Eccentric

@ Eccentric @sh.itjust.works

Posts

37
Comments

64
Joined

3 yr. ago

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 3mo ago

Fun fact: linguists don't actually know what defines a "word"

3mo ago

How confusing is it when a script's numerals are also letters?

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 3mo ago

There isn't really a scientific measure of how confusing something is linguistically that I am aware of. As you and other people have pointed out, there are plenty of languages that don't differentiate orthographically between numbers and letters. It's like asking whether people will confuse read and read. Yes, they probably will in some cases, but on some level speakers understand that these words are written identically and that you require context to figure it out. So they would know the difference much more often than not

www.eruditorumpress.com /blog/on-incomputable-language-an-essay-on-ai

3mo ago

On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI

3mo ago

Permanently Deleted

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 3mo ago

sh.itjust.works cos I was hoping it would just work

www.theargumentmag.com /p/what-happens-to-college-towns-after

5mo ago

What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?

5mo ago

Do gender roles have a stranglehold on heterosexual relationships, or does social media just make it feel that way?

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 5mo ago

Your assumption that all women are looking for a relationship that aligns with traditional gender roles is antithetical to your view of women as equals. I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I'm just nudging you towards the conclusion that people that talk about traditional expectations in a relationship don't really speak for everyone. It also seems like a lot of your evidence comes from male voices, which I don't think is an accurate reflection of what women want in a relationship. It sounds to me like these are the conclusions of the circles that you hang around in (or the culture that you live in/grew up in) rather than a fact of life. Most of the women I know are either in the types of relationships you are describing or vocally advocate for finding that type of relationship. There are both women and men that haven't evaluated the impact of patriarchal male expectations, and so there are both men and women out there that knowingly and unknowingly perpetuate the stereotype of men as unfeeling and uncaring. But to say that all men and all women think this way is probably inaccurate.

It sounds like you know what you want in a relationship and what activities make you happy regardless of whether they traditionally fit with a certain traditional gender expression, so do those things. I know it's demoralising to feel like the odd one out, but even if you live in a particularly conservative country there will always be like-minded people /somewhere/ out there.

6mo ago

The English phrase-as-lemma construction: When a phrase masquerades as a word, people play along

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 6mo ago

To me as a native speaker, 1c is ungrammatical. I do agree that 2a is surprisingly grammatical though.

I will say grammar is really not my strong suit (and I only had time to skim the paper) but I have a decent background in semantics. Maybe I've just been working a lot with euphemisms lately, but PALs almost seem to function like euphemisms?

6mo ago

All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 6mo ago

Big gripe of mine is the distinction of "soft" and "hard" science. I'm a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn't mean it's automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can't exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don't exist outside of human society

evidentlyscientifical.wordpress.com /2021/08/13/i-want-to-eat-the-lava-and-god-cant-stop-me/

7mo ago

I Want To Eat the Lava and God Can't Stop Me

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

Everything will be okay and I'm proud of you.

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

Someone else pointed out I was really uncharitable with reading your post, just wanted to apologise. I'll leave my crappy response up for some good ol public shaming

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

I think that's part of it but less and less so nowadays and especially the younger generation. I think the aversion to physical or emotional closeness is more cultural memory at this point than homophobia, but it might still play a part. Like someone else pointed out, I think a big part of it is just wanting to feel a bit special but just not having existing avenues for support

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

Oh yeah you're right. I thought they were being sarcastic at points where I see they weren't. Sorry about that

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

The question I posited was: if all signs point to men and women having equal amounts of sex, why is there no "female loneliness epidemic" but there is a "male loneliness epidemic"? I posit that the reason we think of sex as a benefit for male loneliness therefore can't be quantity of sex but men must be getting something from sex that women either don't need or are getting elsewhere. Since scientific evidence points toward gender differences being social and not innate, there must be something women are doing different socially that leads us to think of men as a population as in need of sex or intimate relationships but not women. I'm presenting a neutral logical argument here by way of discarding illogical conclusions, not accusing anyone of anything or implying that the comment above me was accusing women of being too promiscuous. I just wanted to ask the question of why are straight men lonely but straight women not lonely even though logically the two populations must be dating and having sex at approximately equal rates

7mo ago

on the male loneliness epidemic

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 7mo ago

Assuming a roughly equal number of straight men and women, either a large amount of women are consistently sleeping with a small number of men or the same number of women are not having sex as men. The former is a pretty common incel assumption that would require women to be a hive mind, so imo the latter should be more true. In my experience as someone present in both male and female social circles, women tend to feel a lot more emotionally supported in platonic relationships while men tend to expect more emotional support from a romantic partner than a platonic friend. I think as a result, men tend to associate physical intimacy with emotional intimacy because they aren't really getting either from their non-romantic relationships. You can see this in the way platonic men are so much less likely to hug each other or hold hands or cuddle than platonic women. So to me, OP is actually onto something with their original assumption. Not getting laid isn't as much of a problem for women because they don't expect as much emotionally from sex and romantic relationships since their emotional needs are fulfilled elsewhere. Imo, male loneliness isn't so much a problem with modern dating or with women as a problem with the fact that social expectations placed on men are preventing men from feeling fulfilled outside of romantic relationships and sex. In conclusion, hug your bros and tell them everything will be okay and you're proud of them.

