Hatta, I've generally appreciated your comments in the past, but this is a cheap shot, and off the mark at that.
In one interview I read, an Amish fellow explained the reasoning. The idea, as best I understood his explanation, is that they believe that God intended for people to work a certain amount in this life. Devices that offer shortcuts to that are therefore shortcutting God's intentions for how people should live, and ultimately encouraging laziness and sloth.
From that basic principle, he continued, automobiles are clearly out, but telephones might not be, and refrigerators could also be allowed. Which helped explain why I would see Amish folk riding a horse or a buggy from home to the dairy store near my relatives' house where the Amish sold their wares, and why that store was equipped with a refrigerator to keep the milk cold.
From that basic principle, it looks to me like logic is being applied to the real world.
I also note that the people I've known in life who've had to work the hardest to achieve success generally value that success all the more. Folks who clawed their way out of the ghetto to get to college, and who then followed through on their clear plans for professional careers thereafter. This stands in stark contrast to the people I've known who were given everything they possibly desired, and who don't understand the value of work. Folks who floated into college without a plan and without any ambition, who partied and vandalized, and who then tried to pass off casual acquaintances as glowingly impressed professional references in order to schlub their way into jobs that they couldn't really do. So I have to say that the Amish point of view might well be right to some extent, even if I don't hold to their sky-wizard reasons for it.
Really? I thought it was quite a gay-friendly culture?
Ba, dum!
Seriously, though, Japan has its issues. "Gay" is okay in certain overt contexts, but more in the way that Liberace was okay -- it's for show, it's funny, it's extravagant, it's entertaining. Gay as a real lifestyle, though, still faces a lot of discrimination and potential for violence. I gather from friends and from living there for several years that being out of the closet is not common for Japanese folks living in Japan. The rules are different for foreigners, so gay gaijin have a relatively easier time of it. (Easier relative to Japanese people, not necessarily relative to their home countries.)
French is "oui" , not "si". "Si" in french means "if".
Yes. No news there.
What would apparently be news is that French oui comes from Latin hoc + Latin ille, "for this reason, that", semantically similar to the derivation of Spanish sí from Latin sic, "such, thus, so" -- both basically mean "yeah, what you said."
Basically, the words for "yes" in the various European languages are more recent developments, hence the greater variety.
Interestingly, the different ways of saying "yes" in the completely unrelated Japanese language show a similar historical derivation from words originally meaning "what you said, just like that", suggesting that this kind of semantic development is relatively common among humans in general.
Also Cantonese seems to use a word like diem to refer to time.
Another false cognate, I'm afraid.
The closest I can find to your diem meaning "time" in Cantonese is dim (see http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/search/?searchtype=4&text=time). This dim actually comes from the word for "point", and is used not for "time" in general, but in set expressions like gei dim "what time", literally meaning "what point (on the clock)", or zung dim "hour, on the hour", literally meaning "chime point (on the clock)" > "the point on the clock when the bells chime" > "on the hour".
Consequently, it can be pretty quickly demonstrated that Cantonese dim and Latin diem ("day") have exactly schmotz to do with each other.:)
From the article, if you can't be bothered clicking the link:
The words not, that, we, who, and give are cognates in five language families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull are shared by four. Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants.
From Google:
Mother in England
Matr in Russia
Motina in Lithuanian
Mater in Latin
Manman in Haitian Creole
Ma in Chinese
Mwtr in Yiddish
Mteay in Khmer
I haven't read the fine article, so I'm hoping your list of Googled cognates is your own and not that of some purportedly esteemed linguist.
For one, the languages you list are almost all demonstrably related, so the presence of cognates here is neither surprising nor informative. To wit:
* English
* Haitian Creole (the vocabulary is mostly French)
* Yiddish (a large portion of the Yiddish vocabulary is basically German)
* Latin
* Lithuanian
* Russian
These are all known relatives, which linguists broadly agree are part of the Indo-European language family. Linguists have even reconstructed one possible rendering of the Proto-Indo-European word for "mother", with clear sound-shift rules generating the word for "mother" in the various Indo-European daughter languages.
So the only possibly interesting convergences are Chinese and Khmer. Khmer is more salient for the dental consonant "t", but then again, Khmer has been influenced by Sanskrit, another Indo-European language, so Khmer mteay may well have been borrowed in from, or influenced by, Sanskrit matr or matru.
