hakase

@hakase@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Copyright Office rejects DMCA exemption to support game preservation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ll just do it anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Targets YouTube Accounts Showing Emulated Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, its predecessor was a basic-ass remake of a ten hour, thirty year old Game Boy game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eating your feelings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The TSA allows food though?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Venom vs Poison⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s my comment from the last time this came up (like a week ago):

  “There’s been no meaning shift. The “possessive” and “envious” uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek.”

  It’s always been synonymous with “envious”, as far back as we can trace.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ladies and Gentlemen, the sate of AI.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

  Since we’re dealing with two different “words” here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

  This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, but others say “paper towel, but it’s still a compound either way

  So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

  For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to a big dog. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard”.

  So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

  Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

  So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

  Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

  So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

  If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨children⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lol, I spelled it “ov” on my spelling test.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't the American market provide efficient and effective health insurance like it does for car insurance?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨turkey⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is difficult to pull a moral out of this story

  Uh no it’s fucking not. Big corpos do whatever the fuck they want and see no real consequences. That’s it. That’s the moral.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I should be banned from using microwaves⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have one of those and it’s cost me who knows how much time and effort. The only times I ever really use are 15 seconds (for melting butter), 50 seconds (for water for baking bread; 1 minute is too hot), and 1:45 for coffee (again, 2 minutes is too hot). I can count the number of times I’ve actually used the “push 1 for 1 minute” feature on one hand, and instead I have to press an additional “timer” button for absolutely no reason Every. Single. Time. I want to microwave something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Measurements⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost half of all English words are borrowed from French, dating from when England was colonized and culturally subjugated by the Norman French starting in 1066.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make it stop.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When we played it you also had to go down on one knee, and the person unfreezing you had to sit on your knee while they flushed your arm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Best admin. <3

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Flat Earth is so yesterday⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  TIL we actually live on the Bionis

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Men over 30, what do you keep in your bedside nightstand?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Inside? An old silk pillowcase that I don’t use anymore, an old birthday card from my mom, and most of my warm pants.

  On top? Phone charger, phone, headphones, glasses

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thomas Edison was the Elon musk of his era⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s a great in-depth video on Edison and his relationship with Tesla. It seems that Edison was actually remarkably progressive for the time in a lot of ways, and, while not perfect, he seems to have been a much better employer than many of his rivals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Academic job talks⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is so accurate it hurts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A mi is one mile in sensible units.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LEARN THE DIFFERENCE PEOPLE 👏👏👏⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All of this is correct, except that it’s not a “mistranslation”, it’s a borrowing. Boundaries between words and morphemes are commonly lost in borrowing, and borrowed sounds commonly undergo adaptation as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the best indie games you've ever played?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #2907: Schwa⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Under some phonological analyses of English. Most phonologists I know would probably use wedge for most of these, since they’re stressed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instance admin updates + Blahaj⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To everyone attempting to reply to the above comment in good faith, remember that the only way to productively engage with a hexbear is to not engage at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.

  Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you’ve consciously learned the rules for doing so.

  Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don’t try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language, seemingly without effort.

  Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can’t tell me why “John hit the ball” is a sentence of English and “John ball the hit” is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to “because it just isn’t”. You don’t know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn’t.

  So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Writing isn’t language at all, for reasons discussed in my comments below.

  Which is part of what makes linguistics work on ancient languages so difficult - we’re having to use these imperfect symbols, which themselves aren’t language, to try to glean as many features about the actual grammars they’re intended to represent, which are language.

  This is why we know much less about ancient languages than we do modern ones - because we have actual recordings of modern languages (the recordings themselves are also not language, of course; they just encode language much better than writing does), so we can get at many more features of the language in question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough.

  What would you say about a dog growling at you, communicating its displeasure at how close you are? If you back away, understanding what the dog intends to convey with its growl, does that make the dog’s growl language?

  Is a honeybee secreting a pheromone to get the hive to swarm language?

  If so, how is language meaningfully different from “communication”? And, is human communication with each other the same type of phenomenon as the cases you and I mentioned, or is there some sort of categorical difference there?

  (Also, this definition isn’t classical - it’s quite modern. The tendency to conflate writing with language in cultures that have writing is as old as writing is, and disentangling the two is a relatively modern discovery.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language.

  Sure, by someone other than people who scientifically study human language, for the reasons outlined above. The study of orthography is its own separate (though closely related) field for good reason, though it’s nowhere as big as linguistics, since it’s not as scientifically interesting.

  There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts.

  You do understand why this supports my argument, right? Writing is just a largely arbitrary system of (imperfectly) encoding/representing human language, which must be learned, and is not acquired the way human language is. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that what is effectively a “code” for language could be used to represent multiple languages. You could just as easily do the same with written English. Heck, formal logic is specifically designed to do this for all human languages, but that doesn’t make it a language itself.

  Here’s a pop article talking about the distinction, reflecting the discussion above (spoilers for the movie Arrival, which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it). I can’t point you to any peer-reviewed articles on the subject, of course, because this has been decided science since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1913 Course in General Linguistics.

  I hate referring to Wikipedia (again however, there are no articles on this because it’s settled science), but note that the article for Writing system correctly identifies writing as representing human language and not actually consisting of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.

  Sign language is language, since it has a grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.

  Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Writing isn’t language, otherwise the thousands of unwritten languages wouldn’t be considered languages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo of America President: “Everyone Has the Right To Form a Union”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why I play multiplayer games exclusively on PC nowadays.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Game Boy game do you love that you never hear anyone talk about?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a full remake of a Game Boy game from 1993, and it honestly kills my faith in humanity a little bit that so many people were falling all over themselves to pay that much for it.