Comment Linguistic discussion (Score 3, Informative) 149
Language Log has discussed this a number of times.
Language Log has discussed this a number of times.
Mandarin is a spoken dialect of Chinese, roughly equivalent to what "Received Pronunciation" is to English.
This is factually incorrect. “Chinese” used colloquially in English refers only to Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is not a dialect of a larger language, it is a language in and of itself. Speakers of other Chinese languages, e.g. Min or Yue or Hakka, can’t understand Mandarin hardly at all without formal education. The analogy is more like English versus Dutch or German. Dutch and German speakers are often fluent in English, but this is only because they have extensive schooling in English. Their languages are related, but mutual intelligibility is very low.
Chinese can generally understand all Mandarin, though few outside of Beijing can speak it perfectly.
In fact, many (ethnically) Chinese people have a hard time understanding Mandarin without education. The simplest test is to see how well young kids (5–8 yo) in a randomly selected village can comprehend spoken Mandarin. At that age they will have a reasonable competence in the local language, but haven’t received much formal education in standard Mandarin. The effect is even stronger outside of China (PRC/ROC) where Mandarin isn’t as important and some other unrelated language is dominant. Examples include Hakka speakers in Tahiti, or Penang Hokkien in Indonesia.
Modern written Chinese borrows heavily from Mandarin grammar and vocabulary, while retaining some conventions from Classical Chinese, the older written form that was pretty much impossible to understand when read aloud.
This is true. But it’s more accurate to say that modern written Chinese *is* Mandarin with a few Classical Chinese bits retained. And most people don’t use much of the Classical Chinese stuff in everyday writing, say in email or forum posts online.
While it is possible to write in Chinese characters using Cantonese, Minnan or Wu grammar, it's quite rare and considered strange or wrong, even in regions where those dialects are spoken.
This is also true, but only from a Mandarin-speaking perspective. The large number of highly literate people speaking Cantonese has led to a fairly standard written form for that language. It’s often unintelligible to Mandarin readers, particularly since the inventory of characters is enhanced with Cantonese-specific ones and also partly because some well known characters are used for different purposes in written Cantonese.
The PRC government has a strong interest in promoting Mandarin as the “one true Chinese language” to the detriment of all other Chinese languages. They meet a lot of resistance from Cantonese speakers, but other linguistic groups have less power and literary history. The situation is quite different in the ROC, where Mandarin is certainly the language of state, but many people – especially in the south – speak a mutually unintelligible Chinese language (Hakka or Taiwanese Southern Min).
What ‘basic assumptions’ are you referring to? That particular claim is at least as old as Grandpa Sapir, if not much older. I am completely unaware of any theories that depend on the negation of that as an assumption. Indeed, in much of linguistic theory today the rest of the mind is considered to be irrelevant or at least abstracted away from so that it doesn’t complicate the (already fiendishly complicated) models. If you’re referring to things like the various cognitive grammar theories, then you’ve missed the point. Those instead take the assumption that generalized mental capacity can be exapted for grammatical processes (thus obviating the need for a specialized universal grammar faculty), not the other way around.
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
What Canada do you live in? I’ve never seen anything like that. Except for the increasing scarcity of GPs, which is apparently happening in every single developed nation on Earth. And which is probably due to the rapidly increasing amount of specialist knowledge required for medicine more than anything else.
In sum, [citation needed].
Regardless, comparisons between the two systems are logically nonsensical because the Canadian health care system and the new American one are so fundamentally different that the comparison is fraught with type clashes.
Can Google/Apple/Amazon not just throw some money at this?
Apple already has a few configured by default in Mac OS X: time.apple.com, time.asia.apple.com, time.euro.apple.com
$ ntpdate -q time.apple.com
server 17.151.16.23, stratum 2, offset -0.002298, delay 0.04951
server 17.171.4.13, stratum 2, offset -0.003922, delay 0.09973
server 17.171.4.14, stratum 2, offset -0.003779, delay 0.09933
server 17.171.4.15, stratum 2, offset -0.004068, delay 0.09940
server 17.171.4.21, stratum 0, offset 0.000000, delay 0.00000
server 17.171.4.22, stratum 2, offset -0.010687, delay 0.11308
server 17.171.4.23, stratum 2, offset -0.006814, delay 0.10687
server 17.171.4.24, stratum 0, offset 0.000000, delay 0.00000
server 17.151.16.12, stratum 2, offset -0.002686, delay 0.04926
server 17.151.16.14, stratum 2, offset -0.002507, delay 0.04927
server 17.151.16.20, stratum 2, offset -0.002333, delay 0.04941
server 17.151.16.21, stratum 2, offset -0.002317, delay 0.04892
server 17.151.16.22, stratum 2, offset -0.002512, delay 0.04955
server 17.151.16.38, stratum 2, offset -0.002454, delay 0.04890
$ ntpdate -q time.asia.apple.com
server 17.82.253.7, stratum 2, offset 0.003790, delay 0.25430
server 17.83.253.7, stratum 2, offset -0.000764, delay 0.15932
$ ntpdate -q time.euro.apple.com
server 17.72.255.12, stratum 2, offset -0.006641, delay 0.20169
server 17.72.255.11, stratum 2, offset -0.006988, delay 0.20267
So it looks like they’ve got a reasonable handful in the pool. Dunno about Google or Amazon because googling didn’t turn up anything immediately obvious.