However, as others note elsewhere in this thread, the concept "mother" is almost always expressed with an initial consonant that is bilabial, which some folks now theorize is due to the "muh, muh, muh" sound produced by a nursing infant.
When trying to demonstrate some sort of cross-lingual über-root (unter-root?), choosing a term where the phonology is likely based on biology doesn't really help prove linguistic relationships, and instead does more to prove that humans are human, and have similar biology. Granted, that's also an interesting point for linguistics, and the concept of biologically-influenced word morphology is an interesting avenue of inquiry -- but probably not the one you were going for?
You make it sound like schizophrenia is actually a 'fixable' problem, that it can be cured reliably.
There's actually a growing body of evidence that common parasite Toxoplasmosis can cause schizophrenic symptoms in humans. For those people for whom their schizophrenia is due to Toxoplasmosis infection, treatment with drugs designed to control Toxo makes their schizophrenia go away.
This doesn't cover everyone with schizophrenia, but it is a step towards a reliable cure of some forms of the disease.
A lot of people like their coffee sweet, and many of them put honey in their coffee. It seems to me that coffee honey in coffee would be damned good, if you like sweet coffee (I don't).
Maybe it's just my personal chemistry, but every time I've put honey in coffee, it tastes horrible. It's like there's some sort of weird chemically reaction or something that happens, like what happens when you have a sip of wine after brushing your teeth. Honey in tea is awesome, but in coffee, I've never been able to stand the resulting flavor.
this thing was 15 meters across, jet black, and moving like a bat out of hell. To paraphrase people that look for near earth objects "Its invisible until it hits the atmosphere."
The sad fact of the matter is, no matter how much money you pour into programs to locate and track near earth objects, there is no way to detect objects of this size and velocity with any degree of reliability.
The fine summary notes,
Today's meteor event came a day after California scientists proposed a system to vaporize asteroids that threaten Earth. Of course, the process needs to be started when the asteroid is still tens of millions of kilometers away; there's no chance to shoot down something that's already arrived.
Well, there's part of the problem right there -- we don't want to shoot the things *down*, we want to shoot them *up* and *away*. Meteors and asteroids are only a problem when they come down!
One account I read explained that the natives were selling hunting rights for one season, which was worth something in exchange. When the Dutch then decided that they'd bought the entire island in perpetuity, it might better be described as a reverse bait-and-switch.
The Qur'an and the history of Islam generally expresses great tolerance towards other religions. People of the Book
Ie, they are allowed a brief despite during the forced conversion, being merely considered a lower class of beings and forced to pay tribute for being allowed to be left alive -- then they need to be put to sword and fire once Allah gives a command to continue extermination (unless they convert to Islam). Yes, quite a stellar example of "great tolerance".
As someone who's not a "person of the Book", and thus has to be slain immediately, especially if I dare to express my views, I think I'll pass praising such a great religion of peace.
Seriously, read up on some Spanish history. The most tolerant period in Spain, with regard to adherents of other religions being free to pursue their faiths, was during the Moorish period from the early 700s through the 1200s. As the Christian kingdoms expanded, so were all non-Christians persecuted. That whole Spanish Inquisition thing where people were tortured and killed if they didn't convert, and sometimes even if they did, was a decidedly non-Muslim pastime.
.
(I.e., there are assholes everywhere, and your brush is too broad.)
Are all Christians the same as Westboro Baptist? Is a Quaker or a Unitarian the same as a Fundamentalist Evangelical who uses biblical quotations to argue against homosexuality and "miscegenation"?
Even though Westboro Baptist pricks spew more shit out of their mouths with every breath then comes out of my ass in an entire month, at least they aren't taking hostages, blowing people up or slowly sawing off heads then posting the video online.
Every religion has had it's dark ages. Christianity has evolved beyond those days but there is a rather large section of Islam that remains in the dark ages. They are primarily the brainwashed ones.
I seem to recall there were some medical clinic bombings in the US not too long ago, that were apparently perpetrated by believers of this "evolved" Christianity you mention... And in terms of darkness, the Catholic church's own extensive cover-up of child sexual abuse is quite far from the light by any measure I can come up with.
There are nutters who are quite happy to cloak themselves in the labels of any given religion or sect. One's subjective interpretation of the divine can lead one in all kinds of weird and destructive directions. The problem is not any particular religion -- the problem is humanity.
Sugar isn't used as much as HFCS due to its price.
