ethanpoole

It's simply for the content, not credit. I assume that if they wanted to get a second degree, they would have to reenroll. I should point out that university employees could also take classes for free, while earning credit; though there have been some cuts to this program recently, if I recall.

At the University of Minnesota, those with degrees from the university can audit courses at a greatly reduced rate. I'm not sure whether this applies to online courses, but it's very likely that it does. During my undergraduate education there, I encountered many such post-degree students; they were quite a joy to have in class.

> If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these.

Orthography and language are not the same thing. Having a complex orthography has no bearing on processing complexity. If a language has a complex orthography, it may be hard to read and write, which are learned skills, but it won't be hard to speak and listen (which are naturally acquired skills given exposure to a language in the critical period).

These are all complaints about orthography, not language.

Foreigners are taught to use the -vat form to form a conditional to get the correct consonant gradation. It's not relevant for juoda because the stem is juo-, no consonants.

The only reason that I didn't provide links in my original post is because I have had this discussion over and over. I get tired of having it.

Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain.

It may very well be that speakers of a language with feature A can perform some task better than speakers of a language without feature A. However, it does not meant that the speakers have different cognitive capabilities (e.g. you can provide sufficient task training), which is the ultimate argument of people supporting linguistic relativity.

I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

Mark Baker's _The Atoms of Language_ and Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ talk about the evidence against linguistic relativism. There is also a debate between Mark Baker (I believe) and some psychologist published online, but I couldn't find the link. I don't know of any other popular literature on the topic.

Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.

Although you are right to be skeptical of this claim because near-native competency is always possible, L2 competency (learning a language as a foreign language) will always be less than L1 competency (native). For instance, there are grammatical constructions with very low input frequency about which native speakers have strong intuitions, which L2 speakers will not have. The difference in L1 and L2 intuitions may be remarkably subtle, often semantic/pragmatic, but you don't have to work in the linguistic community for long to come across them.

The difference between L1 and L2 language competency is deeper than whether you acquired multiple languages in "parallel" or "serially". The competency level, whether you are fluent or near-fluent, is based on the critical-learning period which ends roughly at the onset of puberty. Nothing rules out acquiring multiple L1s in serial, which I suspect to be the case in many instances of multilingual children.

Moreover, the author's anecdotal support is in contradiction with the fact that children do acquire multiple languages largely without problem. There are effects of one language on the other, but they are different in natural, and far less frequent, to crossover effects in L2 language learning, e.g. learning Spanish is high school.

Yes, but this evidence does not necessarily say very much about language and the relationship between language and thought. For example, if a culture does not teach their children to swim and therefore the culture at large does not know how to swim, those people could still swim, albeit slowly. Does this say anything about their bodies? No. If some sort of conditioning by one's culture is required to distinguish colours (which seems to be the case), this is very interesting, but it says very little about language.

I completely agree. For the most part, people do accept the bilateral influence between culture and language. However, the debate generally focuses on the relationship between language and thought/cognition/mind (with culture mistakenly lumped in there) where bilateral influence doesn't make as much sense, at least intuitively. Consequently, the language-culture and language-thought relationships should be analysed separately, although not in isolation of course.

Even if a Chinese speaker casually considers the leaves and the sky to be the same colour, it does not meant that s/he could not make the distinction if prompted. It would be similar to asking an English speaker to distinguish different shades of the same colour. For example, historically, English lacked a word for "orange" (which was borrowed from French) such that "red" and "yellow" covered greater spectrums respectively. Clearly, it wasn't that English speakers couldn't distinguish red, yellow, and orange because modern-day English speakers can do so perfectly.

The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically. A more concrete example: many languages, such as Chinese, lack linguistic tense (e.g. past, present, future)—using instead aspectual markers (e.g. perfective, imperfective)—, but this does not mean that Chinese speakers cannot understand temporal relations (nor that they could not still express such notions linguistically). Similarly, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, but English speakers can still express these two distinct shades despite not having two separate, distinct words. In short, one has to be extremely cautious about making such broad generalisations without fully understanding the empirical data and, ideally, linguistic theory. See the debate in the Economist between Boroditsky and Liberman for more on this topic: http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190

Oh no, I didn't intend for The Language Instinct as an introduction to NLP, but as a basic introduction to the fundamentals of linguistics. I mainly had in mind terms like morpheme, phoneme, scope, etc. A basic understanding of these concepts will make reading the NLTK book much easier, although it isn't necessary.

If you're interested in natural language processing (NLP), but don't have a linguistics background, I would suggest reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It will introduce you to the necessary terminology and concepts for NLP in an easy-to-digest way. (The NLTK book has been free online for quite some time as well.)

No. From what I understand, any material caught in the accretion disk is merely funnelling down into the black hole's event horizon, i.e. the centre. It will not affect any orbiting bodies, such as our solar system, but it will make the black hole pseudo-visible to astronomers because the material in the accretion disk will admit some light.