that's exactly what you'd expect: one part for syntax, another part for vision, another part for converting sound to possible words (in spoken languages), and so forth. That's called modularity. The contradiction would be if everything was mushed together, and there was no division between, say, syntax and our model of the word based on vision.
Chomsky's ideas in linguistics are far from dead; most theories of syntax, whether overtly Chomskian (minimalism) or conceived in reaction to some of it (GPSG and its descendant HPSG, LFG), share the basic assumption that there are innate (genetically transmitted) aspects [pun intended] of language. So no, it has not been debunked, nor are (IMO) his ideas silly. It was some of his predecessors' ideas about language that were silly--Skinner, for instance.
I don't know who you were referring to that 'thought the "Platonic ideal" was how languages worked, that words had a "real meaning" that languages strove towards, and that understanding the "Universal Grammar" could allow understanding of the "true meaning" of language, one inherent in human genetics', but that was never Chomsky's idea. He was a syntactician, not a semanticist, and made no such claims about meaning, teleology, or UG. (He had--and still has--a theory of UG, but not what you describe.)
Finally, it was not _later_ that Chomsky got involved in left wing politics, he's been in that since at least the 60s.
Chomsky wrote about syntax, not the lexicon. This study has no bearing on his work.
As for this study, It's quite possible (IMO quite likely) that no matter how iconic brand new words might be, that has no bearing on the iconicity of English. For one thing, English is not a tone language, so the pitch contours of made up words (one of the things they claimed speakers agreed about) have no bearing on real English words. More importantly, tens of thousands of years separate modern English from the beginnings of language, and sounds have evolved more or less at random since then. Over time, sound changes pretty much affect words across the board, without regard to the semantics of the words. That's why Germanic words typically have an/f/, for example, where Latinate languages have a/p/ ('father' vs. 'padre' is a typical example). Lots of non-Germanic words entered English via (mostly) French, but they didn't come in because of their phonetics, they came in because of their semantics (French borrowings tend to fall into semantic domains).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still on Win7, and at home I use LibreOffice. But the latest from MsOffice (on my work PC) is "We did(n't)...", like "We didn't find anything" when I do a search for some text in Outlook. This is like the stereotypical nurse. Why can't they just use passive voice? "Nothing found."
All of humanity is contained in a processing unit on a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt
This was leaked (albeit in a slightly different version) in 1943, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
with tape drives
Yeap, I understand: as a computational linguist I'm rare and definitely not the main target of these fontmongers. For instance, I do Python or fst programming in which I occasionally need to embed non-ASCII (and non-Latin) characters in the code, such as Bangla (Bengali) or Arabic script characters. In Python, there are ways of dealing with such characters without embedding the characters themselves (e.g. by referring to their code points)--but it's often simpler to just use the characters. For instance if I want to write out a multi-character affix it's easiest to do so using a string consisting of the characters. And in the fst programs (xfst/lexc and more recently sfst), afaik I have to write out the individual characters.
Why do you think MightyMartian is a fake name? I thought everyone knew they had a climate crisis on Mars centuries (if not millenia) ago, and the subsequent drought is why they dug the canals. The CO2 in their atmosphere was a too-late attempt to increase the temperature before global cooling, er climate change, took over. The canals and the oases that Schiaparelli and Lowell saw in the late 19th century dried up during the early 1900s, giving rise to the dust storms that confronted the Soviet Mars 2 and 3, and American Mariner 9 probes in the early 1970s. MightyMartian is doubtless one of the survivors, sent to warn us about climate change. (The notion that Mars was attacking was due to a bug in their translator.)
Florida has been under water restrictions for decades. And it's surrounded by water on 3 sides. Just not potable water.
Couldn't have anything to do with its 3-fold population growth over the last 50 or so years, now could it?
Yeah, I'm wondering about that premise in the original article: (all?) dry areas will get drier, and (all?) wet areas wetter. How do we know it won't be the other way around? This can only be the prediction of a model, and the predictions from models, even the short term/ local ones, thus far don't strike me as very good. In particular, predictions about winter snowfall and hurricane seasons seem to have been way off for the last 10-20 years.
The only people who disbelieve climate change is a problem are corporate stooges, religious nutjobs, and people who can't grasp the notion that they could possibly be doing anything wrong.
and that is just plain biased and ignorant
Ah, that explains the good relations between him and the Republicans in Congress.
Actually, it's the Earth that moves. Which brings up a thought: why not stop the Earth's rotation? Then we could have continuous solar power here [insert your location], and those awful people [insert the antipodes] can be kept in the dark.
Ah, yes, when I was a child... accurate data points, I'm sure.
I recall that the ground was soft enough to sleep on when I was a boy scout. Now the ground is definitely too hard to sleep on. All because of the degree (F) or so of global warming we've had since then.
I hear the wind turbines are taking care of the bird problem. There won't be any more birds to fry.
(Ok, maybe it's the bats; and the Penguins and Ostriches should be ok.)
IIRC, Mr Fusion ran on beer. So free fuel, just not covered under the Gnu license.
