acadapter (u/acadapter)

acadapter commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke

gavinray · a month ago

Having a language in which the exact same letter(s) make different sounds only based on context is absurd.

Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.

acadapter · a month ago

Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

acadapter commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke

throw310822 · a month ago

I always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.

acadapter · a month ago

Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

Posted by u/acadapter 2 months ago

Tell HN: Sweden has its first arrest against a man for "insult against official"

acadapter commented on Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019) scientificamerican.com/bl... · Posted by u/Tomte

IshKebab · 5 months ago

Very interesting. I like the explanation of why studies often find minimal gender differences despite large differences being obvious in real life. Also it's kind of hilarious how the list of traits that they've found in men and women are exactly the stereotypes that everyone knows but you aren't allowed to say any more.

acadapter · 5 months ago

I also noticed that part in the article.

>Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?

It could be that some gender-neutral behavior patterns are part of the modern Western equivalent of "tatemae", and that they easily appear in studies because of interaction with strangers.

acadapter commented on Subsonic Weapon used on the crowd in Belgrade today old.reddit.com/r/PrepperI... · Posted by u/justinzollars

LarsDu88 · 5 months ago

Rumors of some sort of Russian sonic weapon being behind the "Havana Syndrome" have been going around for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWTBEl1rRc

Serbia has been Russia's closest ally for decades, with Russia having its side in the wars of the 90s. Perhaps such a weapon would have been provided to support the current pro-Moscow government.

Alternatively (and more likely) the Serbian government could've simply bought an LRAD device from the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

Which

acadapter · 5 months ago

Most of the research on this, has been done in the US though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

acadapter commented on Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family hms.harvard.edu/news/anci... · Posted by u/jimmytucson

wqaatwt · 7 months ago

> replaced the previous European population

Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived.

Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.

acadapter · 7 months ago

Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved.

Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.

acadapter commented on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955) press.uchicago.edu/Misc/C... · Posted by u/thunderbong

noisy_boy · 7 months ago

> social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.

Social media took away the hesitation of crowing about stupid things. If many people are saying it, maybe I am not stupid after all. The legitimisation and amplification of dumbness is a big contributor to the current state. Among other things of course.

acadapter · 7 months ago

Social media no longer represents "many people are saying it".

The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.

acadapter commented on 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit bbc.com/news/articles/cd7... · Posted by u/defrost

matthewmacleod · 8 months ago

Who is “they”?

acadapter · 8 months ago

I assume the unspecific "they" is a linguistic shortcut for "people in power"

acadapter commented on London's 850-year-old food markets to close bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/kepler471

roughly · 9 months ago

Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?

acadapter · 9 months ago

The things people say in the era where comment fields have been removed from news websites (in the name of "avoiding misinformation")...

acadapter commented on What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase? devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/epilys

acadapter · 10 months ago

Both Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian have these multi-character letters, but these Unicode points were created for the typographical needs (or rather, bad habits) of Serbo-Croatian. The "Dz" was probably included for the use-case where someone transcribes something in Macedonian.

One example can be seen on the Croatian 2kn coin, which features a tuna and a title written T U NJ.

Hungarian has more of these multi-symbol letters (with each letter having 1-3 symbols. It also has some other complications, such as having two "sz" in a row appear like "ssz", unless separated by a line break or a hyphen (then it's just two "sz").

IMO it was probably a mistake to let the article focus so much on Hungarian, as these Unicode points don't seem to be created for the purposes of the Hungarian language.

u/acadapter

KarmaCake day1178September 4, 2021View Original