The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
could you say that town is homelessnessless?
Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:
You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?
A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.
English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.
All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.
What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.
For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:
The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).
Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.
The three main and most relevant properties of interval arithmetic are:
My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What’s up with cannibalism, meat is meat!
Here’s some further info on what he mentions in 4:20 and 5:00, about ōs vs. ŏs and the asymmetrical vowels system.
Latin had two sets of vowels: long /ā ē ī ō ū/ and short /ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ/. And all Romance languages got rid of that length distinction (some redeveloped it like Lombard, but the “old” system was gone). However, how they did it was different, following mostly three different patterns:
| Latin | /ā ē ī ō ū/ | /ă/ | /ĕ ĭ/ | /ŏ ŭ/ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western European Romance | /a e i o u/ | /a/ | /ɛ e/ | /ɔ o/ |
| Eastern European Romance | /a e i o u/ | /a/ | /ɛ e/ | /o u/ |
| Sardinian | /a e i o u/ | /a/ | /e i/ | /o u/ |
So the outcome of long vowels and short /ă/ was mostly the same in all of them (in the short term). But focus on the last two columns: Western Romance is lowering all non-low vowels, Eastern Romance only the front ones, and Sardinian… simply kept them where they were?
Accordingly to this video, Western African Romance varieties followed the same pattern as the ones in Eastern Europe, and the ones spoken closer to Italy (what’s today Tunis) followed the same pattern as Sardinian.
This might sound odd - like, between Morocco and Romania there’s a whole Mediterranean, why the hell are they undergoing the exact same sound changes? But it actually makes sense when you remember that sound changes don’t spread instantaneously. And that those vowel systems are not the result of one, but three sound changes:
Change #1 was likely a pre-requisite for change #2: unless a dialect centralised the front vowels, it wouldn’t centralise the back vowels. Change #3 was independent of the other two, but once it happened it blocked the centralisation.
Now, let’s say that changes #1 and #2 happened in the Italian peninsula. And that #3 would happen way to the south, like Sardinia or [what’s today] Tunis. Then those changes start spreading out.
Once #3 reaches the Western European dialects, #1 and #2 already happened; so they centralised all the short vowels. However, neither #1 nor #2 had any chance to develop in Sardinia or Tunis, as #3 happened rather early in those places.
But what about places far away from both Tunis and Italy? #3 would eventually reach the Latin spoken in those regions; late enough so #1 happened, but early enough to prevent #2. That’s why Mauritanian Romance, Balkans Romance, and potentially Mozarabic* ended with an asymmetrical vowel system.
*“Mozarabic” aka Andalusi Romance is a catch-all for the indigenous Romance varieties from Southern Iberia. Eventually replaced by the varieties spoken up north in Reconquista times.
Probably ascending in Nethack. With a wizard orc! (Not a good combo, but I’m stubborn.) I even #chatted with Famine for shits and giggles.
Ah, got it.
The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)
Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.
He’s talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.
They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.
Yup.
The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.
By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?
If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.
If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.
Here’s a link to the original formulation of Roko’s Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist’s Burden) is this one.
You know, I’ve seen plenty variations of Pascal’s Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say “it’s even dumber than the original”.
I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.
In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.
And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.
Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.
He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.
Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”
I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.
Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.
studies how generative AI can replicate and amplify real-world biases
Emphasis mine. That’s a damn important factor, because the deep “learning” models are prone to make human biases worse.
I’m not sure but I think that this is caused by two things:
I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She’s crazy for this stuff. Story time:
>going to the market with my mum
>mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
>we walk a bit and grab a few other items
>couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
>roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
>they get mildly curious, ask me about it
>trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
>they also noticed that I didn’t buy barbecue stuff
>I point to mum and say “the garlic bread is hers”
>mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
>about her breakfast garlic bread
>why she prefers that brand
>how they could improve their own brand
>the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
>months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper
Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don’t assume that it’s for barbecue. Sometimes it’s for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.
It’s interesting to look for patterns there.
Dual types that are specially well represented (10+):
That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.
For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.
It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).