felix318

8 ms·

31.
by felix318 5y ago
No nation is truly free, all societies are ruled by a small elite that is only concerned with its own wealth and power. How the elite rules depends on different factors, but their motives are always the same. I grew up under military dictat
32.
by felix318 5y ago
I’m not an expert on the matter but, from what I know about Korea and Japan, literacy was a priviledge granted to a small minority. Having a complex script that takes years to learn was a tremendous advantage to them. Maybe it was different
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by felix318 5y ago
This is starting to sound like that debate between Dennett and Chomsky about whether recursion is a universal feature of languages. Linguistics is a strange field.
34.
by felix318 5y ago
The same thing happened in Japanese but both countries refrained from taking the next logical step and throw away the ideograms. Much of it has to do with the educated elite wanting to restrict access to knowledge, but it's still curio
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by felix318 5y ago
I’m not sure I understand your comment. Granted, I’m not a linguist but there is certainly something unique about the Chinese script. I don’t know a single word of Chinese, but I followed a link in a sibling post and came across this: 女書 -
36.
by felix318 5y ago
I also find the Chinese writing system fascinating in that it's the only one that didn't evolve from representing concepts to representing sounds. Maybe there is a connection there?
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by felix318 5y ago
You can create a job whose only function is to increase your cost and consequently allow you to charge more for your product or service. It doesn’t work if you do it on your own, but it does work if you can get the government to force your
38.
by felix318 5y ago
And what about this now common usage of “they” instead of he/she? As a non-native speaker it always makes me go “who the heck are ‘they”? If it’s OK to offend the grammar to avoid offending people, why not just go all the way and also
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by felix318 5y ago
There is a lot of pop music that take melodies from classical pieces, they sound just like any other pop song. There is more to Schubert, or the Beatles for that matter, than a talent for melody. By the way, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninof
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by felix318 5y ago
It’s not just the laws of physics. If you assume the past cannot be changed then you can’t physically interact with it, and you can’t even observe it (observation is interaction). And if you assume the past can be changed then the universe
41.
by felix318 5y ago
I discovered one thing about my hearing that, I think, implies the same thing this article is talking about. When we hear a quick sequence of distinct sounds, like a ringing bell for instance, depending on how fast one sound follows the oth