Similar with VKontakte and other FB-like sites. It may not be a US social networking site, but Americans are tolerated.
VKontakte creeps out plenty of Russians because it is patently government-controlled (and requires Russian users to link their account to their ID). The company will never be able to overcome that Kremlin stigma and draw an appreciable number of users in the West.
I don't care much for FB and rarely post there. I'd be very happy to leave if I knew my friends and family would follow to other means of communication.
As someone who doesn't have a facebook account, I can tell you that you're wrong, and you'll likely realise just how wrong you are in judging the importance of facebook when you actually leave it and see that all your friends, acquaintances, people you need to contact... exist here in real life and have email accounts and phone numbers.
Nope, I've already tried moving back to e-mail. The result is that people rarely respond, because they can't be arsed to log in to e.g. GMail often, whereas if one sends them a message via FB, they perk up instantly. Consequently, I've kept my FB account even if I use it increasingly less.
A friend of mine who left FB entirely last year, with whom I still keep in touch because we both accept e-mail, has bemoaned instantly losing touch with most of his acquaintances. And then mutual friends of ours often ask where he is nowadays, oblivious that he'd like very much to stay in touch with them. He has sent them e-mails, but they just can't focus on e-mail communication.
Been there, done that. Told my friends to use xfire or steam to get in touch with me or use this novel invention called the phone.
So 100% of your friends consist of gamers? What a sad life.
Having an interest in gaming is fine, and you can expect most of your gamer friends to contact you to a gamer network, but an average person's circle of acquaintances would include many people who have no idea what XFire or Steam are.
Yeah, people used to say the same thing about MySpace.
MySpace only had a small portion of a typical person's friends: younger people, more computer-savvy compared to the general population. With everyone else you stayed in touch by e-mail or occasional phone calls.
Facebook, however, is now utterly entrenched in Western society. Everyone a person keeps in touch with is likely to be on it: friends from all walks of life, relatives both close and distant, professional colleagues. And many of those friends seem to have forgotten about e-mail and expect you to contact them via FB message.
Leaving FB is a lot harder to do than moving on from Myspace or Friendster was years ago. I know for a fact that I'd lose contact entirely with many people if I gave up my FB account.
He goes a step further and suggests an intermingling of the two cultures sometime around the split of germanic from Indo-European.
This hypothesis was proposed by Vennemann and is pretty much a laughingstock for everyone except Vennemann and, for some odd reason, McWhorter. While I applaud McWhorter's popular science writing in general, it's a shame that he repeats this crackpottery.
Furthermore, vowel shifts indicated tense and person in Proto-Indo-European, a system called ablaut: the Indo-European languages all had strong verbs at some point in the past, and some branches simply lost them. It's not an innovation that popped up in Germanic.
Actually, this is pretty interesting. I can tie that pretty well with Tamil (which is Dravidian language).
A "Uralo-Dravidian" hypothesis was proposed several decades ago and has been rejected. Historical linguistics doesn't work by comparing forms between modern languages like Estonian and Tamil. Then you just get a bunch of coincidential resemblances. If you compare Proto-Uralic to Proto-Dravidian, no systematic relationship can be found.
Even trying to link more recent presumed genetic relationships, like those between the Indo-European and Uralic languages, which is at least considered a possibility by many linguists.
What "many linguists" are these? The only people publishing claims of "Indo-Uralic" these days are Kortlandt and one or two of his students, and as a Finno-Ugrist I can tell you that their methods are crankish and arguably willfully misleading. Since at least Aulis Joki's Uralier und Indogermanen (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1973) was published, it has been widely understood that similarities between Indo-European and Uralic are due to loans from the former into the latter.
Lyle Campbell's paper in Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998) offers a good overview of the consensus of the field, that no genetic relationship can be shown between Uralic and any other language family.
