![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://lazysoci.al/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmander.xyz%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg&format=webp&thumbnail=128)
The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
If you're from USA: it's like Conservapedia, but your government hates it. It's widely used in the free world though.
Uh, funny coincidence - to see this when I spent my day there.
"We observed that most of the metals detected came from vehicle and industrial emissions," says the researcher.
No surprise - it's an extremely car-centric city, and it has been like this for decades. And it shows that high demographic concentration isn't enough if people want less cars on the streets, you need to actually design it with pedestrians in account. Add the fact it's a strong industrial pole and here you go.
Breakfast for dinner. Then dinner leftovers for breakfast.
I don't eat beans, soy, peanuts, and most derivatives of. Without going into details, let's say that my bowels doesn't handle them well.
e.g. soy sauce and oil are OK, but tofu makes my body scream murder.
PTB. You highlighted immoral shit done by one of the two governments that the .ml admin team licks the boots of, then you get banned while they lie that you're being a bigot (rule 1), since they have the same transparency as a chunk of charcoal and that makes them too dishonest to list "don't criticise the RF or PCC here" as an actual rule.
"I'm whatever you aren't, you fucker" - water, to the substance you mixed with it.
Cool. Get dunked, hipsters' Electronic Arts Paradox Interactive.
Small discussions - 2025/Apr/23
Thank you for linking this paper. His take is the opposite of mine - he proposes current e was actually a, instead of o. It's actually worth investigating this because at least some of his arguments are fair points, specially #2 (o-grade behaving like zero-grade) and #3 (o limited distribution).
It does create a problem, though; in plenty languages you'd have a ə→e a, as if they swapped places. While phenomena like this are attested (Dixie English comes to my mind), it's messy and cross-linguistically rare.
e.g. Southern US English renders /äɪ̯/ as [ä:] and merges /ɛ ɪ/ as [ɪ], so if you look from Middle English to now it's like the vowels were swapped - /i: ɛ/→/ä: ɪ/.
If I need to prove something stupid and immoral, and it relies on the assumption that 2+2=5, then 2+2=4 is woke propaganda. Simple as.
Yeah, nah. Your sentence is completely fine. When I read the title I was expecting you to have clipped it midway, without including the most crucial bit of info. (I know someone who does this. It drives everyone around her crazy, so I get why a mod would scold people for doing it.)
The mod is clearly a troll, and the modlog being full of similar occurrences reinforces it. PTB.
If you have access to a wood chipper or similar, they're great for mulch, and as substrate component for some orchids.
Dinner leftovers, cup noodles, microwaved eggs...
inb4 "eeeew microwaved eggs!" - fourty five seconds! No cleaning required! (Except for the glass bowl and spoon.) There are some tricks though, otherwise you're cleaning your microwaves oven 4AM.
As other users highlighted, canola is a specific cultivar of rapeseed. The name is for Canadian oil, low acidity. It was originally a brand.
Wiktionary also lists "colza", ultimately from Dutch koolzaad (cabbage seed). I never saw it in English, only in Portuguese (and even then it was an "ackshyually" moment).
As others mentioned it was rape as "rapeseed". Unfortunate homophone of another word referring to non-consensual sex.
Middle English borrowed the word "rape" (for the seed) straight from Latin, rapum, rapa. The Latin word actually refers to turnips, but they're relatives and their flowers look really similar:
Top is turnip (Latin rapa), bottom is rape. Latin inherited it from Proto-Indo-European [s]rā́p- "wild cabbage, turnip"; it's a really weird word, that ā shows it was borrowed into Late PIE from some pre-IE language.
Then the word referring to non-consensual sex was from Norman French "rap" instead. It's ultimately from Latin "rapere" (to seize, capture, rape), in turn inherited from Proto-Indo-European h₁rep- "to snatch".
I doubt, however, that anyone out in rural Palestine of 0 BC was speaking Greek so the origins should be somewhat more obscure.
The root was likely borrowed from Aramaic or Hebrew. However the origin of the genitive itself is Greek - unlike Latin, Greek typically didn't borrow full declension tables, it borrowed the root and plopped a native Greek declension. And that's clearly the case here, none of the Semitic languages use an -s for the base form, so Greek changed even the nominative:
the genitive is for reasons only Iupiter might know, Jesu.