I hope they can pronounce it. It's s.t. like [yotebur], at least that's what I recall from when I was there ten or twelve years ago. If English speaking people pronounce it the way it's spelled, the Vikings may start raiding our coasts.
Ok, just found it in the Wikipedia article, and it's [jtbrj]: that's a front rounded vowel in the first syllable, and a sort of [i] ('ee') on the end. I guess my pronunciation was/is pretty bad. But not as bad as it would be if I tried to use the spelling (and my English pronunciation) as a guide.
Have you tried Straighttalk? If you have a CDMA phone, it'll use Verizon towers, and the plans are cheaper.
Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied user of Straighttalk, but I do not own stock in Walmart.
I've always used Verizon (for several years now via Straighttalk), because on paper their coverage outside of cities looks better than the rest, including AT&T. But on several recent road trips between Baltimore and West Virginia on I-70 and I-68, I've had zero (as in zilch, none, nada) Verizon coverage from Hagerstown MD west to and including Fairmont WV, while my daughter's AT&T (Straighttalk) has fine coverage almost all the way. So I'm wondering whether the on-line maps I've found are really accurate. http://opensignal.com/ does seem to show Verizon disappearing past Hagerstown, and AT&T continuing, which at least in this case seems to match reality.
How reality is outside of the couple areas I've traveled, I don't know. Along the interstate is usually good, off that...YMMV.
Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!
"LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast". I don't know about that, but LibreOffice has menus, not a Ribbon, and that's why I use LO at home. (At work, I'm forced to use MsOffice, and hate it. Lots of commands I don't need, and missing some that I need. And while there are islands of mnemonic keystrokes to call menu items, mostly it's just bizarre. I'm looking at you, bold/italic/underline (and lots of other commands).
"English is perhaps the most vocal language among all existing languages on Earth, it has far too many words which sound like the object being described."
Huh? I have no idea what you mean by "vocal", nor what that has to do with onomatopoeia, nor what those English words are that sound like the object being described--I'd probably grant you 'moo' and maybe 'meow', but beyond that?
Yeah, I went there before even reading the comments here. But as a poster pointed out above, the actual article (as opposed to the press release) is much more measured.
"you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary" Thank you!
As for the iconicity: I don't doubt that language in its origin was iconic to some extent; modern signed languages are to some degree iconic, the more so the more recently they grew up. But I do think that tens of thousands of years of sound change have pretty much erased the iconicity in languages like English, with rare exceptions (mom, flit/fly/flutter/flip), and more prevalent ideophones in some languages.
'Chomsky was looking for a single, unitary "language acquisition device", while it now looks as though language is a complex interaction of multiple parts of the brain.' There is no inherent contradiction between a "language acquisition device" that deals with syntax (Chomsky's domain, apart from his detour with Morris Halle into phonology) and the notion that language is an interaction between multiple parts of the brain, in fact that's exactly what you'd expect: one part for syntax, another part for vision, another part for converting sound to possible words (in spoken languages), and so forth. That's called modularity. The contradiction would be if everything was mushed together, and there was no division between, say, syntax and our model of the word based on vision.
Chomsky's ideas in linguistics are far from dead; most theories of syntax, whether overtly Chomskian (minimalism) or conceived in reaction to some of it (GPSG and its descendant HPSG, LFG), share the basic assumption that there are innate (genetically transmitted) aspects [pun intended] of language. So no, it has not been debunked, nor are (IMO) his ideas silly. It was some of his predecessors' ideas about language that were silly--Skinner, for instance.
I don't know who you were referring to that 'thought the "Platonic ideal" was how languages worked, that words had a "real meaning" that languages strove towards, and that understanding the "Universal Grammar" could allow understanding of the "true meaning" of language, one inherent in human genetics', but that was never Chomsky's idea. He was a syntactician, not a semanticist, and made no such claims about meaning, teleology, or UG. (He had--and still has--a theory of UG, but not what you describe.)
Finally, it was not _later_ that Chomsky got involved in left wing politics, he's been in that since at least the 60s.
Chomsky wrote about syntax, not the lexicon. This study has no bearing on his work.
As for this study, It's quite possible (IMO quite likely) that no matter how iconic brand new words might be, that has no bearing on the iconicity of English. For one thing, English is not a tone language, so the pitch contours of made up words (one of the things they claimed speakers agreed about) have no bearing on real English words. More importantly, tens of thousands of years separate modern English from the beginnings of language, and sounds have evolved more or less at random since then. Over time, sound changes pretty much affect words across the board, without regard to the semantics of the words. That's why Germanic words typically have an /f/, for example, where Latinate languages have a /p/ ('father' vs. 'padre' is a typical example). Lots of non-Germanic words entered English via (mostly) French, but they didn't come in because of their phonetics, they came in because of their semantics (French borrowings tend to fall into semantic domains).
I resemble that remark! At least I'm getting there, passed double nickels ten years ago.
And I run, in parking lots, in the halls at work, and on trails. (Not so much on sidewalks any more, because the concrete seems hard on my joints.)
Some day I'll be too old to run, but until then I figure why walk, if I can run?
All seriousness aside, it's because I made good choices: I chose the right parents.