I keep wondering why the US claims it needs to keep ahead of China, lest all be lost. This is not a zero sum game, and the difference between first and second place seems likely to be a few months at most. A few month lead doesn't seem to me like that much of an advantage, even if it is maintained over years (which is not a given, the lead could go back and forth).
And finally, this is not a race with a single goal (like landing the first man on the Moon). One side could be ahead with regard to, say, math proofs, while the other side could be ahead with chemistry applications or something.
1) But for many people and in many situations, translation---including MT---is good enough. And that overcomes any perceived need to learn another language (which learning may be in opposition to learning something else, something perceived as more important).
2) Most people don't "consume" literature or poetry, and it's unclear to me that non-performance art requires language. (I appreciate Rennaissance painting, but apart from the occasional Latin writing I don't need language to understand it.)
Disclaimer: Besides English, I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish (more so 35 years ago when I last lived in a Spanish speaking country), and used to be reasonably fluent in German, French, Tzeltal and Shuar (and a bit of Italian and written classical Greek). So I have every reason to hope this study is correct. But I have my doubts.
11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.
One thing he didn't mention is getting the first and last steps to be the same vertical distance as the others. Nothing will trip you up (literally!) so easily as a final step that is a different height than the other steps.
I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.
Did you even look at any of the papers (published in scholarly journals, not in TED talks), which argue against the idea that the Indus script is a written language?
I know nothing of death threats, but posting a YouTube video does not constitute "proof". And there's been plenty of water under the peer-reviewed bridge over the last twenty years, most of which does not seem to be politically motivated. Sproat for example has no political reason to prefer one or the other conclusion, but he has come down steadfastly on the side that the Indus script does not represent a language.
To repeat myself, then: there is no proof that the Indus script is the writing system of a language.
The Jesus cult documents (and the documents before that fork) exist in thousands of languages besides Javascript/English... Indeed, the original FORTRAN/ Greek, plus LISP/ Ethiopic, not to mention the Assembler/ Hebrew from before the fork. And modern languages like Tzeltal/ Python.
Slow, but interesting. I used the query "government" and got back passages in Romans 13 (as I expected), but also passages in Daniel and Ezra describing decrees by government officials, which made sense.
I think the web version looks correct, although the grid lines are so faint there that it's hard to tell. I'll paste some screenshots to that link--thanks for the work!
I'm running Linux Mint (xfce version), and I installed the .deb version (TikZ.Editor_0.4.0_amd64.deb). It's very odd...for example, when I open it or do File/New, many (but not all) of the grid cells are rectangles, not squares. Am I doing something wrong, like installing the wrong version? Or maybe misinterpreting what the faint grey lines are?
"...it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script..." No, it has NOT been proven to be a writing system for a language. Indeed the very link you cite [1] says:
"... difficult to judge whether or not they [the Indus symbols] constituted a writing system used to record a Harappan language..."
"There are doubts whether the Indus script records a written language or is instead a system of non-linguistic signs or proto-writing similar to merchant's marks and house marks, and to the contemporary accounting tokens and numerical clay tablets of Mesopotamia. Due to the brevity of inscriptions, some researchers have questioned whether Indus symbols can even express a spoken language."
In sum, whether it's a writing system for some language is still debated.
"How could they have been so wrong initially?" For the same reason that many other proposed reconstructions were (and some still are) so wrong. Chance matches, sometimes actual loanwords, and bias on the part of some people.
Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.
"...syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P." Given that aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops were almost certainly distinguished in spoken Greek of the time (as they were in proto-IndoEuropean and in later classical Greek), why would the Greeks not have carried over such a distinction if it existed in the Linear A language? It seems much more likely that the distinction did not exist in the Linear A language or script, and that's why it didn't show up in Linear B.
Maybe not, but this is clearly a free speech issue. Because if the article being passed out had been anything but an editorial about Trump's administration (and particularly RFK Jr), they would never have been evicted from the meeting. It was clearly for fear of Trump's potential retribution that the ADA kicked them out. So that's what I mean about the First Amendment.
True, although it used to be a suffix and now it's (just) a clitic. ("The king of England's crown" would have had the genitive marking on 'king' instead of 'England'.)
> a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more
> in fewer characters.
True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.
But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.
Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.
English has sometimes been called a creole, i.e. what was a pidgin language but after it has been spoken by several generations of native speakers. One thing it lost some time around the Norman Conquest was the case marking phonology (apart from some pronouns).
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think what he meant when he said that a "strict phonetic transcription" would be bad is phonetic vs. phonemic. Most writing systems (apart from things like Chinese) represent (some of) the phonemes of the language, not the phones (not phonetic). For example, in English we have two kinds of p-sounds: one is found in words like 'pill', the other in words like 'spill'. We write them both the same, because which sound the letter should take is determined by the environment: after an /s/, it's pronounced without a puff of air, elsewhere (or mostly elsewhere) it's pronounced followed by a puff of air. It's actually hard for most native speakers of English to tell the difference, although speakers of languages like Thai, where the two sounds can appear in the same environment and can be used to distinguish different words, can hear the difference just fine.
Bottom line: writing systems that are easy for native speakers to use, usually represent the phonemes of the language, not each phone.
I tried to do a little (web) research on this. It is of course the reason a prism separates white light into its components. I didn't find out much about sea water, though.
And then there's "slow glass", in which the passage of light through half an inch of glass takes years; the subject of the short story "Light of Other Days" :).
Good point, so here's how I worded my FB post without even mentioning diabetes (URL truncated here because that's how FB displays them, but it works):
"Scientists were ejected from a meeting of the American Diabetes Associate for distributing printouts of an editorial that had appeared in the ADA journal. Here's the link: https://diabetesjournals.org/.../Misguided-Brushes-of-a.... The article highlights "the many threats the current U.S. administration pose[s] to the health of our nation". I recommend that you do read it: it is not technical, you don't need to have a degree in medicine or biology to read it.
What do people not understand about the First Amendment?"
I'm hoping the Streisand Effect will take hold, and this editorial becomes the most read article ever of that journal. I've posted this news on my FB (yes...) page. And I downloaded a PDF, in case the journal takes the editorial down.
I wasn't arguing for whether cats have consciousness, and I agree that they do, to some extent. (We just lost a 23 1/2 year old cat who had lots of personality.) But killing birds or mice is one of their instincts. One of the triggers is nearness. Young cats will watch a bird through the window with their tail twitching, and the closer the bird is the more excited the cat gets. If they could get through the glass I'm pretty sure they'd go after it. Older cats (my old cat in particular) watched, but either they understand what glass is, or they're too tired to do much about it.
Well, that may be true. I've heard that when a dog sees its master loving it, feeding it, caring for it (minus the vet visits, I guess), the dog thinks "My master must be god." When the cat sees its humans treating it well, the cat thinks "I must be god."