In context, it means that they claim to take into account the universal features of anthroponymy, and the features that Russian and Arabic cultures share technologically (ideotechnical), and they also claim to provide a complex analysis of the Arabic and Russian materials investigated. A little Greek helps in reading this kind of jargon. Everybody's cool on anthroponymy, right? — John Lawler9 mins ago
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> Interestingly, Taiwan, which, not being subject to the Communists, never adopted simplified characters, has a higher literacy rate than mainland China. This, together with all of the preceding observations, leads us to an obvious conclusion: a complex orthography is actually superior to a simple one. Learning to spell a language with a straightforward phonemic alphabet, such as Finnish, is easy. You don't see a lot of news stories about the Finnish National Spelling Bee.
> In English, on the other hand, competent spelling is seen, correctly, as a significant intellectual achievement, and champion spellers even appear as guests on late-night talk shows. Unfortunately, far too many people attain a fairly high level of success fairly quickly. As a result, they get bored with English, and move on to languages with more challenging writing systems, like Akkadian.
You get a structure, I’ll get a rule, honey, You get a structure, I’ll get a rule, babe, You get a structure, I’ll get a rule, And we can join the generative school, honey, ba-by mine.
Yonder comes a man with a Turing machine, honey (etc...) Yonder comes a man with a Turing machine, Can’t generate language but sure looks keen, honey, ba-by mine.
I've heard plenty of examples where the suffix "-wise" is added to a word to mean, "with respect to." I believe that they are examples of neologisms.
Are lengthwise and clockwise the only words that are not neologisms that end with "-wise" and have that sort of meaning? Perhaps otherwise counts ...
I just finished reading the question asked by Bobnix, in which RegDwight referred to another question with an interesting answer by Kosmonaut. Kosmonaut refers to the great number of pictograms (Kanji or Hanzi) available in Japanese and Chinese, and mentions that the task of memorizing our weirdo...
You missed 🐪 splice. 😈 As for how with to behead one can use the longer Latinate decapitate or decollate, for untailed (ppl. adj.) or for to de-tail (vb.) — not to be confused with detail vb. :) — one can also use the someone lovelily Latinate albeit someone recondite decaudate /dɪˈkɔːdeɪt/, as in this OED citation: 📖 “1864 N. & Q. V. 165 — The P. was originally an R. which has had the misfortune to be dacaudated.” Not to be confused with ecaudate (adj.), which never had one in the first place. 😎 — tchrist5 mins ago
@tchrist Don't even get me started. I was trying to think of the term for that big open space between the Washington and Lincoln monuments in D.C. the other day. Couldn't. Then, in the evening, "the mall" just popped into my head.
I've never been to China or Russia but I assume Italy is more like Sweden. In Sweden the percentage is high and increasing rapidly the last 20 years. Don't knwo exact number but I would guess 15% of the population.
@RegDwighт I have for the last twenty-two years resided in a city with half again the percentage of black people as the one in which I grew up: Boulder has 0.9% compared with Lake Geneva’s 0.6%. I’m sure that seems like a lot to you, given the ~40k total Afro-Russians, but I often hear people bitch about it as looking weird to the point of being morally reprehensible. But it is all I have ever known, so it does not seem weird to me.
@tchrist I've probably said this before here, but the first black person I ever saw (when I was about three or four) was a waitress at a Walgreen's lunch counter. I was horrified that there must be some kind of disease that turned people's skin dark brown, and I was afraid to order anything because I didn't want to catch it.
My mom didn't seem to mind, so eventually I ate what she ordered for me.
That wouldn’t have happened in Geneva when I was a kid. I’m sure there were no black people at all then. There were some that lived out by Lake Ivanhoe though.
I went to a Catholic prep school in Lake County, and we had one black kid in our class. He was from Waukegan and, of course, recruited to play sports. Later we got a couple more.
We had one half-black girl in class in grade school, and she took a great deal of abuse for it.
There was a black girl in my graduating class, though.
Her name of course was Nicole.
Nobody hassled her at all about it, either. Big difference in 8–10 years.
> But accounts from the time say when blacks arrived to Lake Geneva, they were not greeted with welcoming arms. Discrimination thwarted attempts by blacks to buy property in the Geneva area.
@Robusto I wouldn’t think that Lake County and Walworth County would be any different from each other in that regard.
The really weird thing was I didn’t ever know what a “Jew” looked like/was/etc.
There was a casual undercurrent of racism in my all-white suburb back then. I worked at my high school over the summer to help defray the tuition cost, and one of the other kids who worked with me on one of our lunch breaks told me that he "hated all niggers except Kenny A-----." (This was the one black kid he knew, who played on the school football team.)