Blame Greek:
| Case | Latin | Greek |
|---|---|---|
| NOM | Iēsūs | Ἰησοῦς Iēsoûs |
| ACC | Iēsūm | Ἰησοῦν Iēsoûn |
| ABL | Iēsū | N/A |
| GEN, DAT, VOC | Iēsū | Ἰησοῦ Iēsoû |
Latin didn't borrow just the name, it borrowed the whole declension for the name. And at least in theory this should've happened with Chrīstus too, the genitive would end as Chrīstū; but I think it was regularised because it looks like a native 2nd declension name way more than Iēsūs does.
Welcome to real life: advertisement is seen as filth. People might tolerate it in exchange for something else, but being "targetted" doesn't make them less filthy; on the contrary, once you get how it's being targetted at the expense of your privacy, comparing it with dog shit becomes unfair - because dog shit is less worse.
As such I want to see Perplexity bankrupt.
Hexbear started in Reddit, as r/chapotraphouse.
My sis, BIL, and nephew consistently visit us (my mum and me) every weekend, so we all have a meal together, but there's a catch - we never know if they're coming for Saturday dinner or Sunday lunch. So Saturday afternoon I'm going to prepare boeuf bourguignon, since it gets tastier once reheated - if they come Sat or Sun that's what they're going to eat, then we just need to buy some fresh bread and it's done. Bonus points that my BIL loves wine stews.
Beyond that it's all about preparing myself for travelling Tuesday. Going to visit an 80yo aunt, just to check how things are going with her.
For me, the small politeness words are not "thank you", "sorry", or "good morning". They're "maybe", "I think", "perhaps", "I don't know". I respect honest doubt way, way more than I respect dishonest = rushed certainty, and I wish I saw more of that.
Small discussions - 2025/Apr/23
Use this thread to ask questions or share trivia, if you don't want to create a new thread for that.
[Note: the purpose of this thread is to promote activity, not to concentrate it. So if you'd still rather post a new thread, by all means - go for it!]
A Trojan Echo in Clay: Hittite Tablet Discovery Reinforces Homeric Traditions A remarkable new discovery has emerged from the archives of Hittite texts, shaking the very foundations of how we perceive the Trojan War and its historicity. Unearthed and recently published under the auspices of Oxf
Quick summary: a tablet written in Hittite, from a likely vassal to their king, recounts how Attaršiya [Atreus?] of Ahhiyawa [the Achaeans] and his sons attacked Taruiša [Troy]. And at the end there's a fragment in another Anatolian language, Luwian, saying the following:
wa-ar-ku-uš-ša-an ma-a-aš-ša-ni SÌ[R
\ wrath.ACC god(dess).VOC? si[ng
So roughly "Sing, oh goddess, the wrath..."
This is pretty much how the Illiad starts in Greek:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
\ mênĭn áeide theā́ Pēlēïádeō Akhĭlêos
\ rage.ACC sing.IMP goddess.VOC Peleus.GEN Achilles.GEN
\ Sing, oh goddess, the rage of Achilles [son] of Peleus
You Might Think of Shrimp as Bugs of the Sea: But Bugs Are Shrimp of the Land
Here's a direct link to the journal article.
Summary: phylogenomic study found that Hexapoda (insects, springtails, headcones) is a sister clade to Remipedia (venomous, cave-dwelling "crustaceans"). So it's basically the same that happened with birds and dinos, except with bugs.
Small discussions thread - 2025/Apr/04
Feel free to use this thread to ask small questions or share random language / linguistics trivia, if you don't feel like creating a new thread just for that.
(Just to be clear: yes, if you want to create a new thread for your question/trivia, you can. I'm only trying to stimulate discussion in the comm.)
Federation infographic, or "federation for dummies".
This infographic is still incomplete; I'm posting it here in the hope that I can get some feedback about it. It has three goals:
Criticism is welcome as long as constructive.
EDIT: OK, too much text. I'm clipping as much as I can.
Iodine clock reaction
This is not some sort of fancy new development, but it's such a classical experiment that it's always worth sharing IMO. Plus it's fun.
When you initially mix both solutions, nothing seems to happen. But once you wait a wee bit, the colour suddenly changes, from transparent to a dark blue.
There are a bunch of variations of this reaction, but they all boil down to the same things:
Requesting community feedback on potential rule changes
Changes highlighted in italics:
What I'm looking for is constructive criticism for those rules. In special for the updated rule #3.
