mcswell

4 ms·

31.
by mcswell 4mo ago
"...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 In
32.
by mcswell 4mo ago
"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.
33.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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
34.
by mcswell 4mo ago
I think it comes up in the Gospels, too, e.g. "on the third day" after the resurrection.
35.
by mcswell 4mo ago
"...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 o
36.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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
37.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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'.)
38.
by mcswell 4mo ago
> 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. Fo
39.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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 remark
40.
by mcswell 4mo ago
Blame that on Latin, which had only five vowels (not counting the long and short vowels separately).
41.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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 (apar
42.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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) repre
43.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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 p
44.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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
45.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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
46.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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
47.
by mcswell 4mo ago
The Appalachians haven't disappeared yet, but they're believed to be much smaller than they used to be. Yes, I get your point...
48.
by mcswell 4mo ago
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,
49.
by mcswell 4mo ago
Many linguists (who know more about language than most other people) still don't accept the story of Alex.
50.
by mcswell 4mo ago
> House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals > every year that they don't need or want to eat. "Recreationally" is carrying a lot of weight here. I suspect that cats kill birds and mice because
51.
by mcswell 5mo ago
In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once compl
52.
by mcswell 5mo ago
Somebody posted a similar comment above yours (somewhere...). I don't think your experience is unique!
53.
by mcswell 5mo ago
What documentation?
54.
by mcswell 5mo ago
...or I asked the question (and got an answer) years ago, but forgot because I hadn't worked in that programming language in the interim. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
55.
by mcswell 5mo ago
I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got ti
56.
by mcswell 5mo ago
Maybe. I wouldn't take bets on it, though.
57.
by mcswell 5mo ago
Not about the stars part or the map, but xenonite struck me as rather odd from a scientific standpoint. Apparently it's some organic chemical bonded--somehow--to xenon. But the mystery depended on the mass spectrometer Grace uses to
58.
by mcswell 5mo ago
On Vivaldi (a chromium-based browser), it just hangs at the initialization phase. I tried it on Firefox, and of course it comes right up.
59.
by mcswell 5mo ago
Go outside on a dark night and look at the Milky Way: you'll see (at the right time of the year) that it's tilted at a large angle to the celestial equator. (There's also the fact that the Earth's axis is tilted relativ
60.
by mcswell 5mo ago
OP here: I was referring to fossil fuels as things we burn to drive automobiles, airplanes and ships, or to power electric generators. So yes, petroleum will continue to have its uses, just not power. (Although my ten year timeline was ho

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