fourtrees

I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct.

Not too much we can do about it though.

No, seas are filled with salt water. I'm sure there are some more technical oceano-/limnogrpahical reasons to distinguish them too. Otherwise, they certainly seem like it especially when you're beyond the sight of land.

I feel like I ought to note that there's no evidence of military activity (that I know of) in the IVC, but certainly evidence of violence: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/G_Robbins_Schug_Peaceful_2... . I wish it weren't the case, but it seems early Harappan scholars made the same error that early scholars of the Minoans did in concluding that the absence of evidence of violence implied the absence of violence itself. Of course, this doesn't mean that the IVC wasn't a relatively peaceful place compared with places like Sumer or Elam, like you said.

I agree, the EMR implementation/enhancements were a giant handout to consultancies, hospitals, maybe clinics that's now enshrined in law. It was a travesty and likely ended up costing more for lesser benefit. The effects were of course felt in impoverished areas more than in suburbia, as hospitals clinics and are poorer, consultancies are (almost) not existent. It was a grift -- even academia got in on the money training!

I'm sure the legitimate justice system can be misused alongside the others in various unethical ways.

A slippery slope: we've reached a point where, with some kickback, institutions like the media can nearly silence dissent from a manufactured truth to whatever end. A witch-hunt/moral crusade, leaving fame and fortune aside a bit, is a potential consequence of this dissent. The true believer can, has, and will silence, punish (or kill) a dissenter, as their mere voice and presence risks the crusade by humanizing the dissenter and threatening the discourse on which its built. Given that many of the crusaders are true believers, a sense of dignity seems to follow the process, thus the rush of the crusade's actions and the enrolment of more crusaders wishing for even greater truth and justice. I can see this rapidly spiraling out of control, with or without government support.

La lanterne? She's always been waiting.

I'd be phenomenally more shocked if they they didn't. I wish the article cited its sources, but I guess the PCM will help fill in the gaps. More evidence in support of the open publication of scientific articles.

Yes, but that's the good propaganda, violence, erasure, and censorship though. Promoting it protects liberal westerners from the complicated tasks of basic research, historical knowledge, critical thinking, and the potentially complex and appalling realization that states and their actions --even democratic ones, from the Melian massacre to extraordinary rendition-- exist on a spectrum of good and evil. Our good propaganda, ect. saves citizens a ton of intellectual effort which is clearly better spent somewhere else. Let freedom ring undulled by the complicated.

Honestly, this whole thing reminds me a bit of the Lusitania and the way England manipulated US opinion (not saying war wasn't justified). The US and UK governments denied the ship carried munitions for close to 100 years. It was a German attack on a peaceful vessel, period. The wreck was found in the 80s, and divers were told to be careful surveying the wreck given its cargo. Later, the cargo was of course revealed to be high explosives and tons of rounds of ammunition, making it fair game for U-boats and causing the deaths of thousands (?) of travelers as a result... best of all, the German government had published warnings of the risk of traveling into a war zone in American papers.

In short, take all news with a grain of salt. The good guys are usually the ones publishing.

Addendum: I do support the Ukraine whole-heartedly; I hope this results in a free Ukraine and a new Russia.

If you get a chance, listen to Dubliners, Joyce's collection of short stories, too, the last story is probably one of the best of 20th century English if not of all time.

Yeah, these are really common experiences and called afterimages or one of the other terms motioned in the thread. Certain tricks like looking at a bright source of light before shutting you eyes or even meditating, in my experience, can increase their intensity.

This is more to the general readership.

Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't, like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo, good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit.

Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics, particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at least at the point where languages seems to alternate between the two extremes.

To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist universally. I mean that many languages, especially the lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited geographically. We once assumed that there were at most three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the verb's position in the sentence and function like a predicate. They need that those words to make sense of communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps the word also a concept that some groups have need of and others do not.

On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP. Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s) they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion. There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in speech is only one example.

Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.

Davis' conclusions might be questionable here or there, but this seems like a decent guide to communicating science to the layperson especially in a lecture.

Discovering these rules and their exceptions have been what field linguists, and philologists before them like Champollion (who should be more widely known imo -- he was actually doing science to decipher hieroglyphics; a generation or two before, decipherments were largely alchemistic gobbledygook) as well and the westerners and Indians who worked on the old languages India had been doing for well over a hundred years.

These field linguists (Imperialistic Europeans, those under the colonial yoke, and disinterested, merely inquisitive parties) produced grammars noting rules, which really do outnumber the exceptions in any given dialect at a given time (that's important), and exceptions. This work has led to everything from a tighter grasp on colonial possessions, to the enhanced ability of colonized to resist their colonizers, to the decipherment of forgotten, thousand year-old and the recording of near-dead languages.

And regarding your last comment, in many cases the languages we're dealing with have no writing, so I do agree. A better Olympiad would have at least included a aural-only portion of the exam. I right there with you on this one.

Really, maybe we're agreeing more than disagreeing, because I also support your comment that "expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting". Mathematics doesn't change; no same person steps in the same linguistic twice. That was the base of the linguistic program for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century (this was also computational linguistics before it took it's rule-based -to-statistical turn), and it produced insights and tools for the field linguists, mainly to decipher morphosyntax. Yet, I'd say the BIG discoveries, like the decipherment of Maya, have come from that muddy, uncomfortable, dangerous field work... gathering evidence for regularities among the glyphs that could be painstakingly comparing those amongst themselves and with the spoken languages of the region today. Some rules have stayed very similar for a long time, and I invite you to look at the historical recreations of proto-languages to get a sense of not only the regularities of a given modern language, but the regularities in the changes of languages over >1000 years.

That being said, (statistics-borne) Computational Linguistics is a wonderful (and a little scary thing), and I'm very willing to change my mind. It certainly challenges the rule-based assumptions and just maybe we're headed towards another paradigm shift.

Historically, a liminal space was just a place a where two areas meet, like a doorway, a gate, a crossroads, or even death. Somewhere a journey ends and another begins. I think Hecate, who was the goddess of crossroads and magic/illusion (and hellhounds) among 1000 other things, was in charge of liminal things. (Makes you wonder where Robert Johnson picked up a good chunk of the Hecate myth). I think Janus also played a role in controlling exits and entryways.

So, how does a rather normal Roman concept get turned into whatever liminality is now? The answer is that the idea was picked up first by Early Modern philosophers (I think Kant was first but he had a very unmystical definition of the liminal -- but I won't bore you with... Kant). Keep in mind that during this period the limit in mathematics was being developed.

It gradually regains something of its spiritual, Roman-like meaning as the 19th century progresses and also finds an appropriate home in anthropology to describe places and ideas like the Roman ones and in (Jungian I'm guessing) psychoanalysis where it's used metaphorically as turning point or a threshold between sanity and madness.

After that, the French philosophers (maybe from existentialism on -- existential literature, Satre and Beckett come to mind, have some sublime depictions of liminality) of the later 1900s, ran further with the psycho-metaphorical version. Besides its already-established connection with madness, it came to be, I guess, a sort of goal. I think the aim was to push the writer, reader, and message into a liminal space where cultural and other boundaries could be crossed with the hope of seeing things from an alternative perspective.

From there it trickled down to colleges and culture at large (again). Sorry for the ramble. I hope I got my facts correct.

Hwæt?! I think it's more than just modern Americans who love(d) heroic war stories. Look at J. Caesar, look at the knightly romances from the Middle Ages -- the latter are especially sanitized, the former were probably bloodied up a bit. The pursuit of that kill streak has been a genre for a really long time. I thought it was common knowledge that the US Government helped it along here and there and has in one medium or another since the beginning. There is a Maldon for every few Beowulfs though.

She and her co-workers did fuck up badly and were unlucky enough to be under attack from one of the most powerful countries in the world. But to attribute that failure to her having received masters in composing fourteen years before, years she spent as a successful (as far as we know) Security Officer and VP at other financials seems a bit much like scapegoating.

I agree and think the Jesuits are one of the best things to emerge from the Roman Church in ages. There are/have been problems with the Jesuits as with any other big, influential organization, but I think as a whole they deserve our respect for their piety (even if they're wrong about theism), erudition, and bravery in traveling the world in the early modern period. They've been called God's Marines for a reason, like a soldier tasked with establishing a beachhead, they suffered miserably for their mission. Speaking truth to power in defense of the colonized and powerless has generally been another of their dangerous practices

They published a Mandarin translation of Galileo's Starry Messenger and notes on sunspots within about 15 years of Messengers' first publication in Italy. They were successful in converting Japanese by not attempting to replace Japanese culture wholesale. The arrival of the Dominicans, the Dutch, and the end of the civil wars put a bloody stop to that, but their temporary success does demonstrate the efficacy of their methods. They stood up to National Socialism (among many others).

They also tried to defend Catholicism in England (and indeed ministered to cryptocatholics who weren't buying what Henry and Liz were selling). They became a stereotype arch-villain of the English propaganda of the era called the Black Legend. It's largely mixed with the historical truth in the modern popular imagination of the anglosphere by now (viz. Dan Brown) . It alleges that the Spanish were treacherous idolaters, fond of torture and so on. The Spanish indeed were rabid imperialists and religious bigots, but not to a unique degree for the age. The Jesuits were the ones being tortured in England for (religiously) aiding the silenced and powerless.

