…care to contribute a link to their favorite site for an AI activity? I’d be really interested in seeing what’s out there, but the field is moving and growing so fast and search engines suck so hard that I know I’m missing out....
Transformativity is part of fair use. What AI datasets do is much akin to researchers dissecting corpuses (I’m a linguist, data scraping is what we’ve done in the field for 300 years). When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process. Just because a computer does it doesn’t make it magically not OK.
Either information wants to be free or it doesn’t. If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.
I have noticed lately that a lot of users on Lemmy spell whining as “whinging” what’s up with that? I could understand if it was misspelled “wining” or somthing but that extra g really confuses me. Is this a misspelling specific for some region or is it lingo of some sort?
I’m not talking about orthographic reform. I’m talking about in terms of vocabulary and grammar—how it is under the hood (or bonnet, if you’re across the pond).
A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.
You heard about that recent study trying to say that Indo-European speakers came from Anatolia? Classic case of people from another subject of study thinking their own experience and conventions transfer across fields. The dataset is supposedly very good but their theoretical framework and conclusions aren’t.
Your language isn’t the world’s oldest/first language.
That includes Sanskrit. It isn’t the Ur-language either. Sorry not sorry.
Neither is Albanian.
Nor Arabic.
Or Tamil.
Turkish neither.
Not all languages came from Latin—in fact, most didn’t. It’s a quirk of history that Romance (and Indo-European generally) spread so far and wide
Indo-European language theory is correct regardless of whether you choose to believe it.
Russia may be Satan’s dacha, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russian is a real language (and a Slavic one, to boot). Also, when I cite George Shevelov, you don’t get to write him off as a propagandist; he is Ukrainian, not Russian (somebody tried to do that to me last weekend, refusing to even consider the idea because his last name looks Russian).
Black people (or whatever minority of your choice) don’t speak “bad English” or whatever other language. African-American Vernacular English in particular is a well-studied lect—a language variety—with a ton of scholarship behind it; it isn’t arbitrary (“he eating” and “he be eating” have different meanings/connotations; they don’t just drop words for no reason—there’s logic to it).
“I could care less” is an idiom. The fact that it is so widely used and understood makes it a part of proper English. That’s the yardstick in linguistics: The crowd tends to win. (Or do the complainants never say things like “I read it a million times” or “it was a billion degrees out and humid”?)
Words like “supposably”, “liberry”, “expresso”, and “conversate” are analogically extended forms. Sound change and grammar change happen all the time. If you have issues with them, you will have issues with “tenth” (the original form of this word, tithe, survived as a specialized form), “snuck” (sneak is originally a weak verb, not a strong one), or “messenger” and “passenger” (analogy with challenger).
BONUS ROUND: The Armenian genocide DID HAPPEN. I was quite smugly told by a Turkish nationalist to “read the court case” as I was wrong…in which case THE JUDGES AGREED THAT IT HAPPENED and were only concerned with whether the right to deny history exists. I also got libeled as a racist “Cizvit” (“Jesuit”) for some reason. Same guy tried to pull the “Turkish is the mother of all languages” card, even saying that Native American languages came from Turkish. (Which is facially implausible. North American languages are often front-loading whereas Turkic likes to suffix.)
Yes, it is the Christian ideal of donating 10% of your earnings. In the history of English, “m” or “n” sounds were deleted before fricative consonants (like “s”, “z”, or “th” for example), which is why we say us rather than uns. It’s also why we would normally have said tithe as opposed to tenth. However, on the basis of other numbers (fourth, fifth, sixth), the word for “tenth” was re-formed. Tithe survives in specialized form because that was how it was often used.
Trying to go back to an Ur-language is a fool’s errand. I personally consider it a moot question, though I admit my religious views impact this; even with that said, it’s not really a serious topic of scholarship for many reasons. It’s not even clear that the main major language families share a common origin—a few proposals have attracted serious scholarship (Indo-Uralic, Dené-Yeniseian), but there’s not much in terms of respected research or consensus.
Person-first language. IT SUCKS. Don’t use it. I am not “a man with mental illness”, I am “a mentally ill man”.
“X language has no word for Y, so they can’t think about it!” Wrong. Language has ways of adapting to gaps. Sometimes they make up phrases or circumlocute; other times, they straight-up borrow the word. You could perfectly well take some language with 300 speakers in the rainforest in Brazil and talk about quantum physics, though they’d need to invent or borrow quite a bit of vocabulary to do it (but the point is, it can be done in the first place). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is basically false in its strong form. (There is evidence for a weak form holding, with particular reference to color terminology and Guguu Yimidhirr’s famed real-space orientation).
Despite what Twitter and Tumblr tell you, nobody who’s in the demographic actually likes “Latinx” or similar “-x” forms in practice. The people who shout about this ignore that Indo-European languages have had strategies for mixed or indeterminate gender for thousands of years—they would simply use the masculine as a default. The masculine/feminine dichotomy isn’t even thought to have been the original situation in Indo-European: The Anatolian languages evince an older system that was more strictly animate/inanimate, with feminines deriving from some sort of collectivizing suffix (I’m somewhat hazy on the details of this).
“Can I do X?” “I don’t know, can you?” Piss off! “Can” has acquired a secondary definition relating to permission; this is, cross-linguistically, unsurprising and it’s not clever asking them to rephrase. It’s obnoxious.
English isn’t the only Anglic language! Off the top of my head I can think of Scots (not Scottish Gaelic, something entirely different) and Yola. Fingallian also appears to be Anglic.