I gotta wonder, though -- how much of that price differential is due to the sizable subsidies the corn industry gets every year? After factoring that in, I suspect that sugar from sugar cane is cheaper to produce than HFCS.
Zevia's good stuff. My wife's got a family history of diabetes and has to watch her sugars, so finding stevia has been a godsend. And Zevia's pretty tasty -- I've seen it at Whole Paychecks^WFoods, QFC, Kroger, and Safeway here in the Seattle area.
Depends on what you mean by "learn Chinese". If you're only talking about the spoken language, then I'd argue -- from first-hand experience -- that Chinese will be easier in many respects than, say, Japanese or Korean. Just off the top of my head: Chinese is conceptually and grammatically quite similar to English: for simple utterances, like "I go to the store," the words parse almost as-is into Chinese as "I go to store" (only missing the article "the"), but translation into Japanese or Korean requires a major conceptual reworking into "store to go" (where articles are missing, prepositions are postpositions, verbs come at the end, and person is often implied by context). Chinese has no grammatical number or tense or person or gender, and verbs don't conjugate: and anyone, but anyone, who's struggled with "der/die/das", "está/estaba/estuvo", "touchez/touchons/touchent", "mouse/mice" and "goose/geese" but "moose/moose", will find Chinese incredibly easier in this regard.
Reading the linked article, I really have to say the author comes off as a horrible whinger. Of the nine concrete examples he tries to explain:
a full four are complaints about the writing system (these could all be reduced to one long-winded complaint, and all are irrelevant to the spoken language),
one complains about romanization schemes (again irrelevant to the spoken language, and generally only a real challenge if you start trying to learn different dialects of Chinese, like Taiwanese and Cantonese in addition to Mandarin),
one complains about tonality (at least the author has the sense to realize he's biased on this one),
one complains about a lack of cognates (laughable -- may as well say the same thing about any non-Indo-European language),
one complains about classical Chinese (ridiculously irrelevant -- may as well bitch about Beowulf),
and one complains about different cultural contexts (again, you could say the same about most non-European languages...).
Basically, he comes across as a whinging, unworldly boob.
Even allowing for writing system issues, Japanese uses several thousand Chinese characters, with the added bonus that many of them have multiple, often quite different, readings, depending on the context. Imagine if the prefix "pre" was sometimes read as "fore" in some words, "pre" in others, and "front" in yet other words, but was always spelled the same. Chinese occasionally does that, but nowhere near as often, or as complicatedly, as Japanese. Fail.
Japanese itself has at least three romanization schemes that I commonly run into: Hepburn, which most of us in the US will see and recognize as romaji (closest to "phonetic" spelling from an American English perspective); Kunrei, which the Japanese government uses on public signage in Japan to help foreigners (which has oddities like "zyo" for the sound spelled "jo" in Hepburn, and pronounced like the common given name "Joe"), and Yale, which was invented by academics for phonemic accuracy, but is horrid to try to read. So yeah, guess what? Languages not historically written in the Latin alphabet, and that have sounds not found in European languages, are a bitch to romanize. Have a look at the wild variations of Latin-alphabet spellings for Hebrew or Arabic words some day. Fail.
Tonality? Even English has tonality, after a fashion. Try enunciating the difference between "record", the thing, and "record", the action, without changing your tone. Sure, Chinese has a lot more of it, and the truly tone-deaf must first learn to
So crazy. This whole Mayan doomsday prophecy stuff all amounts to nothing more than an ancient form of the y2k bug.
I've often imagined getting together a crew to do a remake of Office Space, only where everyone would be wearing Mayan outfits, carrying chisels, and complaining about having to rework all these bloody great stone calendar wheels.
It may not be corruption of the language. It may simply be evolution of the language. Language changes over time. Speakers choose the most suitable word for their porpoises. If you suggest otherwise then you are laying.
I *wish* I were laying... with my wife!
Aww yeah, you know what I'm saying... I'm talking 'bout business time.
You know how I know?
Because it's Wednesday.
And Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love...
... the Nintendo model is to achieve the highest fun/$ ratio and to provide entertainment.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Absolutely.
It sure looked to me like Sony and Microsoft were busy off in a pissing match about which system had better graphics. Meanwhile, Nintendo was busy making thingsfun.