Sometimes an older, more prejudiced generation just has to die off before ugly old views go away.
I wish it were otherwise.
I’ve heard that recently voiced with regard to bigotry against gay people, but it is completely applicable to bigotry against blacks, against Irish, against Italians, etc.
Still, it's much more obvious when someone is black than when someone is gay or Italian or Irish or whatever. It is the great divide of America, and always has been, ever since the founding fathers agreed that some people could own other people.
For the record, my wife is third-generation American, of purely Japanese ancestry.
@tchrist I'm just saying it's obvious to me. YMMV.
When my first son was born, we moved from Chicago to St. Louis for my employment, and when we went down to look at places to live, we tried to stop for dinner in a little town about 40 miles north of St. Louis. The looks we got going in were like something out of Easy Rider. We might as well have been wearing a sign that read "Interracial Marriage!" After waiting an hour at a table for someone to do anything but glare at us as they walked by, we left.
On the long road-trips to and from Burning Man, if we were off the Interstate we sometimes didn’t let the bouncy flowers with pastel-colored hair go into the local places for fear of getting harrassed.
It was just better that way.
There are really weird places in Nevada and Utah, Easy-Rider kind of weird.
@Rob @tchrist here's another story. In the town where I now live, that throughout its history went from the Germans to the French to the Germans and back again, and is sitting firmly on the French-German border right now, we have a big annual film festival. For all intents and purposes, it's an indie-film festival. The biggest of its kind in Germany, and in fact the second-biggest German film festival, period.
I myself actually only attended exactly once. So after that one late session, out of many late sessions, on one night out of many nights, of one of said festivals, I rode the streetcar back to town with a couple of my buddies and a whole bunch of directors and screenwriters and whatnot returning to their hotels from the many panels. And one of the directors turned out to be Russian. So we talked.
Now, he was completely and entirely new to Germany, or pretty much anything outside of Russia for that matter. So he asked a lot of questions. Like, "what is this neon-blue-lights silhouette of a baroque-looking man plastered all over the town? Oh, it's the local beer brand, how interesting!" and so on.
And then he asked, in that same most innocently curious way, "Are all black people French?"
My friends and I still fondly remember that episode to this day.
In fact one of said buddies that rode the streetcar with me is now married to a girl from, um, some really weird place, like Suriname. She used to work for the place I work at, too. It's a small world.
There aren’t many black people in Finland or Montana, either. I wouldn’t worry that Russia is very white. Well, in its west. I know nothing of its east.
It’s only the small and recent "countries" in Europe whose inhabitants more identify as Europeans than as countrymen of whatever “nation” they got shovelled into.
@tchrist I'm European, but then, I'm Irish with English parents. (And my granny is from a part of Poland which is now in Ukraine; and my granddad was a Greek Cypriot from what's now Northern Cyprus.)
Well that's Eastern Slavic for you. You'll have the same trouble with Belorussians, except I think they are not legally allowed to ever visit anywhere.
Except Russia.
Which they of course don't. Cuz it's the same for them, as well.
@tchrist What 'is' is, is difficult to say. The suburbs of Moscow are pale and northern. But near the Caucasus, there are all the (only slightly) darker types, and out east (near Kazakhstan and far east, there are all the 'non'-white natives and chinese and mongolians and japanese and siberians and chukchi and etc, etc.
Portugal still wants Olivenza back from Spain after two or three hundred years. It’s a local cause celèbre amongst the younger chattering classes of Lisbon, while in Madrid, nobody has any idea what you’re talking about.
BTW, here's another random thought about racism I was meaning to share for quite come time. Way too many things get labeled racism so quickly, and for completely straw-men reasons that are not helping anyone. But it's not immediately obvious, or in fact obvious at all. Like, any mention of the N-word is racist.
I am thinking back to how I was a kid. And then I'd get into an argument with a buddy, and then we'd call each other names. Like, fatso. Did that mean I hated fat people? Of course not. Or I'd call someone a beanpole, because he was so tall. Or "roughhands" because he had that rare skin condition. And then the very next day we were cool again and the best buddies ever.
Now imagine one of them kids had been black. What'd we've called him? Why, a nigger of course. Can you extrapolate racism from that? Or even just subliminal racism? Hell no. It's just when you're calling people names, you go with what comes to your mind first. Their single most defining feature that makes them unlike others. Would it have been meant to be hurtful? Well yes, that's the whole point. But would it have been meant as an expression of racism? No frigging way.
And then fast forward to how we "grow up". And then we start labeling things "Communist", even though we would love to have them, or in fact already do. The same thing.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…