Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "NativLang" channel.

@aldobernaltvbernal8745 I guess it depends on whether plurals are counted as variants of OP's list or as different words. "These" is kind of borderline.
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I never realized the Spanish eñe (ñ) was analogous to the French circonflexe (ˆ, as in â).
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In this case, the Hittite language was deciphered first, in the early 20th century when Hugo Winckler discovered tablets written in the Akkadian cuneiform script of an unknown language, which turned out to be Hittite. So really, the process here involved two steps: First, decipher the unknown language (Hittite) from the known script (Akkadian cuneiform), then decipher the unknown script (Hittite) from the known language ( . . . also Hittite). History is not usually so isolated as the intriguing examples these videos like to present. Bilingual texts are especially useful, as in the famous example of the Rosetta Stone aiding the deciphering of both hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts of the previously untranslated Ancient Egyptian language. Even so, there probably do exist some supremely isolated examples like Rongorongo that will forever resist deciphering.
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"Queue" comes from French with a very different pronunciation. I think the English approached the strangely spelled word with an eye to local dialects and it gradually evolved into the modern /kju:/. How the French came up with that atrocity of a vowel "ueue," I have no idea.
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The article is about giraffe communication in visual, olfactory, and acoustic modalities. It doesn't claim that sound is the main way giraffes locate each other, just that it might be one way.
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ALPAC's conclusion was absolutely accurate. In the 1960s, the notion of machine translation was completely hopeless. Even now, five decades later, with billions of times the computing power, machine translation is only barely adequate in most situations, and frequently still terrible. And even that is a bit of a "cheat," as Robin would say (god I hope her name is Robin; online citations are lacking). The best modern translators like Google Translate rely on suggested translations and on analysis of large, constantly updated corpuses. So a relatively few enterprising users can easily change translations for specific terms, and people have been doing this for years. Obviously we have come a very long way, but in the 40's, people were presenting the problem as if it could be solved in a decade. The disappointment of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and even today are completely justified. This is why nobody should announce a discovery before it has been confirmed.
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mondoke English does have a fairly large number of phonemes, at least compared to Spanish. Which sounds are hard for you?
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mondoke Wow, I didn't realize Spanish has only five vowel allophones. English has somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 depending on the accent, not including diphthongs. The -er in non-rhotic accents like RP (standard British English) is just a schwa (ə), a neutral (mid center) vowel, but in rhotic accents like GA (General American) it's definitely not, because the r changes it. So I can imagine a Spanish speaker having as much trouble with that as I have with the French -re (it's like half a syllable . . . ). Spanish pronunciation is pretty easy, but I can never figure out how to pronounce c and v. It seems like there is no consistency there.
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The spatial meanings of "before" and "after" relate well to the temporal meanings if you imagine people in a single file line. People standing before you in line reach the front before you, and people standing after you reach the front afterwards.
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Diazproduction "the second one is softer and the lips don't touch themselves." Yeah that one is very hard to pronounce. Your rule also doesn't match what I learned in my one semester of Spanish (though I'm sure it varies by location). I learned that the sound depends on the preceding vowel, not the next one, so the word club would end with the same sound as in the word adobe, no matter what sound comes next. The only time you would pronounce it as a stop would be after a pause (first letter of the word) or after an l, m, or n. Well that's the rule, but I don't remember actual Spanish speakers following it very closely, which is why I said it doesn't seem consistent, especially with the letter v.
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@Minty1337 Sorry, I did find your comment funny, which is why I clicked on it. I get the joke, I was mostly responding to the conversation that happened afterwards. So maybe I should have directed it @EyeSeeThruYou. That said, I'm a bit disappointed at how the article doesn't answer its own question. Sparing the obvious, we still don't really know how giraffes locate each other!
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The Mexican flag is pretty neat up close, but you can't see any of the detail from a distance. I feel like it sort of fails at being a flag. It might be nice if they removed all but the essential outlines of the eagle and snake and left the details for a seal or something.
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The word "bicameral" should already flow off the tongues of many Americans and other English-speakers in countries whose legislatures have two houses.
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You should mention the two forms of the letter 'g' at some point. A lot of people don';t even seem to notice that there are two different glyphs in widespread use for lowercase g in different fonts.
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@bacicinvatteneaca That just sounds like a mistranslation.
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Vegetative propagation is super cool. It allows us to make a crop into a commodity. My Granny Smith apples are genetically identical to yours, so they should come out more or less the same, unless something went wrong during growing. Who needs seeds in grapes anyway? We get to force strawberries to cram in more and more chromosomes until they cry. It's pretty great.
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@AaronOfMpls Yeah, a new disease can nearly wipe out a strain, and you have to replace it with a different one that is resistant. That seems like a small price to pay, though.
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Speaking of numbers, English has all kinds of systems of numbers that range from infrequent to rare. We have cardinals (one, two, three, four, ...), ordinals (first, second, third, fourth, ...), multipliers (single, double, triple, quadruple, ...) which also come in another form (once, twice, thrice) and yet another (onefold, twofold, threefold, fourfold, ...), distributives (singly, doubly, triply, quadruply, ...), collectives (singlet, doublet, triplet, quadruplet, ...) or (duo, trio, quartet, ..., though these are sometimes considered distributive), but also twin, pair, couple, brace, dozen, gross, etc., composites (unary, binary, ternary, quaternary, ...), ranking (primary, secondary, tertiary, quartary, ..., though in practice "quaternary" is usually used for the fourth), partitives (whole, half, third, quarther/fourth, ...), and others (e.g. deuce, triad, trinity, duplicate, triplicate). Too many if you ask me.
