mcswell

40 ms·

571.
by mcswell 3y ago
Code switching is when you're speaking language X, then switch over to language Y for one or more words. If there's another person present who knows X but doesn't know Y, they'll probably be lost when you do that. Borro
572.
by mcswell 3y ago
Exactly (although I would have used the word "etymology" rather than "root", which means s.t. else to a linguist). The fact that a word might have been borrowed into English nearly a thousand years ago does not mean tha
573.
by mcswell 3y ago
Universal grammar in the way that Chomsky suggested, a sort of structure all humans must have in there brain, is a thing. But it's more of a meta-grammar than a grammar, i.e. a way to build the grammar of the particular language the c
574.
by mcswell 3y ago
"Some languages require significantly more effort to think in": No. A native speaker of one of those languages can think as effortlessly in them as you can in English. "Interpersonal relationships in one language are non-tra
575.
by mcswell 3y ago
Vietnamese is a tone language, and it is written in a Latin script (with a number of accent marks). If it can be done with Vietnamese, it can be done with Chinese. For that matter, lots of tone languages are written in Latin scripts. The
576.
by mcswell 3y ago
Off topic: Why do people feel compelled to start what they say with "So"? I find it very annoying. And get off my lawn.
577.
by mcswell 3y ago
I wish they'd have a scale next to pictures (in this article and elsewhere). We're out in the woods a lot, but it's hard to know what to look for as you're walking along.
578.
by mcswell 3y ago
If you ever think you might get into running, do it when you're in your 40s. You get to keep making PRs for several years.
579.
by mcswell 3y ago
Trails in the woods: no automobiles.
580.
by mcswell 3y ago
I'm 72 (73 next month), and I run dirt trails. Concrete is terrible on the joints, and asphalt only a little better. It's surprising how easy the dirt is on my joints. Part of it is that dirt is just softer, although I suppose
581.
by mcswell 3y ago
But find some large pumice rocks and you'll really look impressive!
582.
by mcswell 3y ago
I'll take "taking your car to go at gym and run on indoor machines" for $400. I'm 72, and I run dirt trails. I find running on asphalt uncomfortable on my joints, and dangerous unless you can find pedestrian-only paved
583.
by mcswell 3y ago
What was beneficial to them about saying the apostles all ran away on the night Jesus was betrayed, or that they were hiding in fear a few days after the crucifixion? Or by saying that Jesus told Peter (who was recognized as the early chur
584.
by mcswell 4y ago
And this is how Henry Higgins listened to vowel sounds a century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN0wXFN0GO0 (Well, he would have, had he been real.)
585.
by mcswell 4y ago
Likewise here. IMO, Teams is a good place for information to go to die. I can file emails that I may want to refer to in my own filing system, and in some cases I've gone back to emails I filed ten years ago to discover the answer to
586.
by mcswell 4y ago
I usually use the term "tokenization" to refer to breaking a text into "words" (tokens), although in the examples shown in the article, for the Latin script languages it seems to be doing tokenization into something like
587.
by mcswell 4y ago
Simplified tax form: 1. How much money did you make last year? ______ 2. Send it all in.
588.
by mcswell 4y ago
Are you sure someone else didn't use your SSN? I suppose if it had the same employer on it, that's unlikely. But I'm surprised that there isn't more misuse of SSNs.
589.
by mcswell 4y ago
I am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it
590.
by mcswell 4y ago
Maybe you can hear paint dry, too.
591.
by mcswell 4y ago
"Those statements are outright lies: Unicode does not provide a unique number fpr "upper case Turkish dotless i". Nor does it provide one for "lower case Turkish dotted i"." By design, and I would argue that t
592.
by mcswell 4y ago
No single font supports all of Unicode, that would be highly cumbersome. The "Noto fonts" is really a family of a hundred or so fonts, each of which supports a separate part of Unicode (not necessarily a block). I believe there a
593.
by mcswell 4y ago
Not exactly. It's true that they are (mostly) not found in the same block as other (alphabetic, numeric, punctuation etc.) characters. But there is no single emoji block, which makes it hard to write regular expressions to search for
594.
by mcswell 4y ago
He's not talking about Arabic speakers , he's talking about people who can read (to some extent) the Arabic script. This would include speakers of Urdu, Western Punjabi, Pashto, Dari, Farsi and many other (smaller) languages. H
595.
by mcswell 4y ago
Another example of a contextually dependent glyph in Latin script is the non-word-final form of 's' that looks sort of like an 'f' in English texts. See for example images of the hand-written US Constitution, where this
596.
by mcswell 4y ago
This may be referring to people who can "read" the Koran, where "read" means say the text out loud. Understanding what they're saying is a different question, and most of those people probably do not understand the
597.
by mcswell 4y ago
Urdu (and IIRC Western Punjabi, i.e. Punjabi as spoken/written in Pakistan) prefer to use the Nasta'liq variety of Arabic script, and historically Persian (Farsi) was written in Nasta'liq. And it is not the case that Nasta&#
598.
by mcswell 4y ago
No. First off, I said grammar, not word meaning. Second, saying "Ouch" is not even language. My cat says something when I step on her paw. That doesn't mean she understands language, nor that she speaks some language. Thir
599.
by mcswell 4y ago
Our cats understand cardboard boxes, and the concept of hiding in them. I don't know whether they do so instinctually, but as young kittens it didn't take them long.
600.
by mcswell 4y ago
Agreed. I sometimes marvel as I'm driving on the freeway with other cars going 70, or maybe even more so when I'm driving 45 on a two lane highway, at how easy it would be to hit someone, and how comparatively seldom it happens.

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