1) Wiktionary is not an reputable citation. There are widely recognized etymological dictionaries of Finnish like Suomen sanojen alkuperä, you could have referred to them. 2) If Finnish borrowed the term from Germanic, it would have borrowed it from Proto-Germanic, not "Old Norwegian". Gothic is mentioned on that Wiktionary page, but it must be understood as "cf." and not "derived from".
This is pushing the inferences in linguistics to one more boundary. Earlier linguists by themselves could take these mutation trees in languages to some 5000 years or 8000 years. Beyond that the noise was too much. Now with independent information about which people migrated where and when, they are able to push it beyond 8000 years to 16000 years.
No, they aren't able to "beyond 8000 years to 16000 years". I can assure you that the vast majority of linguists (FWIW, I am one) reject these long-range comparisons. It is only by pitching themselves in the popular press and non-linguistic-savvy journals like Nature that Atkinson, Ruhlen and others of that ilk have been able to get any attention. People knowledgeable about the field think this is crank science.
The Hebrew word for mother is "Ema". Interesting to see a Finnish-Hebrew link in words.
This is a coincidence. Both forms are nursery words and not evidence for any historical relationship between Finnish (which only a branch of a larger Uralic family) and Hebrew (which is only a branch of a larger Semitic family).
I wonder what Noam Chomsky would make of this theory.
Noam Chomsky is not a historical-comparative linguist. Indeed, one of the reasons he is held in low esteem by a large part of the community is that he began making claims on typology and universals solely on the basis of English grammar, with little knowledge of other languages in a diachronic perspective. Chomsky is working in an entirely different part of the field (linguistics became very specialized over the 20th century), so I don't understand why his input is so important for you.
If you want to know what a respected linguist thinks about these dubious long-range comparative attempts, see the late Larry Trask's publications. He fought hard against this kind of flim-flam when it was peddled last time by Merrit Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg.
Sami (the first inhabitants of Fennoscadia after the ice age) word for mother is eadni
The Saami (defined as speakers of Saami) were not the first inhabitants of Fennoscandia after the Ice Age. When Uralic speakers arrived in the area, there was already a population present speaking a non-Indo-European language. This is attested by a number of loanwords in Saami. See Ante Aikio's recent publications.
That's very weeaboo of you, but the point is that mama and chichi sound nothing alike.
Why should they? chichi means "father" after all, not "mama", and it is quite common for words meaning "father" to begin with a dental stop (whether voiced or unvoiced). As I said, the original titi, which is comparable to English daddy, survives among Japanese dialects, and the affricatization of t- to chi- before high vowels in the standard language is a recent development. As I mentioned before, please read more about the history of Japanese before thinking that you are so clever.
Ãiti in Finnish.Apparently the Finns separated from the general population way before the ice age.
In Proto-Uralic, and even Proto-Finnic, the word for mother was *emä. Finnish äiti is thus a fairly recent innovation.
The Finns were not at all "separated from the general population" and in fact the Finnic languages show a large number of loanwords from Germanic, Baltic and Iranian. They very much were in contact with their neighbours.
What the article describes is not the Paleolithic Continuity Theory. The PCT, associated with Alinei and his fellow crackpots, claims that language families were spoken wherever they are presently spoken back to the Paleolithic. Thus, according to this (entirely untenable) theory, there was never a movement of Indo-European languages into Europe in millennia BC, nor a spread of the Slavic languages from the Baltic to the Balkans in the first millennium AD, but rather those languages had always been spoken in those places.
This article says nothing against languages moving to new territories. It merely claims that they are related and preserve common lexicon.
Sounds a bit of a stretch to me - relatively isolated communities like the Japanese say haha and chichi for mother and father
As I posted further down, Modern Japanese haha and chichi go back to the bog-standard babble forms *papa and *titi in Old Japanese, and the sound changes that produced the Modern Japanese forms happened relatively recently when the Japanese language can not be said to have been isolated.
(The word for father still survives as titi dialectally.)
And where does the Japanese "chichi" for mother fit in?