I've watched friends play some of the most successful FPS games, and frankly the game play is monotonous and boring. They sit intent with their thumbs flying and not much else going on, largely isolated. If they're communicating it's with mostly unknowns on a headset (yes there have been a few WoW marriages, I know). The "Level too easy? Make everything darker" design mocks the past generations' attention to level complexity. They hire big-name actors to attach videos to the game when the story lines make Sierra games look like Hamlet. I really don't get this, since a well-constructed game ought to have quite a market advantage.
Conversely, I've watched other friends play, say, Wi Bowling, and they were legitimately having a fun time. The game was kind of stupid, but it was an enabler of social interaction, not a substitute for it. This becomes a much richer experience because the game is just a focal point, not the entirety of the experience. Not entirely unlike a dart-board in tavern in that way.
Mario Kart Wii, for instance, might be kinda simple, but it's an absolute blast to play with a bunch of friends and a few beers. And my wife and I have had a lot of fun playing co-op Donkey Kong Country Returns. And we've had good laughs watching neighbors and nephews and nieces playing Super Mario Wii, at one moment cooperatively where they help each other through hard parts, in the next moment competitively where they pick each other up and throw each other into lava pits. But we're all in the same room -- instead of spread out across the interwebs, communicating only via headsets, we're jostling each other as we round difficult corners, whomping each other with sofa cushions to distract attention as Bowser attacks. The social element is just a lot stronger with Nintendo games than pretty much any other I've played, and at least part of that is thanks to the console design.
As regards globalization and the redistribution of American wealth, Obama is mostly a sucker, and a chump. Mittens, on the other hand, is an active player, pushing hard to enrich all the rest of the world at America's and Europe's expense.
You've got it wrong here -- Mitt is working hard to enrich himself. Any other beneficiaries of his actions, such as China's economy, are purely accidental. If Romney thought he could get as rich as quickly by creating jobs in the US, you can rest assured that he'd do just that. But for now, the US is still relatively close to (if not at) the top of the global economic pile, so any arbitrage to be made from outsourcing will negatively affect the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Hatta, I've generally appreciated your comments in the past, but this is a cheap shot, and off the mark at that.
In one interview I read, an Amish fellow explained the reasoning. The idea, as best I understood his explanation, is that they believe that God intended for people to work a certain amount in this life. Devices that offer shortcuts to that are therefore shortcutting God's intentions for how people should live, and ultimately encouraging laziness and sloth.
From that basic principle, he continued, automobiles are clearly out, but telephones might not be, and refrigerators could also be allowed. Which helped explain why I would see Amish folk riding a horse or a buggy from home to the dairy store near my relatives' house where the Amish sold their wares, and why that store was equipped with a refrigerator to keep the milk cold.
From that basic principle, it looks to me like logic is being applied to the real world.
I also note that the people I've known in life who've had to work the hardest to achieve success generally value that success all the more. Folks who clawed their way out of the ghetto to get to college, and who then followed through on their clear plans for professional careers thereafter. This stands in stark contrast to the people I've known who were given everything they possibly desired, and who don't understand the value of work. Folks who floated into college without a plan and without any ambition, who partied and vandalized, and who then tried to pass off casual acquaintances as glowingly impressed professional references in order to schlub their way into jobs that they couldn't really do. So I have to say that the Amish point of view might well be right to some extent, even if I don't hold to their sky-wizard reasons for it.
Cheers,
There's no such thing as innate value. Value is context-dependent. All money is funny money. It's just a question of what brand of humor you prefer.
The US Dollar is like Jay Leno. Dull and unimaginative, but shows up for work on time every night.
Bitcoin is like Richard Pryor. Offensive, unstable, unpredictable, implicated in tax-evasion, and prone to setting itself on fire.
So where does the "funny" bit come in for Bitcoin? Only I remember Richard Pryor actually making me laugh.
Cheers,
Japanese is rife with homophones
Really? I thought it was quite a gay-friendly culture?
Ba, dum!
Seriously, though, Japan has its issues. "Gay" is okay in certain overt contexts, but more in the way that Liberace was okay -- it's for show, it's funny, it's extravagant, it's entertaining. Gay as a real lifestyle, though, still faces a lot of discrimination and potential for violence. I gather from friends and from living there for several years that being out of the closet is not common for Japanese folks living in Japan. The rules are different for foreigners, so gay gaijin have a relatively easier time of it. (Easier relative to Japanese people, not necessarily relative to their home countries.)
Cheers,
I still firmly believe that the English language was actually invented by five German philosophers on a mushroom trip.
So is that the start of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles? I never knew!
