bradrn

> Can anyone explain why this happens?

Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:

• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.

• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.

Thus we end up with the paradigm of:

    |   | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
    |---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
    | M | he      | him    |             his                |
    | F | she     |       her             | hers            |

Oh, certainly, as is the case for any language!

In the case you mention, I note that Huddleston & Pullum in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language specifically call ‘some’ an existential determiner. As is usual with them, this is an insightful observation: you use ‘some <noun>’ specifically in order to say that there exists some set of things drawn from some larger set or in some configuration. You say ‘there are some vendors in the street’ because you’re drawing attention to their existence in the street (and indeed ‘there is/are’ is the prototypical English expression for existentials). You don’t say ‘they are some vendors’, because the use of ‘they’ implies some specific group of vendors already known to both speaker and listener — highlighting their existence again feels weird.

(Of course, this analysis is still incomplete. At some point you simply have to list all the specific ways in which ‘some’ is used — which, indeed, is exactly what Huddleston & Pullum do. Furthermore I’m certain that there is some discourse context in which ‘they are some vendors’ would be natural, even though I haven’t managed to think of one just yet.)

i think this post with more details would be a better link: https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/. The graph of exceptional cases is particularly interesting.

(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)

It’s simply that, in English, there is no indefinite plural article — or, equivalently, that the indefinite plural article is null. So ‘they are doctors’ is consistent with the behaviour of plural nouns elsewhere.

Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.

Ooh, very nice! I have my own tool I’ve been using for this [https://github.com/bradrn/full-history-search/], and it’s incredibly useful, but it’s also pretty primitive. This one looks a lot nicer.

> wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?

Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)

> Google "language isolates in papua new guinea".

My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/86071361/The_languages_and_linguist...

No, the reason it occurred in the Markham Valley is because of the bit immediately after that sentence:

> a 1,000 metre climb over about 30 km takes you straight up onto the edge of the eastern highlands

i.e. because the Markham River provides a pathway from the Lowlands into the Highlands.

The paragraph you quote concerns a different proposition, as may be clearer if some of the subordinate clauses are elided:

> The reason why I believe that […] the highlands were functionally cut off, is that […] they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world.

Yes! I know it! (And I’m not old at all.) I saw it at, as I recall, a model train exhibition when I was very young, and I found it so hilarious I’ve never forgotten it. In fact I was quite surprised when I eventually learned it was a well-known thing, considerably older than I am.

I’ve been using https://the-saurus.org/ lately to get access to the hierarchy, since reading https://blog.plover.com/2026/08/02/ on its use a couple of weeks ago.

Reminds me of this classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20010803131841/http://www.lemis....

> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''

> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.

> ``Are you a Satanist?''

> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.

> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''

> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.

> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''

> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''

And it continues…

Speaking as a Jew, I don’t read GP as being ‘anti-Jewish hate’ — it seems to be at least vaguely positive in claiming the weekend as a Jewish invention, albeit with very muddled phrasing. (For one thing, Zionism didn’t exist 2000 years ago…)

> Is there a name for a light source which has a constant emission intensity across a given range of wavelengths?

The issue with this is that you can’t necessarily define ‘constant’ in a meaningful way. Being a density function rather than a point function, the energy irradiance from a source changes changes depending on whether you measure in terms of wavelength or frequency. I recommend [0] as an introduction to the problem.

[0] https://oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/level...

I tried working on this idea at one point. My conclusion is that doing it sensibly ends up removing all the advantages of spreadsheets which makes them so widespread (as the beginning of this article discusses so well).

> the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I

It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.

Ah, whoops, thanks!

In fact, I believe that the article is describing a reinvention of this technique! Just with a plotter on oil rather than a compass on plastic.

> also many of the characters in the language are believed to be derived from hieroglyphs

This is true insofar as all Western writing systems are ultimately descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphics, via the Phoenician script. In the case of Coptic most of the letters are rather transparently borrowed from Greek.

Of course, Coptic is unusual in having added seven letters to the Greek alphabet for sounds not in Greek (Ϣ, Ϥ, Ϧ, Ϩ, Ϫ, Ϭ, Ϯ), and these were taken directly from the indigenous Egyptian writing system of the time, namely Demotic, itself a direct descendant of the Hieroglyphic script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script#Letters_derived_....

Hah, I had the same thought on seeing the title!

Personally I’ve found this article a much more approachable overview to the question in the title: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2019/09/the_riemann_hyp...

It’s presumably named after Henry Bigelow (like several other things in oceanography), so my guess would be /bɪɡəˈlə͡ʊwi.a͡ɪ/.

Reminds me of Haskell’s monad-bayes: https://monad-bayes.netlify.app/

> lots of unexplained grandiose thinking like “ k and q made the vector the unit of thought.”

That much makes sense in context: K is an array language, like APL, J, etc. From what little experience I have with J, ‘vector as a unit of thought’ seems like a reasonable description.

> Extremely likely to be AI

I had the same thought though.

This point in the comments made me think twice:

> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Yep, that’s what I meant; thanks for clarifying the point.

(Though that said, a sibling post linked this interesting talk on limitations in OpenType itself: https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf)

In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.

By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.

(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)

Just reread the post — it’s much more pleasant to read now! Thank you!

(For what it’s worth, I think your own writing style is quite nice, now that I can see it.)

I like wl-kbptr myself: https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr

Yes, that would help considerably.

(Also, I suggest clearly acknowledging where AI was/wasn’t used. I like CuriosityC’s suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411968)

It’s slightly confusingly phrased, but the full sentence is:

> The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra […] where the main mode of pitch control is by moving the tuning slide.

Which is correct.