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+TheJman0205 The oldest uses of the "eszett" ligature 'ß' were actually for ſz in fraktur, while the later antiqua used it for ſs. Of course, the truth is far more complicated, as both typefaces coexisted for centuries and the meaning of ß varied over time as it gradually became incorporated as a proper letter of the alphabet rather than simply a ligature like & or æ*. *Not a German ligature. Unfortunately, the only German ligature with its own code point in Unicode is ß.
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Mr. Rich B.O.B There is no capital eszett.
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Mr. Rich B.O.B I never knew that. Anyway, the design of the glyph depends on the font. On my screen, it does not look much like ſʒ or like ſs but more like ſ3. However, it was presumably designed around the idea of ſʒ. That said, when capitalized, ß traditionally became SS, not SZ, so again it isn't that simple.
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That's still not a syllogism. That is replacement, which is valid in most logical systems , but which is significantly more complex than pure syllogistic logic. A syllogism would be something like this: 1. Some suns are yellow. 2. All suns are stars. 3. Therefore some stars are yellow. (This IAI-3 syllogism is valid and sound, therefore its conclusion is true.) Or perhaps this: 1. All stars are yellow. 2. Some stars are suns. 3. Therefore some suns are yellow. (This AII-3 syllogism is valid but unsound. However, its conclusion is true.) Or even this: 1. All suns are stars. 2. All yellow things are suns. 3. Therefore all yellow things are stars. (This AAA-1 syllogism is valid but unsound, and its conclusion is not true.)
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@sqone1 <eu> being pronounced /ju:/ is not common at all unless it is the start of a word. Much more common is /u/ (e.g. "maneuver"). One of the few exceptions I can think of is "therapeutic."
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@sqone1 In "queue"? No. It's positioned the same as in the word "deuce."
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mondoke Nah, it's not the same. You guys have a bilabial fricative (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricativa_bilabial_sonora), which can also be an approximant or a stop, depending on the word. English only has a bilabial stop (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oclusiva_bilabial_sonora). You might not realize the difference without thinking about it because in Spanish they are allophones. The American -er is objectively harder to pronounce than the British -er. For instance, in America, most people pronounce "her" as [hɚ] or [hɝ], whereas in Britain, most people would just pronounce it [hə]. R-coloring never happens in Spanish (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_r%C3%B3tica).
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4th dimension It's always the simple words like trop that I find just impossible.
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3:40 "cyka for 'figs'" Don't replace that i with a Spartan alpha!
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In contrast, Latin has only two irrealis moods (imperative and subjunctive) and only distinguishes between grammatical aspects in the past tense (perfect and imperfect). Everything else related to time is expressed by tense.
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I would love a video on seseo and ceceo in peninsular and Latin American Spanish.
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How are they translating "He's a friend of mine"? « Il est un de mes amis »?
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Math is a language too, though. That's not just an affectation; it really is. From a formalist perspective, mathematics only investigates the logical consequences based on pure definition of the terms. It is a formal language, which makes it very unlike the natural, informal languages we typically use to communicate, but then so is code (at least ideally).
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Out of the few Germanic languages depicted on that tree, the only one that is unrecognizable in English is . . . German. Apparently "Tyska" is German.
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It really isn't, though. That's not how you name peptides. In particular, it is missing conformal information. Titin has multiple bands and multiple disulfide bridges that are not expressed in this word. It is, in fact, chemically inaccurate. I point this out because nobody has ever represented the entire molecule of titin in the "correct" way like this. It would simply be too much work, and while I suppose you could code a computer to take a PDB file and spit out a IUPAC-compliant name for it, as far as I can tell, nobody ever has. Calling something a "word" when it has never been used, never been printed, and nobody knows what it even is, seems pretty silly, especially when the trivial name (and recommended name) is only five letters long. Aside from that, titin is not the largest molecule, and thus if we allow these type of formulaic shenanigans, it would not be the longest.
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Even in a clearly SVO language like English, clauses aren't always put in that order. Sometimes grammatical rules dictate a different order, like in the sentence "Charlie is the person whom I saw yesterday." And if you really want to pick nits, inversion can even put an auxiliary verb before the subject, like in "had I not." But English has a pretty formal and restrictive word order. Imagine how much more confusing it could be in a language with an even slightly flexible order. Then imagine trying to generalize over all languages worldwide . . .
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Even within English, the term "arm" varies in meaning. Most people mean the entire upper limb by the "arm" (or at least the part above the wrist), but anatomically, the "arm" is only the part of the upper limb from the shoulder to the elbow. Between the elbow and the wrist is the "forearm," which is not part of the "arm" in this definition.
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This is my first time seeing "patwah" spelled that way. I guess it makes sense.
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jan simonides Yeah? I'm not sure if you're trying to contradict me or something...
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jan simonides I just . . . what does Slovak have to do with anything? I never suggested "other languages have got no cardinal numbers." That doesn't even make sense.
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jan simonides I don't know what you mean. The video is about rare features in English. Some of them were nearly universal to Europe, as he pointed out, but rare elsewhere. Nobody is suggesting any of these features are unique to English. He goes out of his way in the video to point out exceptions.
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jan simonides What he says is, "the way English compares with an adjective plus a suffix plus this compare particle [than] is rare outside Europe." He then goes on to contrast it with the ways many other languages handle comparison. The point of the video isn't "look how special English is," it's "look at all these things you take for granted that most of the world does differently."
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jan simonides Is Slovak not a European language?
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jan simonides Did you watch the video or read my comment? Nobody suggested English was somehow unique except you. The quote you are objecting to says that this style of comparison is rare outside Europe. Slovak is inside Europe, so it hardly contradicts that.
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