:-P
Cheers,
French is "oui" , not "si". "Si" in french means "if".
Yes. No news there.
What would apparently be news is that French oui comes from Latin hoc + Latin ille, "for this reason, that", semantically similar to the derivation of Spanish sí from Latin sic, "such, thus, so" -- both basically mean "yeah, what you said."
Basically, the words for "yes" in the various European languages are more recent developments, hence the greater variety.
Interestingly, the different ways of saying "yes" in the completely unrelated Japanese language show a similar historical derivation from words originally meaning "what you said, just like that", suggesting that this kind of semantic development is relatively common among humans in general.
Cheers,
Also Cantonese seems to use a word like diem to refer to time.
Another false cognate, I'm afraid.
The closest I can find to your diem meaning "time" in Cantonese is dim (see http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/search/?searchtype=4&text=time). This dim actually comes from the word for "point", and is used not for "time" in general, but in set expressions like gei dim "what time", literally meaning "what point (on the clock)", or zung dim "hour, on the hour", literally meaning "chime point (on the clock)" > "the point on the clock when the bells chime" > "on the hour".
Consequently, it can be pretty quickly demonstrated that Cantonese dim and Latin diem ("day") have exactly schmotz to do with each other. :)
Cheers,
From the article, if you can't be bothered clicking the link:
The words not, that, we, who, and give are cognates in five language families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull are shared by four. Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants.
From Google: Mother in England Matr in Russia Motina in Lithuanian Mater in Latin Manman in Haitian Creole Ma in Chinese Mwtr in Yiddish Mteay in Khmer
I haven't read the fine article, so I'm hoping your list of Googled cognates is your own and not that of some purportedly esteemed linguist.
For one, the languages you list are almost all demonstrably related, so the presence of cognates here is neither surprising nor informative. To wit:
These are all known relatives, which linguists broadly agree are part of the Indo-European language family. Linguists have even reconstructed one possible rendering of the Proto-Indo-European word for "mother", with clear sound-shift rules generating the word for "mother" in the various Indo-European daughter languages.
So the only possibly interesting convergences are Chinese and Khmer. Khmer is more salient for the dental consonant "t", but then again, Khmer has been influenced by Sanskrit, another Indo-European language, so Khmer mteay may well have been borrowed in from, or influenced by, Sanskrit matr or matru.
However, as others note elsewhere in this thread, the concept "mother" is almost always expressed with an initial consonant that is bilabial, which some folks now theorize is due to the "muh, muh, muh" sound produced by a nursing infant.
When trying to demonstrate some sort of cross-lingual über-root (unter-root?), choosing a term where the phonology is likely based on biology doesn't really help prove linguistic relationships, and instead does more to prove that humans are human, and have similar biology. Granted, that's also an interesting point for linguistics, and the concept of biologically-influenced word morphology is an interesting avenue of inquiry -- but probably not the one you were going for?
Cheers,
Interestingly, Japanese chichi can also mean "teats, breasts; mother's milk". So in some ways, chichi *does* mean "mother".
(Japanese is rife with homophones.)
Cheers,
Well, the ISO installs Windows. What more citation do you need?
Of course, this means that both pirates and paying users get the rootkit. But hey, bonus!
Seen on a poster somewhere recently:
Seems about right for what I see at our house. :)
Cheers,
You make it sound like schizophrenia is actually a 'fixable' problem, that it can be cured reliably.
There's actually a growing body of evidence that common parasite Toxoplasmosis can cause schizophrenic symptoms in humans. For those people for whom their schizophrenia is due to Toxoplasmosis infection, treatment with drugs designed to control Toxo makes their schizophrenia go away.
This doesn't cover everyone with schizophrenia, but it is a step towards a reliable cure of some forms of the disease.
Links for the interested.
Cheers,
A lot of people like their coffee sweet, and many of them put honey in their coffee. It seems to me that coffee honey in coffee would be damned good, if you like sweet coffee (I don't).
Maybe it's just my personal chemistry, but every time I've put honey in coffee, it tastes horrible . It's like there's some sort of weird chemically reaction or something that happens, like what happens when you have a sip of wine after brushing your teeth. Honey in tea is awesome, but in coffee, I've never been able to stand the resulting flavor.
Cheers,
this thing was 15 meters across, jet black, and moving like a bat out of hell. To paraphrase people that look for near earth objects "Its invisible until it hits the atmosphere." The sad fact of the matter is, no matter how much money you pour into programs to locate and track near earth objects, there is no way to detect objects of this size and velocity with any degree of reliability.
The fine summary notes,
Well, there's part of the problem right there -- we don't want to shoot the things *down*, we want to shoot them *up* and *away*. Meteors and asteroids are only a problem when they come down!
One account I read explained that the natives were selling hunting rights for one season, which was worth something in exchange. When the Dutch then decided that they'd bought the entire island in perpetuity, it might better be described as a reverse bait-and-switch.
:-P
The Qur'an and the history of Islam generally expresses great tolerance towards other religions. People of the Book
Ie, they are allowed a brief despite during the forced conversion, being merely considered a lower class of beings and forced to pay tribute for being allowed to be left alive -- then they need to be put to sword and fire once Allah gives a command to continue extermination (unless they convert to Islam). Yes, quite a stellar example of "great tolerance".
As someone who's not a "person of the Book", and thus has to be slain immediately, especially if I dare to express my views, I think I'll pass praising such a great religion of peace.
Seriously, read up on some Spanish history. The most tolerant period in Spain, with regard to adherents of other religions being free to pursue their faiths, was during the Moorish period from the early 700s through the 1200s. As the Christian kingdoms expanded, so were all non-Christians persecuted. That whole Spanish Inquisition thing where people were tortured and killed if they didn't convert, and sometimes even if they did, was a decidedly non-Muslim pastime.
.
(I.e., there are assholes everywhere, and your brush is too broad.)
Cheers,
Are all Christians the same as Westboro Baptist? Is a Quaker or a Unitarian the same as a Fundamentalist Evangelical who uses biblical quotations to argue against homosexuality and "miscegenation"?
Even though Westboro Baptist pricks spew more shit out of their mouths with every breath then comes out of my ass in an entire month, at least they aren't taking hostages, blowing people up or slowly sawing off heads then posting the video online.
Every religion has had it's dark ages. Christianity has evolved beyond those days but there is a rather large section of Islam that remains in the dark ages. They are primarily the brainwashed ones.
I seem to recall there were some medical clinic bombings in the US not too long ago, that were apparently perpetrated by believers of this "evolved" Christianity you mention... And in terms of darkness, the Catholic church's own extensive cover-up of child sexual abuse is quite far from the light by any measure I can come up with.
There are nutters who are quite happy to cloak themselves in the labels of any given religion or sect. One's subjective interpretation of the divine can lead one in all kinds of weird and destructive directions. The problem is not any particular religion -- the problem is humanity.
Cheers,
Sugar isn't used as much as HFCS due to its price.
I gotta wonder, though -- how much of that price differential is due to the sizable subsidies the corn industry gets every year? After factoring that in, I suspect that sugar from sugar cane is cheaper to produce than HFCS.
Cheers,
Zevia's good stuff. My wife's got a family history of diabetes and has to watch her sugars, so finding stevia has been a godsend. And Zevia's pretty tasty -- I've seen it at Whole Paychecks^WFoods, QFC, Kroger, and Safeway here in the Seattle area.
Happy hunting,
How hard is it to learn Chinese?
Very.
Depends on what you mean by "learn Chinese". If you're only talking about the spoken language, then I'd argue -- from first-hand experience -- that Chinese will be easier in many respects than, say, Japanese or Korean. Just off the top of my head: Chinese is conceptually and grammatically quite similar to English: for simple utterances, like "I go to the store," the words parse almost as-is into Chinese as "I go to store" (only missing the article "the"), but translation into Japanese or Korean requires a major conceptual reworking into "store to go" (where articles are missing, prepositions are postpositions, verbs come at the end, and person is often implied by context). Chinese has no grammatical number or tense or person or gender, and verbs don't conjugate: and anyone, but anyone, who's struggled with "der/die/das", "está/estaba/estuvo", "touchez/touchons/touchent", "mouse/mice" and "goose/geese" but "moose/moose", will find Chinese incredibly easier in this regard.
Reading the linked article, I really have to say the author comes off as a horrible whinger. Of the nine concrete examples he tries to explain:
Basically, he comes across as a whinging, unworldly boob.
Even allowing for writing system issues, Japanese uses several thousand Chinese characters, with the added bonus that many of them have multiple, often quite different, readings, depending on the context. Imagine if the prefix "pre" was sometimes read as "fore" in some words, "pre" in others, and "front" in yet other words, but was always spelled the same. Chinese occasionally does that, but nowhere near as often, or as complicatedly, as Japanese.
Fail.
Japanese itself has at least three romanization schemes that I commonly run into: Hepburn, which most of us in the US will see and recognize as romaji (closest to "phonetic" spelling from an American English perspective); Kunrei, which the Japanese government uses on public signage in Japan to help foreigners (which has oddities like "zyo" for the sound spelled "jo" in Hepburn, and pronounced like the common given name "Joe"), and Yale, which was invented by academics for phonemic accuracy, but is horrid to try to read. So yeah, guess what? Languages not historically written in the Latin alphabet, and that have sounds not found in European languages, are a bitch to romanize. Have a look at the wild variations of Latin-alphabet spellings for Hebrew or Arabic words some day.
Fail.
Tonality? Even English has tonality, after a fashion. Try enunciating the difference between "record", the thing, and "record", the action, without changing your tone. Sure, Chinese has a lot more of it, and the truly tone-deaf must first learn to
Where the hell is Elop? I would have thought that cratering the company you're running would count something towards being a bad CEO.
And shouldn't Ballmer at least rate a dishonorable mention?
:-P
So crazy. This whole Mayan doomsday prophecy stuff all amounts to nothing more than an ancient form of the y2k bug.
I've often imagined getting together a crew to do a remake of Office Space , only where everyone would be wearing Mayan outfits, carrying chisels, and complaining about having to rework all these bloody great stone calendar wheels.
If I only had the time, and the budget... :)
Cheers,
It may not be corruption of the language. It may simply be evolution of the language. Language changes over time. Speakers choose the most suitable word for their porpoises. If you suggest otherwise then you are laying.
I *wish* I were laying... with my wife!
Aww yeah, you know what I'm saying... I'm talking 'bout business time.
You know how I know?
Because it's Wednesday.
And Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love...
(Apologies to Flight of the Conchords. :) )
You are not supposed to put both '0x' and 'h' to indicate a hex number.
That's not a hex number, that's his signing key in cleartext.
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
:-P
... the Nintendo model is to achieve the highest fun/$ ratio and to provide entertainment.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Absolutely.
It sure looked to me like Sony and Microsoft were busy off in a pissing match about which system had better graphics. Meanwhile, Nintendo was busy making thingsfun.
I've watched friends play some of the most successful FPS games, and frankly the game play is monotonous and boring. They sit intent with their thumbs flying and not much else going on, largely isolated. If they're communicating it's with mostly unknowns on a headset (yes there have been a few WoW marriages, I know). The "Level too easy? Make everything darker" design mocks the past generations' attention to level complexity. They hire big-name actors to attach videos to the game when the story lines make Sierra games look like Hamlet. I really don't get this, since a well-constructed game ought to have quite a market advantage.
Conversely, I've watched other friends play, say, Wi Bowling, and they were legitimately having a fun time. The game was kind of stupid, but it was an enabler of social interaction, not a substitute for it. This becomes a much richer experience because the game is just a focal point, not the entirety of the experience. Not entirely unlike a dart-board in tavern in that way.
Mario Kart Wii, for instance, might be kinda simple, but it's an absolute blast to play with a bunch of friends and a few beers. And my wife and I have had a lot of fun playing co-op Donkey Kong Country Returns. And we've had good laughs watching neighbors and nephews and nieces playing Super Mario Wii, at one moment cooperatively where they help each other through hard parts, in the next moment competitively where they pick each other up and throw each other into lava pits. But we're all in the same room -- instead of spread out across the interwebs, communicating only via headsets, we're jostling each other as we round difficult corners, whomping each other with sofa cushions to distract attention as Bowser attacks. The social element is just a lot stronger with Nintendo games than pretty much any other I've played, and at least part of that is thanks to the console design.
Cheers,
As regards globalization and the redistribution of American wealth, Obama is mostly a sucker, and a chump. Mittens, on the other hand, is an active player, pushing hard to enrich all the rest of the world at America's and Europe's expense.
You've got it wrong here -- Mitt is working hard to enrich himself. Any other beneficiaries of his actions, such as China's economy, are purely accidental. If Romney thought he could get as rich as quickly by creating jobs in the US, you can rest assured that he'd do just that. But for now, the US is still relatively close to (if not at) the top of the global economic pile, so any arbitrage to be made from outsourcing will negatively affect the US.
Cheers,