lvxferre

Note: I'll use "Language" (capital L) to refer to the human ability, and "language" (minuscule l) to refer to specific implementations of that ability (stuff like Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic etc.)

Cool research, with shitty press coverage. The paper itself is rather careful on claiming that humans 135kya already had linguistic capacity; but the coverage is adding a lot of bullshit that leans into Proto-World quackery.

They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin—as the researchers strongly think—the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.

This could be true but we should not assume that it is true, without ruling out other possibilities. In fact Miyagawa rather carefully hints those, when he says that "Language is both a cognitive system and a communication system," [...] "My guess is prior to 135,000 years ago, it did start out as a private cognitive system, but relatively quickly that turned into a communications system."

"The logic is very simple," says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. // "Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related."

Pick any creole of your choice. Focus on its syntax. Now look at the syntax of the lexifier languages. Done, the bolded statement is proven false.

Like many linguists, Miyagawa believes all human languages are demonstrably related to each other, something he has examined in his own work. For instance, in his 2010 book, "Why Agree? Why Move?" he analyzed previously unexplored similarities between English, Japanese, and some of the Bantu languages. There are more than 7,000 identified human languages around the globe.

Emphasis mine. To be frank this is smelling as fishy as those guys who claim to have reconstructed Proto-World from some random modern languages.

When you're trying to understand the languages of the past, you don't simply pick random modern languages and look for similarities. You pick the oldest varieties you have at your disposal, attested or reconstructed - because if they inherited something from their potential common ancestor, it'll be easier to see, and you'll get less noise being introduced by random mutations.

Try comparing Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Japonic and Proto-Niger-Congo instead.

"Human language is qualitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, working together to create this very complex system," Miyagawa says. "No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others."

You see the elements in the non-linguistic communication of other animals. For example, dolphins seem to have the ability to use some really primitive grammar. It is by no means Language proper but it shows that the difference is not qualitative - it's quantitative.

I'm not annoyed by cross-posts, but I've seen plenty other users who are, to the point that IMO this issue should be addressed.

I don't have a good solution for that though.

Keep reporting. Eventually admins will find some pattern on the IPs being used, and not even allow the bot to register back.

When people leave home, Siegfrieda often meows loudly. Either towards the door or towards whoever is still home - as if saying "they're abandoning us, do something about it!".

But it's really loud, to the point of being annoying. And this week Kika got enough of this shit: once Frieda started meowing, Kika jumped off her cardboard box, pawed Frieda on the head twice, then went back to her box. As if saying "enough of this drama dammit, the human is back soon."

Got Nicole'd twice, last time ~a hour ago.

My guess is that the scammer is simply hitting random Fediverse people, with no meaningful pattern besides "some post/comment activity".

Football fans tend to not care about jack shit. You could see the world literally burning and they'll say "b-but the game..."

Sic semper salatis!

I hope that it haunts OpenAI.

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

Latin. In fact it's where this mess started out.

Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction between the following sets of consonants:

• ⟨Φ Θ Χ⟩ /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ - they sound like English pill, till, kill; there's a clear asphhhhiration in them
• ⟨Π Τ Κ⟩ /p t k/ - they sound like English spill, still, skill; no aspiration
• ⟨Β Δ Γ⟩ /b d g/ - more like English bill, dill, give; instead of aspiration you vibrate the vocal folds before the consonant even starts

Latin borrowed a lot of Greek words. The words with the second and third set of consonants were no problem; they were mostly spelled in Latin with ⟨P T C⟩ and ⟨B D G⟩. But Latin didn't have the sounds of the first set, and for Latin speaking ears they sounded like they had /h/. So they were spelled with ⟨PH TH CH⟩, to represent that /h/ sound.

So back then the digraphs still made sense... except that Greek changed over time. And what used to be pronounced /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ ended as /f θ x/ (like English fill, think, and Scottish loch). And Latin speakers started pronouncing those words with the "new" Greek sounds instead of the old ones. But they were still spelling them the same.

From that that ⟨PH⟩ spread out across a lot of orthographies using the Latin alphabet.

Italian and Spanish subbed ⟨PH⟩ with ⟨F⟩ ages ago; examples here and here. Portuguese stopped using it in 1911 (ACL / "European" standard) asd 1943 (ABL / "Brazilian") standard.

In Portuguese it was part of a wider wave of orthographic reforms, that also got rid of etymological double consonants and ⟨Y⟩. A lot of people were hilariously annoyed, example stolen from Wikipedia:

Imaginem esta palavra phase, escripta assim: fase. Não nos parece uma palavra, parece-nos um esqueleto (...) Affligimo-nos extraordinariamente, quando pensamos que haveriamos de ser obrigados a escrever assim!

Imagine this word phase, written like this: fase. It doesn't resemble us a word, it resemble us a skeleton. (...) We get profoundly afflicted, when we think that we would be required to write it like this!

It depends on the amount of errors and if you used the -verbose option.

The opposite, it ultimately comes from a Chinese language via Portuguese.