This tendency hasn't really changed. Liberation theology and its less extreme brethren have largely been products of Jesuit theology. At times it seems like they're among the few Catholics who read whole catechism (there are some surprisingly progressive ideas in it) and don't focus to great excess on sex and abortion.

It is important to remember the failings of the Church too.

Nice article on human evolution, buy if I'm not mistaken, we'll be needing a time machine to answer that one.

Might a serial founder effect during the peopling of Eurasia result in low genetic diversity and the fact that diversity increases the closer you get to Africa? Is there a way to distinguish low diversity due to a serial founder effect and a bottleneck cause by a natural catastrophe?

Penrose, who's probably my favorite living physicist, is far from the only person who's attempted to connect QM to everything mental from consciousness, free will, qualia to telepathy or the efficacy of prayer. QM is a god-of-the-gaps for mental things we don't understand or don't really exist. And it plays that role in plenty of other places.

One good reason for not lumping ORR in with crystal healing (beyond the rigor and erudition applied to the theories) is that ORR addresses what most would consider a real mystery in our understanding of the mind (however you define that), while crystal healing addresses something demonstrably false.

I'll still contend there's some quantum woo to ORR, but for that reason it's been a brave attempt to further scientific knowledge.

People with (often) new age mystical beliefs justify them with unconventional, incompletely understood, or naïve views of QM. Like the belief in the healing effects of crystals due to some quantum effect or that consciousness is generated by quantum effects in neurons.

I seriously doubt any quantum mysticism is true, and I'm happy to defer to the physicists to get my woo from QM as in this experiment.

Aw man, almost did this myself a few months ago when I was down with COVID. You make me reall want to revisit the idea! Grats on your success.

This is one of my big take-aways from the article. My great-(great?-)-grandparents from Eastern Europe armed with nothing but excellent numeracy, some English, and the clothes on their backs. They could reliably expect to enter move out of post-immigration poverty based on skills cultivated for the purpose of success in the US. My great-x-grandfather ended up a bank manager. And they passed money and knowledge along to their children, insuring as best they could that their progress wouldn't be lost, and it wasn't. You've heard this story a thousand times, and I'd bet it happened tens of thousands of times.

But that sort of outcome seems almost impossible in America today due to more factors than I could probably name especially at this hour. But it seems clear to me that America has changed in the last 120-100 years in a way that locks people into their social classes/'earnings quintiles' while perpetuating, I assume to the advantage of the very wealthy, the myth that that old America of extreme social mobility still exists. This is a myth that needs to die if we're to adequately address our problems as a nation. I suspect the solution begins in the education industry.

Wow, Georgism is actually being discussed again. I guess cats do have nine lives.

I for one hope it makes its way back into the political mainstream, as unlikely as that might be. It's really quite a brilliant and simple system of taxation.

I like this answer, and Krause's on my reading list now. I have to speculate that the development of the organizational/institutional capabilities to produce bronze on a large scale (especially the need for reliable long-distance trade networks needed to acquire tin (or pre-made bronze) en masse), and not just the effectiveness of the material as an arm (and the feedback between these two factors), was a very important change. 'Suddenly', you have a whole part of society whose livelihoods are dependent on the bronze industry and who would seemingly be willing to fight to keep their potentate(s) in power if it meant keeping their trade afloat (were the original nobles just the members of the local bronze 'guild'?). And of course an even larger segment of the population willing to go along with it for their own safety.

I basically agree (he enjoyed the Eastern Front too!). But don't the flaws of the Tractaus put you (all) off Wittgenstein entirely. His later work -- what he wrote when he wasn't in the life-threating midst of unimaginable suffering -- is much more normal in method of argumentation and much easier to digest. Some of it is downright enjoyable to read.

I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a 'severe language impairment'; there are lots of aphasias out there that only affect very specific parts of the whole language/writing system in the brain. They could be comprehend normally, but have trouble producing (on some level) speech or vice versa. If could comprehend spoken language without difficult, they could 'easily' complete tasks that didn't require those neural connections. Without knowing what the specific symptoms were, this is kind of a moot point.

Brutalism produced disasters and masterpieces like any other artistic trend. Let's do what we've been doing for thousands of years and keep the masterpieces and a few of the disasters to show the range of the style and move on. Badly designed, built, or photographed buildings exists regardless of their style. You don't have to go too far (in the US at least) to find examples of awful neoclassicism for instance.

Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.

Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.

Kirii? I don't mean to be pedantic, but do you mean kuru-kuru? Or is there another prion disease out there I'll be having nightmares about?

Something like that concurrent with the Evergrande bs in China, the pandemic, ect. seems like a recipe for a financial disaster. I agree Facebook should be dealt with, but let's have a few quarters of normalcy beforehand.