hakase
@hakase@lemm.ee
- Comment on Thomas Edison was the Elon musk of his era 1 week 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 2 weeks ago:
This is so accurate it hurts.
- Comment on Very understandable, have a nice day 2 weeks ago:
Original Original Poster
- Comment on Very understandable, have a nice day 2 weeks ago:
I just assumed the OOP was also a cop.
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 3 weeks ago:
A mi is one mile in sensible units.
- Comment on LEARN THE DIFFERENCE PEOPLE 👏👏👏 3 weeks 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? 1 month ago:
Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight
- Comment on Anon gets a job 3 months ago:
“Not in Employment, Education, or Training”
- Comment on Excuse me, René 3 months ago:
The worst part of this comic is that philosophy bro is clearly not even very good at his field, since there’s a much better Cartesian point to be made here.
“I think, therefore I am” is actually leaving out (imo) the most important part of Descartes’s argument. He was trying to find literally anything that he could know without a doubt was true. The problem is, that’s really hard, as our existence-troubled shopper has discovered. Descartes could doubt the existence of God, he could doubt the existence of goodness, of truth. All of these things might not actually exist. Descartes could even doubt his own existence.
In fact, literally the only thing Descartes could conclude without a doubt was true was the fact that he was doubting at all. So, since that’s the only thing he could be sure of, that’s what he built his argument for rationalism upon.
This perfectly mirrors the existential crisis the so-called philosopher comes upon, but instead of starting the shopper right where Descartes started, he instead just provides what must seem like almost a non sequitur in context, since if the man is currently doubting his existence, he can also doubt that he’s thinking. What he cannot doubt, is that he is in fact doubting.
“I doubt. Therefore, I think. I think, therefore I am.”
- Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis? 3 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? 3 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? 3 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? 3 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? 3 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” 6 months ago:
This is why I play multiplayer games exclusively on PC nowadays.
- Comment on Opinions wanted: defederating with bot spam instances 8 months ago:
why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? “This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”.
The problem is that it’s not one single person deciding to unsubscribe to a newsletter - it’s one single person deciding to unsubscribe hundreds to thousands of other people.
I don’t want other people deciding what I am or am not allowed to see, which is why I’m on lemm.ee in the first place. There are plenty of other instances out there that are more than happy to make all of your decisions for you if that’s what you want, but this is one of the very few larger instances not like that, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
- Comment on Opinions wanted: defederating with bot spam instances 8 months ago:
I vote nay to defederation (as I almost always will). If a problem can be solved simply by blocking two users, then there is no need whatsoever to resort to defederation.
I understand your “new user” problem argument, but I think it’s really a non-issue. Lemmy already has a much higher learning curve than a site like reddit, and I think the number of people who aren’t put off by Lemmy’s learning curve but are put off having to figure out how to block two users is pretty close to the empty set.