Here’s TECO EMACS version 170 from MIT, circa the mid 1980s I think: http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/index.html To use it you need a working PDP-10 (or an emulator), with an appropriate OS (ITS, TOPS-10, or Twenex), and a working TECO. Emacs was originally a bunch of Editing MACroS implemented in TECO, the world’s most difficult text editor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)
I don’t know if you could get TECO EMACS working in other versions of TECO, but TECO is still lovingly ported to modern systems like Mac OS X and Windows. Learning to use it will make your brain hurt.
Multics Emacs was the first port away from TECO, thoroughly described by its author Bernie Greenberg: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html There’s a link to the source in that paper, dating to the early 1980s.
Other flavours of Emacs were ZWEI (ZWEI was EINE Initiailly; EINE Is Not Emacs) for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine (http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html) and its descendants like ZMACS on the LMI Lambda and on Symbolics Genera systems.
Yes, your choices back then were TAMU, Yggdrasil, and SLS, and maybe one more. You had to buy Yggdrasil, and TAMU and SLS were pretty hard to get working. So when Slackware came along, it quickly became the distro of choice. It was a bit easier than SLS (which it was based on), and was kept up to date. There were also ‘distros’ that consisted of a handful of primitive tools and a boot floppy. Like the later Linux From Scratch, those took a *real* nerd to get working.
You are wrong about the lack of grammatical gender in Germanic languages. Most Germanic languages actually maintain a system of grammatical gender, though in many it has been somewhat reduced from the Proto-Germanic model. English is one of the few Germanic languages that has largely lost grammatical gender, retaining it only in the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’. Scots and Afrikaans are similar in this regard. Dutch still has grammatical gender although it is no longer correlated to biological sexes, being divided into ‘common’ (merged from masculine and feminine) and ‘neuter’ depending on the article (de, het) and adjective ending (-e, nothing). West Frisian, Swedish and Danish are similarly structured. German retains a strong tripartite grammatical gender system, as do Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese.
Yeah, even the early Lisp Machines had such bad GC that people would instead dump out the contents of memory (save the world) and then reboot. This was a simpler and more efficient stop-and-copy GC technique. I think actually that GC wasn’t implemented for quite a while because there was enough memory and algorithms were carefully hand-tuned to not generate much garbage.
So I guess what I'm getting at is that cryptographers and other code-breaking enthusiasts can have fun with Rongorongo because linguists aren't terribly concerned with it.
Every Polynesianist that I've talked to has said that Rongorongo is interesting but probably most likely to be some sort of mnemonic device rather than actual written language. And I've talked to quite a few Polynesianists for the average linguist, since I did my master's degree at the University of Hawai'i. It's unlikely that the Rongorongo carvings will ever be deciphered. I think Polynesianists are more concerned with documenting and conserving the Rapa Nui language itself, which is rapidly dying due to shift to Spanish.
There is probably a battle between lawyers and engineers going on within the walls about whether to release the sources or not. Give the engineers some time before you start bashing them, and instead give them more reasons to use as ammunition against the lawyers.
It’s a little bay on Kluane Lake. It’s named that because they lost so much equipment there while building the Alcan (Alaskan) Highway. There’s not much there. The nearby village of Burwash has a gas station, restaurant, and hotel, and that’s about it. There are a number of Athabaskans (Northern Tutchone I think, or maybe the northernmost Southern Tutchone) living around there, as well as a few white folks. It’s a beautiful place in the summer, but it’s ferociously cold and windy in the winter. Good hunting in the area, and I guess that’s why the Athabaskans stuck around.
This happens elsewhere too. In Alaska various juncos, chickadees, pine siskins, and other small songbirds will get drunk off of mountain ash berries that freeze and ferment on the tree during the late fall and early winter. This has happened since "time immemorial" according to various Athabaskan and Tlingit elders I've talked to, and they have always enjoyed watching the drunken antics.
Moose will get drunk from eating crabapples frozen and fermented on the tree. I think they browse the mountain ash berries too. There was one moose a few years ago in downtown Anchorage that was stumbling around drunk and managed to get a string of Christmas lights in his antlers.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood
