panglott

67 ms·

601.
by panglott 11y ago
That discussion of evolution seems to me like he was paraphrasing and criticizing Chomsky's ideas of language evolution. Chomsky has both argued for an innate language organ and language acquisition device, and been critical of attempt
602.
by panglott 11y ago
The headline makes the claim that the idea of a language instinct that has dominated linguistics for decades is completely wrong. That's a much narrower claim than "there is no innate linguistic knowledge."
603.
by panglott 11y ago
The article has plenty of flaws, sure, and anyone familiar with linguistics could point some of them out. One of my favorites was the statement that Broca's area was the language center, without any mention of Wernicke's area. But
604.
by panglott 11y ago
OK... but so what? If you're doing a general interest article on debates in linguistics in the last 10 years, you're going to end up covering Everett's work and its implications for Chomsky's theory du jour. This article
605.
by panglott 11y ago
Virtually no font tries to cover the entire Unicode space. Code2000 and GNU Unifont are relatively comprehensive, and Arial Unicode MS is pretty good for a mainstream font. Making emojis Unicode will significantly improve their handling.
606.
by panglott 11y ago
JavaScript vs. Python, huh?
607.
by panglott 11y ago
Note that this is an article in which the people actually talk about their struggles with homelessness and their fears of becoming homeless. I don't actually disagree that the trailer park should probably be torn down and be replaced w
608.
by panglott 11y ago
People who live in trailer parks are vulnerable to homelessness. Homelessness is something that the people in that article actually express worry about. The problem is not that people are entitled to housing that they can't afford. The
609.
by panglott 11y ago
People need to live in houses. You think all these people should just be living on the street? The bigger problem is that California has so little supply of housing relative to demand that prices are just astronomical.
610.
by panglott 11y ago
I suspect this sort of belief is what legitimated sortition in the classical world: the choice is made by unknown or supernatural powers. Sortition and "casting of lots" is better known today for divination.
611.
by panglott 11y ago
I meant could work, as in the place where it actually did work. I wouldn't yet argue that mass exclusion is necessary so that it can work. Whether sortition can work in a large, inclusive, and diverse society is an interesting qu
612.
by panglott 11y ago
Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool. "Only adult male Athenian ci
613.
by panglott 11y ago
Emerald ash borer is a noxious pest that is just devastating. It's going to kill something like 15% of all of our urban trees. Just staggering. http://www.courier-journal.com/story/tech/science/environme
614.
by panglott 11y ago
Guy Deutscher argues that the reason that languages in industrialized countries have developed basic color terms is due to the rise of industrial dying and color matching technologies, and that the reason that human languages typically don&
615.
by panglott 11y ago
The obvious target would be fruit-bearing apple branches grafted to those noxious Bradford pears. But I wonder if there's any good fruit or nut candidates for grafting to all those zelkova trees.
616.
by panglott 11y ago
There's a certain bias in that assertion that "human names aren't unique", especially in the John Smith example. A legal name is at least partly social construct meant to interact with a government bureaucracy. Compare t
617.
by panglott 11y ago
...but the author is using it to support the point that "...we slip in what we think a foreign speaker means to say, particularly when their accent has low social standing." Which seems like it should mean that the participants wo
618.
by panglott 11y ago
HN headline is inaccurate: the article headline is simply "Judged by Your Accent". This article is really a mishmash: "Molly Babel, a linguist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, replicated Rubin'
619.
by panglott 11y ago
Seems like there should be something like this for language exchange. Or tabletop gaming.
620.
by panglott 11y ago
A large salmon fishery is inestimably more valuable than a gold mine, even if gold is worth more money than salmon. Salmon has real value as food while gold is merely cash. A sustainably managed fishery is an ongoing resource that could sup
621.
by panglott 11y ago
After I moved from the US to Japan for a few years before spending a couple months backpacking around China, I concluded that Japan has the highest-quality consumer goods, China had the cheapest goods, and America had the best-value goods.
622.
by panglott 11y ago
His complaint was that Wikipedia's definition of "notability" is arbitrary, dogmatic, and inconsistently applied. Explicating the dogma doesn't convince many people that the dogma is correct.
623.
by panglott 11y ago
Why would my choice be standing next to a smoker vs standing next to a vaper? In my day-to-day life, none of my family, friends, nor co-workers smoke or vape around me at all.
624.
by panglott 11y ago
Your argument is that exchanging anonymous digital money is like cash, except without the risks to personal safety that exchanging cash requires...and that is a bad thing?
625.
by panglott 11y ago
Vaping is clearly less harmful than cigarette smoking, and shifting from cigarettes to vaping is a great move. But somehow the most gullible vapers have convinced themselves that vaping is utterly harmless, and they should be able to do it
626.
by panglott 11y ago
The advantage of trough-style urinals is not so much the large catch area, it's that they handle a large number of users in situations where rule #1 can be broken. It's unpleasant, but it sure makes the lines to the infield men&#x
627.
by panglott 11y ago
That's an interesting paper, but what they conclude is that is effectively impossible to get a sufficiently large sample to make strong claims for absolute linguistic universals. "It is important to emphasize one aspect of this an
628.
by panglott 11y ago
This is a well-known legend, but very unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
629.
by panglott 11y ago
Looks like a dubious correlation. Geographic language distribution patterns are subject to the vicissitudes of migration, conquest, and technological and environmental change. A lot of the features discussed are driven by outliers, like the
630.
by panglott 11y ago
Teachers, lawyers, and lots of other professions where you need to communicate effectively with other people provide lots of value. Many people fail to starve and even get rich this way.

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