TFNA

3 ms·

1.
by TFNA 5d ago
Since my late teens, I have spent ~6 months a year traveling the world, and language learning has been a big part of that. And now I am in my 40s having seen how, in most regions, interest from locals in intensive conversation steadily dimi
2.
by TFNA 6d ago
For someone in the field, teaching is work, while telling people they are wrong isn't. Unless you are paying good money, you don't have a right to the former instead of the latter. In any event, the GP (note: not the same as the O
3.
by TFNA 6d ago
Your post history suggests your sole personal experience is Spanish. Congratulations, you lucked out learning the language of speakers more likely to be friendly and sociable than not (though there are corners of Latin America colder than o
4.
by TFNA 7d ago
I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing
5.
by TFNA 7d ago
Everyone knows about the weakness of the research and jokes about it, but much fewer people are aware of the dementia behind it.
6.
by TFNA 8d ago
English dog has had an etymology for the last 20 years or so (Gasiorowski's) that many find convincing. But with regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many o
7.
by TFNA 8d ago
Recent paper by Kassian in Transactions of the Philological Society makes formidable case that Thracian was not Indo-European.
8.
by TFNA 8d ago
"Bread and circuses" refers to a public free grain dole and free entertainment events in Ancient Rome. Precious little of that in the US right now, except for food benefits whose recipients probably on balance do not support the c
9.
by TFNA 8d ago
Neither Buck nor Pokorny are regarded today as worth citing except for historiographical reasons. Their work is obsolete by many decades.
10.
by TFNA 8d ago
This is a well-established field where you can read experts discussing the word in depth, including its derivational properties and ablaut behavior. This isn't something where an HN's armchair guess is worth anything, just like wh
11.
by TFNA 8d ago
There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowe
12.
by TFNA 8d ago
The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working today believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idée fixe of the scholar Robert Beekes well over a decade ago now, and very flawed research as Beekes was succumbing t
13.
by TFNA 10d ago
I have corresponded at length with composers who seemed to appreciate the interest. On the other hand, I know a composer (not even that famous, just successful enough) who has his copyist answer all correspondence with stock replies, since
14.
by TFNA 10d ago
Some cultures would mind, China for instance: the anthropology of the CCP holds that the ability to labour is what makes us human and separates us from lower primates. Therefore, as AI grows more powerful and takes over jobs, it is importan
15.
by TFNA 10d ago
When several EU countries are already struggling with large Indian Subcontinent communities that don't integrate (and dodge taxes and food-processing regs--Indians where I am have their own large underground cash-only food economy amon
16.
by TFNA 10d ago
The point is that traffic streams are not unbroken: when there is a crosswalk and cars are obliged to stop in front of it in the presecence of a pedestrian, then the flow is broken.
17.
by TFNA 10d ago
Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920
18.
by TFNA 11d ago
There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
19.
by TFNA 11d ago
By the way, your discontent about missionaries shouldn't be centered just around "gospel" groups. Multiple denominations of Islam have pretty far-reaching missionary networks into seemingly faraway places.
20.
by TFNA 11d ago
It is a pity you are being downvoted. I do linguistic fieldwork in a similarly remote region and, yeah, you learn pretty quickly visitors fall into about those three types.
21.
by TFNA 12d ago
I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use t
22.
by TFNA 12d ago
American 501c3 law is extremely lax compared to analogous structures in the EU. A number of 501c3s are run as sinecures where a board (self-selecting, so no input from the membership) just hires its friends for well-paid positions that invo
23.
by TFNA 12d ago
The OP's ridicule does make sense. Think about how in Star Trek TNG , Data's description of everyday hobbies and pursuits in logic-speak was used to lend humor to episodes, "Haha, he's so weird". And people often
24.
by TFNA 12d ago
I wouldn't knock neuroatypical people's attempt to overcome their faulty wiring and do something that could socially benefit them, even if the perspective they are doing it from is strange. RMS has spoken about how getting into Bu
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by TFNA 12d ago
In many countries now, "over the replacement rate" or "under the replacement rate" is indeed a binary that closely tracks with religious observance. I would rather not out where I am, but here a couple having even a seco
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by TFNA 12d ago
The USA is not the whole world. I heard a lot about the MARRS case as a teenager, and I wasn't even in the UK where it happened.
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by TFNA 13d ago
One of the most infamous legal challenges to sampled music was MARRS "Pump Up the Volume" in the 1980s, and that was preceded by other famous cases. Not sure why you think that started in the 1990s.
28.
by TFNA 13d ago
A lot of people today, particularly young people, no longer use the open web in a browser. They only use the social-media walled gardens through phone apps. Even for some newspapers etc. that might have existed first as websites, they use i
29.
by TFNA 14d ago
Complaints about loud audio on public transport are common in Europe, where the predominant phone OS is Android, not iPhones.
30.
by TFNA 14d ago
In cultures where the sight of certain things is taboo, telling a local person that they have to direct their gaze elsewhere feels as much of a rude imposition as someone's phone audio reaching your ears. Please try to step beyond your

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