Modern Japanese chi- goes back to Old Japanese *ti-, thus the earlier form of the word was titi. Again, a standard babble word. If Japanese looks exotic, it is due to sound changes that are only a few centuries old (and which happened at the same time as a massive influx of Sinitic loanwords, so they were hardly an isolated people).
I'd really suggest picking up a Japanese historical grammar before asking more. These things are pretty elementary for students of Japanese.
Think of this for a moment - for the parts of the mind that are more pre-patterned and instinctive, there may be some component of cognition that encourages, say "Fi" as a root sound for fire.
Not at all. For one, the reconstructed word for "fire" in Proto-Indo-European began with *p-. The shift to f- was a development specific to the Germanic languages. In other languages the sound changed in other ways (Celtic languages lost initial p- entirely, for instance). If sound change can go in so many directions, then "cognition" doesn't predetermine the shape of a word.
Since Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago, it has been understood that the word for a concept can take pretty much any form. Yes, there are limited examples of sound symbolism, but this does not apply for the lexicon in general.
Except for where they don't, like Japan, the Iroquois, and similar disconnected cultures.
The Japanese are no exception here. Modern Japanese haha 'mother' goes back to Old Japanese *papa, a standard babble word (and used for mothers as opposed to fathers in a number of languages around the world).
First problem in English is the canon tends to consist of books which are old -- for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" was popular fiction in its day, but its day was 1850. Shakespeare is even worse, being 16th century.
Shakespeare was hugely popular in the US in the 19th century. Actors would go from one backwater town to another putting on productions that drew large crowds (Mark Twain depicted some of this in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and debates on "who really wrote Shakespeare" were as popular in mass media as Da Vinci code rubbish in our time. And yet, the gap between Shakespeare and that audience was greater than the gap between us and Hawthorne. Literature does not necessarily have an expiration date.
You're saying it isn't helpful to cite what Christians call the word of God (i.e., the authoritative text on the nature of god and their religion)?
While Christians believe that this text is authoritative, like any text (whether Christian, Muslim, Jew or not even religious in nature at all) it means absolutely nothing in itself. It means something only when combined with a rule of interpretation which is external to the text. This has been pretty well understood outside religious circles since De Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago. With Christianity, the fact that this religion existed for several decades before the compilation of any texts makes it pretty clear that calling the Bible -- and not the tradition that predates it -- the ultimate source of Christian belief is inaccurate.
You're suggesting some Christians then believe that Jesus isn't god? If not, then what was Jesus? Just a really good human by their standards?
Yes, some Christians believe that Jesus isn't God (with a capital G). The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator. The classic Unitarianism which arose in the Austro-Hungarian Empire several centuries ago (which self-identifies as a school of Christianity and is not to be confused with the much less dogmatic Unitarian Universalism that arose later) believes that Jesus was simply a great man chosen for a special purpose by God.
Sigh. Isaiah 46:10, Acts 2:23, Revelations 1:8.
Citing Scripture isn't helpful here because the majority of Christians worldwide do not believe in the principle of sola Scriptura. They look to a Tradition which draws upon the Bible, but only in combination with an extrabiblical rule of interpretation.
The contradictions come from the Bible, which is the source of others' beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
VKontakte creeps out plenty of Russians because it is patently government-controlled (and requires Russian users to link their account to their ID). The company will never be able to overcome that Kremlin stigma and draw an appreciable number of users in the West.
I don't care much for FB and rarely post there. I'd be very happy to leave if I knew my friends and family would follow to other means of communication.
As someone who doesn't have a facebook account, I can tell you that you're wrong, and you'll likely realise just how wrong you are in judging the importance of facebook when you actually leave it and see that all your friends, acquaintances, people you need to contact... exist here in real life and have email accounts and phone numbers.
Nope, I've already tried moving back to e-mail. The result is that people rarely respond, because they can't be arsed to log in to e.g. GMail often, whereas if one sends them a message via FB, they perk up instantly. Consequently, I've kept my FB account even if I use it increasingly less.