9mo ago

Lawsuit Challenging 2024 Election Results Moves Forward After Kamala Harris Received Zero Votes in a New York County

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

Yeah, I think this article is way too far into the weeds. A lot of the comments in this thread are starting to sound a little too much like the right wing conspiracies we saw coming out of the 2020 election. And I get it, we're all looking for ways to prevent this from happening again.

I don't think there was any fraud--bar the usual voter suppression and sleazy tactics the Republicans engage in. Voter turnout went way down for the 2024 election compared to 2020. Had there been wide scale vote tampering, I doubt they would've let the total number of votes for Trump go down. Besides, the 2020 post-election bullshit lawsuits showed that our voting system is relatively secure and it's quite difficult to fabricate votes. The unfortunate reality is that Trump voters really are just that dogmatic and close minded to keep voting for him

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/04/redditor-accidentally-reinvents-discarded-90s-tool-to-escape-todays-age-gates/

10mo ago

Redditor Accidentally Reinvents Discarded '90s Tool to Escape Today's Age Gates

11mo ago

NEW MAJOR ORDER!!

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 11mo ago

See y'all in the trenches o7

defector.com /if-you-ever-stacked-cups-in-gym-class-blame-my-dad

1y ago

If you ever stacked cups in gym class, blame my dad

ourworldindata.org /cleanest-air-lessons

1y ago

In many countries, people breathe the cleanest air in centuries. What can the rest of the world learn from this?

aresluna.org /the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/

1y ago

The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan

Linguistics @mander.xyz

www.independent.org /pdf/tir/tir_16_02_8_oneill.pdf

1y ago

(Bad linguistics) Language change is wrong, actually

1y ago

A Critique of Politically Correct Language

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 1y ago

Edit: TL;DR: O'Neill is passing a value judgement on language change, something the field of linguistics considers poor practice.

Linguist specialising in swearing and offensive language here. Furthermore, I am actually a corpus/computational linguist who has done statistical and computational research on the subject (O'Neill is a statistics and mathematics professor). The gist of O'Neill's argument is that words are made insulting by virtue of having euphemistic counterparts. To simplify, euphemism here is a technical term for any word that takes the place of a word considered more offensive. So "mentally handicapped" by this definition would be a euphemism for "retarded". In reality, euphemisms develop as a reaction to a term that has become offensive. "Retarded" did used to be a medical term that referred to someone who is developmentally disabled, but it began to be used as an insulting term in non technical speech, and so the technical term changed to reflect this semantic change and distance itself from the offensive term. (This is wildly simplified. I wouldn't even consider "developmentally disabled" to be a euphemism at all but this is just to make it easier to explain the point without giving a whole intro to linguistics lecture)

He also argues that a lot of terms now considered offensive are changing primarily for performative reasons. This is also not really the case, and we can demonstrate that with "retarded" versus "developmentally disabled". In general, people have started preferring terms that are more specific and descriptive. When we rephrase the term "mentally retarded", we see that it essentially means someone has a "slow brain". This, however, is no longer considered to be accurate for many people that used to be diagnosed with conditions under that umbrella and so the label has changed to reflect that.

Language is always in flux and will never stop changing, just like species will never stop evolving. O'Neill is taking what is considered a prescriptive approach to language, which means deciding how language should be used. Virtually all linguists now agree that linguistics is a descriptive science and prescriptive approaches to defining language are often futile at best and counterintuitive at worst. Basically what I'm saying is if people want to use these terms, even if it's for the reasons that O'Neill is describing, it is not inherently a "bad thing". It's just a "thing".

Rude language, swearing, and insults are also constantly changing as society changes. It's an established fact that the semantics and pragmatics of a term will change over time. Some terms will become more offensive and some will become less offensive. It's just a thing that will inevitably happen as society shifts and changes.

Edit 2: O'Neill also does not provide any linguistic evidence for his claims, he's mostly going off of his own perception of them. Basically, his argument doesn't really hold any weight because he hasn't actually proved that these terms are actually used in the way he describes or for those reasons.

1y ago

Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?

Eccentric @sh.itjust.works 1y ago

Hey I'm a linguist and I'd like to chime in! Great article!

There's this misconception that language is exclusively a communication tool. In reality it's a cognitive tool that helps us process the world around us. This is why writing something down helps you figure it out or why we sometimes talk to ourselves. So, very broadly, the more 'linguistic effort' you put into a task, the better you're going to remember it. This is also another reason why writing notes in lecture by hand helps you remember better than if you type on a laptop. Pressing a button or tapping on a screen is a lot less 'linguistic effort' than writing a letter by hand.

Another consequence of language being a cognitive tool is that it's intertwined with a lot of the ways we use physical tools. In fact, some historical linguists use the emergence of complex hand tools as evidence of when language emerged in our pre-history. But that's a very complicated subject for another time. There is some evidence that cognitively, proficiency with fine motor skills are correlated with language processing functions (big caveat that I'm not a cognitive linguist). So writing might not only help you slow down and be deliberate about what you're putting on a page, but the act of writing itself might also be intrinsically linked with language processing.

This is all not to say that typing is a somehow bastardized version of language production. It's just that we've decided that easier is better, which in the sense of language learning and maintenance, isn't really the case.

1y ago

Skyblivion - The Path to Release (Development Update)