Thank you!
EDIT: feedback seems overwhelmingly positive, so I'm implementing the changes now. Feel free to use this thread for any sort of metadiscussion you want. Thank you all for the feedback!
Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species. However, research published in Science has uncovered the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language in humpback whale song.
Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.
"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.
[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.
Though I was taught this through, or so I thought, it's still tough throughout.
A tirinha inteira é piadinhas estilo tio do pavê, só que com latim!
Aue, patrue placentae! (Oi, tio do pavê!)
First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
The document charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is being 'unwrapped' using X-ray scans and AI.
It's a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius' volcanic ash in 79 CE. It's fully carbonised but they're using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they're using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.
The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they're confident that they "will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety". And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.
Where lies the origin of the Indo-European language family? Ron Pinhasi and his team in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna contribute a new piece to this puzzle in collaboration with David Reich's ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard University.
The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is interesting. Quick summary:
A new ancient population was recognised, based on genetic data. This population has been called the Caucasus-Lower Volga population, or "CLV". They were from 4500~3500BCE, tech-wise from the Copper Age, and lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga. .
About 80% of the Yamnaya population comes from those people; and at least 10% of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, where Hittite was spoken, also comes from the CLV population. The hypothesis being raised is that the CLV population was composed of Early Proto-Indo-European speakers (the text calls it "Indo-Anatolian").
Lemmy advertisement
I'm sharing this pic because it might be useful, to advertise Lemmy in Reddit meme communities and the likes. It isn't supposed to be a full info dump, just to spread the word that Lemmy exists and give people some room to ask questions about it.
The copypasta is from @Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com. The meme is from @JokkaJukka@lemmy.world.
Here's the source SVG file in case anyone wants to edit it.
EDIT - @Libb@jlai.lu had a great take on this idea, I need to share it here:
Genetic evidence points towards the Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian hypotheses
A team of 91 researchers—including famed geneticist Eske Willerslev at the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Center, University of Copenhagen—has discovered a Bronze Age genetic divergence connected to eastern and western Mediterranean Indo-European language speakers.
cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/1499265
What a Christmas present!
Italo-Celtic is a hypothetical branch of the Indo-European languages. If that branch is real, it means that the Italic and Celtic languages are closer to each other than to other Indo-European languages.
This hypothesis has been raised multiple times in the past, due to a few shared morphological features between Italic and Celtic languages; for example, the -ism̥mo- superlative. But that's on its own weak evidence, so this genomic data makes wonders to reinforce this hypothesis.
And also to bury the competing (IMO rather silly) Italo-Germanic one.
Graeco-Armenian is similar to the above, but between the Hellenic languages and Armenian. There were lots of competing hypotheses "tying" both branches to other "random" Indo-European branches; for example I've seen Indo-Greek, Italo-Greek, Armeno-Germanic, Armeno-Albanian...
It would be problematic if it reminded you something else, wouldn't it?
In case anyone wonders about the star:
| what you type | what you get |
|---|---|
| = | ☆ |
| 💢 | |
| $ | ⌾ |
| ♡ | |
| ▷ | |
| @ | ◁ |
Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries
Archive link: https://archive.ph/cIz4A
It's dated to be from around 2400 BCE. The article doesn't clarify if it's a true alphabet or an abjad, but either way it's interesting.
EDIT: see also https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-oldest-alphabet-discovered/ for a less pop-linguistics narrative of the same discovery.
In canvas 2025, what if we ganged up against the largest country flag, whichever it is?
[Idea] If you don't want to see huge flags taking space over actual drawings in the Canvas, pick the biggest flag that you can find to deface.
As long as a lot of people are doing that, the ones templating larger flags will be forced to reduce their layouts and give more room for actual drawings.
[Reasoning] When it comes to country flags, I think that the immense majority of the users can be split into four groups:
I'm myself firmly rooted into #1, but this idea is a compromise between #1, #2 and #4.
Typically #3 uses numbers (and/or bots) to seize a huge chunk of the canvas to their flags. Well, let's use numbers against it then. As long as #1, #2 and #4 are trying to wreck the
Archaeologists discovered the stone tablet at a Tartessian site in southwestern Spain.
I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.
Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.
The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?