A friend of mine who left FB entirely last year, with whom I still keep in touch because we both accept e-mail, has bemoaned instantly losing touch with most of his acquaintances. And then mutual friends of ours often ask where he is nowadays, oblivious that he'd like very much to stay in touch with them. He has sent them e-mails, but they just can't focus on e-mail communication.
So 100% of your friends consist of gamers? What a sad life.
Having an interest in gaming is fine, and you can expect most of your gamer friends to contact you to a gamer network, but an average person's circle of acquaintances would include many people who have no idea what XFire or Steam are.
MySpace only had a small portion of a typical person's friends: younger people, more computer-savvy compared to the general population. With everyone else you stayed in touch by e-mail or occasional phone calls.
Facebook, however, is now utterly entrenched in Western society. Everyone a person keeps in touch with is likely to be on it: friends from all walks of life, relatives both close and distant, professional colleagues. And many of those friends seem to have forgotten about e-mail and expect you to contact them via FB message.
Leaving FB is a lot harder to do than moving on from Myspace or Friendster was years ago. I know for a fact that I'd lose contact entirely with many people if I gave up my FB account.
This hypothesis was proposed by Vennemann and is pretty much a laughingstock for everyone except Vennemann and, for some odd reason, McWhorter. While I applaud McWhorter's popular science writing in general, it's a shame that he repeats this crackpottery.
Furthermore, vowel shifts indicated tense and person in Proto-Indo-European, a system called ablaut: the Indo-European languages all had strong verbs at some point in the past, and some branches simply lost them. It's not an innovation that popped up in Germanic.
A "Uralo-Dravidian" hypothesis was proposed several decades ago and has been rejected. Historical linguistics doesn't work by comparing forms between modern languages like Estonian and Tamil. Then you just get a bunch of coincidential resemblances. If you compare Proto-Uralic to Proto-Dravidian, no systematic relationship can be found.
What "many linguists" are these? The only people publishing claims of "Indo-Uralic" these days are Kortlandt and one or two of his students, and as a Finno-Ugrist I can tell you that their methods are crankish and arguably willfully misleading. Since at least Aulis Joki's Uralier und Indogermanen (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1973) was published, it has been widely understood that similarities between Indo-European and Uralic are due to loans from the former into the latter.
Lyle Campbell's paper in Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998) offers a good overview of the consensus of the field, that no genetic relationship can be shown between Uralic and any other language family.
1) Wiktionary is not an reputable citation. There are widely recognized etymological dictionaries of Finnish like Suomen sanojen alkuperä, you could have referred to them. 2) If Finnish borrowed the term from Germanic, it would have borrowed it from Proto-Germanic, not "Old Norwegian". Gothic is mentioned on that Wiktionary page, but it must be understood as "cf." and not "derived from".
Cite?
No, they aren't able to "beyond 8000 years to 16000 years". I can assure you that the vast majority of linguists (FWIW, I am one) reject these long-range comparisons. It is only by pitching themselves in the popular press and non-linguistic-savvy journals like Nature that Atkinson, Ruhlen and others of that ilk have been able to get any attention. People knowledgeable about the field think this is crank science.
This is a coincidence. Both forms are nursery words and not evidence for any historical relationship between Finnish (which only a branch of a larger Uralic family) and Hebrew (which is only a branch of a larger Semitic family).
Noam Chomsky is not a historical-comparative linguist. Indeed, one of the reasons he is held in low esteem by a large part of the community is that he began making claims on typology and universals solely on the basis of English grammar, with little knowledge of other languages in a diachronic perspective. Chomsky is working in an entirely different part of the field (linguistics became very specialized over the 20th century), so I don't understand why his input is so important for you.
If you want to know what a respected linguist thinks about these dubious long-range comparative attempts, see the late Larry Trask's publications. He fought hard against this kind of flim-flam when it was peddled last time by Merrit Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg.
