mcswell

37 ms·

541.
by mcswell 3y ago
There are lots of languages in the world that don't have any word for taxi, because they don't have taxis. The same is true for many of the other words talked about here or in the article. Of course if you want to say "Of th
542.
by mcswell 3y ago
It's easy to start learning another language without an interpreter or dictionary, you just start with concrete objects and actions. The hard part is representing the sounds (phonemes), which are often quite different from the languag
543.
by mcswell 3y ago
Not sure exactly what you're saying, but: Bible translators regularly translate the Bible into other languages, including the kind of "tribal" languages you refer to. The people they translate for are fine with saying "
544.
by mcswell 3y ago
"Communicate" is a vague word. I guess I could communicate with you by hitting you upside the head, which is way more than I can say for plants communicating with each other, and for that matter about as much as I can say for m
545.
by mcswell 3y ago
I think FarSide beat us to the punchline: https://ifunny.co/picture/donning-his-new-canine-decoder-pro... (or if that link doesn't work, try this one: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/ac&#x2F
546.
by mcswell 3y ago
That one says "Food! Food!" That one over there is saying "Predator! Predator! Predator!" And this one over here is saying "Hey, babe! Wanna make some eggs?"
547.
by mcswell 3y ago
That presumes that there is non-human sentience on Earth, which is not a given. Given that it's been impossible to teach apes anything like real language (they have been taught a few signed words), my guess is there are not any truly
548.
by mcswell 3y ago
A few words are related to sound: in English, "meow" sort of sounds like the sound cats make (although my cat is much more nuanced, he wants you to know!). "Woof" sort of sounds like some dogs' bark, "cock-a-d
549.
by mcswell 3y ago
If you (think you can) make the case for 3D, then you can make the case for 4D, because we can talk about time--past, present, future, yesterday, five minutes ago...
550.
by mcswell 3y ago
They conceptualize the past and future exactly the same as you do; the past is something they remember (some of), the future is something they can only guess about. Their language talks about it differently, that's all.
551.
by mcswell 3y ago
How do you "filter" heavy metals? They would, I think, be in solution, so it should not be possible to remove them with a filter. (I know the ZeroWater company claims that, but I'd have to know what the basis is for that cl
552.
by mcswell 3y ago
Like viruses
553.
by mcswell 3y ago
Did you read the article? It talks about the drawbacks to those.
554.
by mcswell 3y ago
I haven't paid a lot of attention to the debate, so I can't give you a citation. But there have been many claims over the years (some of them by real linguists) that language property X is correlated with physical/ social&#x
555.
by mcswell 3y ago
Mark Twain tried, but failed. As you probably know, he said he'd rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
556.
by mcswell 3y ago
It's often (certainly not always!) the case that if a language has significant inflectional morphology (conjugation) for expressing person and maybe number of the subject (and for some languages, the direct and/or indirect object)
557.
by mcswell 3y ago
I think you meant polysynthetic languages. And you don't have to memorize all the forms of each stem, there are grammar rules that usually let you derive each form.
558.
by mcswell 3y ago
There's another category between analytic (no affixes) and agglutinating (potentially multiple affixes on a single word), namely inflectional (usually one affix per word). Many IndoEuropean languages like Spanish, German and to some e
559.
by mcswell 3y ago
I saw an earlier article about this on Newsweek, and that's exactly what happened. In fact one poster thought this meant we were "punching holes" in the atmospheres of other planets. The term "punching a hole" is a
560.
by mcswell 3y ago
You're right. Translating OE 'Hwæt!' as "So." does make me grit my teeth.
561.
by mcswell 3y ago
You do realize that if you do all of those things in an ICE, you'll get a similar drop in range, right? At any rate, most people never do all those things, nor do they go into some death valley. Because most of us don't like
562.
by mcswell 3y ago
Most of those problems are exactly the same with ICE engines. You may not want that comment, but it's true. Except the roof rack one is bogus. I installed the cross bars of a roof rack on my Bolt EUV (it came with the rails), and
563.
by mcswell 3y ago
From the article: "solid-state batteries... don’t do well in cold weather, tend to weaken quickly after repeatedly getting charged and drained, are particularly costly... Toyota...said it may have solved the range and battery weight p
564.
by mcswell 3y ago
He doesn't mention my pet peeve: the use of "So" to start a story or a talk, or to start every (spoken) paragraph. Other than that, the article was groovy, man. And get off my lawn.
565.
by mcswell 3y ago
Glad to hear that someone else thinks of XSLT the way I do. I had to write some to deal with converting DocBook XML to LaTeX (building on dblatex, but adding some specializations), and besides being verbose (as another commenter here says)
566.
by mcswell 3y ago
Perl still does have the best Unicode support, especially for regex's. In comparison, grep has imitation Unicode support (the -P "Perl" flag helps, but it's still nowhere near as powerful as Perl regex's). Python&
567.
by mcswell 3y ago
There's a book called "Tika in action" which I found useful.
568.
by mcswell 3y ago
I can't speak to the Apache documentation, but I once had the task of extracting plain text from many different document formats: Word, spreadsheets, PDFs, the EXIF information in JPEGs, and so on for a long list. I had written code w
569.
by mcswell 3y ago
Tika can be used as a library in Python: https://pypi.org/project/tika/
570.
by mcswell 3y ago
This is all hypothetical, of course, but: you don't have to lose all your baby teeth in order for your adult teeth to come in. Somehow an adult tooth coming in causes the baby tooth's root to dissolve (if that's the right wo

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