The Saami (defined as speakers of Saami) were not the first inhabitants of Fennoscandia after the Ice Age. When Uralic speakers arrived in the area, there was already a population present speaking a non-Indo-European language. This is attested by a number of loanwords in Saami. See Ante Aikio's recent publications.
Thanks a lot, Captain Obvious. Nobody has ever compared the European languages before.
Why should they? chichi means "father" after all, not "mama", and it is quite common for words meaning "father" to begin with a dental stop (whether voiced or unvoiced). As I said, the original titi, which is comparable to English daddy, survives among Japanese dialects, and the affricatization of t- to chi- before high vowels in the standard language is a recent development. As I mentioned before, please read more about the history of Japanese before thinking that you are so clever.
In Proto-Uralic, and even Proto-Finnic, the word for mother was *emä. Finnish äiti is thus a fairly recent innovation.
The Finns were not at all "separated from the general population" and in fact the Finnic languages show a large number of loanwords from Germanic, Baltic and Iranian. They very much were in contact with their neighbours.
This article says nothing against languages moving to new territories. It merely claims that they are related and preserve common lexicon.
As I posted further down, Modern Japanese haha and chichi go back to the bog-standard babble forms *papa and *titi in Old Japanese, and the sound changes that produced the Modern Japanese forms happened relatively recently when the Japanese language can not be said to have been isolated.
(The word for father still survives as titi dialectally.)
Modern Japanese chi- goes back to Old Japanese *ti-, thus the earlier form of the word was titi. Again, a standard babble word. If Japanese looks exotic, it is due to sound changes that are only a few centuries old (and which happened at the same time as a massive influx of Sinitic loanwords, so they were hardly an isolated people).
I'd really suggest picking up a Japanese historical grammar before asking more. These things are pretty elementary for students of Japanese.
Not at all. For one, the reconstructed word for "fire" in Proto-Indo-European began with *p-. The shift to f- was a development specific to the Germanic languages. In other languages the sound changed in other ways (Celtic languages lost initial p- entirely, for instance). If sound change can go in so many directions, then "cognition" doesn't predetermine the shape of a word.
Since Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago, it has been understood that the word for a concept can take pretty much any form. Yes, there are limited examples of sound symbolism, but this does not apply for the lexicon in general.
Lord Renfrew may be a respected archaeologist, but his views on historical linguistics are rejected by most of the field.
The Japanese are no exception here. Modern Japanese haha 'mother' goes back to Old Japanese *papa, a standard babble word (and used for mothers as opposed to fathers in a number of languages around the world).
Shakespeare was hugely popular in the US in the 19th century. Actors would go from one backwater town to another putting on productions that drew large crowds (Mark Twain depicted some of this in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and debates on "who really wrote Shakespeare" were as popular in mass media as Da Vinci code rubbish in our time. And yet, the gap between Shakespeare and that audience was greater than the gap between us and Hawthorne. Literature does not necessarily have an expiration date.
While Christians believe that this text is authoritative, like any text (whether Christian, Muslim, Jew or not even religious in nature at all) it means absolutely nothing in itself. It means something only when combined with a rule of interpretation which is external to the text. This has been pretty well understood outside religious circles since De Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago. With Christianity, the fact that this religion existed for several decades before the compilation of any texts makes it pretty clear that calling the Bible -- and not the tradition that predates it -- the ultimate source of Christian belief is inaccurate.
Yes, some Christians believe that Jesus isn't God (with a capital G). The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator. The classic Unitarianism which arose in the Austro-Hungarian Empire several centuries ago (which self-identifies as a school of Christianity and is not to be confused with the much less dogmatic Unitarian Universalism that arose later) believes that Jesus was simply a great man chosen for a special purpose by God.
Citing Scripture isn't helpful here because the majority of Christians worldwide do not believe in the principle of sola Scriptura. They look to a Tradition which draws upon the Bible, but only in combination with an extrabiblical rule of interpretation.
Ditto.