Arabic and Chinese are often considered single languages, but the situation is akin to Latin and Romance. Modern Standard Arabic and Mandarin are artificial standards, the dialects being highly divergent, so the standards are used to facilitate things generally. (When I was in college I took a few semesters of Arabic and ustaaz, my professor, was from Cairo. He told us once that he was in a room with a Jordanian and a Moroccan and the Moroccan spoke his dialectal Arabic. The Jordanian had to ask ustaaz to translate.)
No worries, I’ll try to succinctly explain (it’s 5:08 AM here and I need sleep).
It’s not so much about efficiency. Calling me “a man with mental illness” trivializes the experience and makes it sound like you can separate the malady from my person. You can’t. Being, as in my case, bipolar and obsessive-compulsive is part and parcel of my life.
“I could care less” is an idiom, a set of words that is somehow beyond the sum of its constituents. It’s apples and oranges with the preceding.
I’m thinking about learning to play drums for some time now and I have a question. If I’m a complete beginner should I still get a full drum set? I know you can buy a cheap electric set for like $300 but can I start with something smaller and simpler? Are there some kind of electric pads that would work for taking first...
Days that nothing catastrophic happens, but lots of moderate things happen all in the same day? You wake up not feeling great, so the morning plans are toast. Then afternoon plans fall through. The stuff you do in the meantime doesn’t work out well either. To add insult to injury, dinner just doesn’t come out right. You feel...
A bit of background; Someone I know told me, sometimes they feel crazy 'cause there are just so incredibly many different narratives and stories in their mind, about all the relationships they’re in… they forget who they are themselves sometimes, don’t know what to trust and believe so they feel very overwhelmed. Like,...
It could be over a few months, like a new job where one day you feel like actually going to work thinking, hey I actually like these people and don’t mind working here....
(Wikipedia) Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme...
Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It’s been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it’s smaller, making it stronger and...
When I lie, it’s most often a lie of omission. Are you more of a falsehood teller? Or do you lie out of ignorance? Or is there a particular subject you’re likely to lie about? Or a person who you tell most of your lies to?...
I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before....
Change your profile pic to the Stars and Bars. You are minimizing the very real and tragic effects of racism to win social justice points. I have no words.
Context: I currently have a back injury and as such my sleep schedule has been destroyed. There are days that I simply cannot get comfortable no matter where I sit/lie....
Say you went out on like 2 dates and said person was too clingy and you ghost em, now you might have to face them due to work. Apologize or not? And if apologize, do it preemptively or upon meeting?...
Tell that to every woman I've ever dated/matched with. I am autistic so social norms confound me and I really have no idea what I did to piss them off.
When my Babcia was alive she would take us thrifting all the time. Best thing I found (that I can think of off the top of my head) was a framed wall advertisement for the IBM PCJr. I still have it, it's hanging up in my bedroom.
A UK Member of Parliament recently suggested that there should be a Government minister for men which would presumably do similar things to the existsing minister for Women....
Electronics stores sometimes sell static discharge bracelets. You put it on your wrist and then there’s a cord that goes to an alligator clip or something and you can touch it to metal to discharge the pent-up electricity. I had to do that at mine old workplace—the air there was so dry, and my legs so hairy, that static charge would build up from my pants. I had a static discharge once that was so loud someone came over to ask if I was all right; it stopped when I started wearing the bracelet.
I hate it when people on social media, dare ask questions when you know they're fishing for personal information/ammo on people to exploit. Like asking for people's dark secrets. Why do you want to know? Is there a fetish to this? Nobody is going to be dead serious, they're just going to give softball answers and why should they...
With inflation, soaring costs of living, the housing crisis, climate change and more devastating impacts that seems to crush the global middle class, what do you think our society will look like in the future? Do you think any of these problems will be addressed effectively?
I’ll start. Teenage me driving up the street to hang out with friends at the mall and passed my younger neighbor and his mom. When I got back a couple hours later, the neighbor’s mom was livid - confronting me for the slight. I seriously had no idea wtf she was talking about and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.
I get accused of not knowing about linguistics or history a lot.
I am a degreed linguist, and the people who accuse me of it tend to be ethnic nationalists or right-wingers. You can’t reason with them. People don’t like being told that their language isn’t the end-all be-all or that minorities (gasp) have their own speech patterns.
There was a notable incident on Reddit where someone complained that African-American Vernacular English wasn’t legitimate. I responded to the guy, who, in response, kept moving the goalposts. He asked if AAVE let Blacks “flourish”, I directly addressed it, then he took me to task because that was supposedly something he didn’t ask about. Then he spouted off about how Indigenous American languages were inferior because you couldn’t talk about quantum physics with them (which is false, but the hard Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a tough bug to kill). The kicker is my interlocutor was from Texas. He shut up when I pointed out that “y’all” is, by his own metric, “incorrect English”.
Watch their brains implode when they talk about how French is “legitimate”, and Latin is even more “legitimate”, and then you point out that French developed out of Latin via the same means and processes they demonize in minority speech.
Or when people bitch that “I could care less” is incorrect English. It’s not; it’s an idiom. “Brazen” as a descriptor of methods or attitudes is descended from an idiom (nobody says “bold as brass” anymore though, so its origin is obscured).
I even run into this on the fediverse (search my comment history).
It gets worse when people write sources and facts off because it’s inconvenient. I was into it today with a Turkish nationalist who claimed that Turkish was the mother of all languages (it’s not even the mother of Turkic generally) and then went on to deny the Armenian genocide. I also ran into someone who tried to deny that Russian was a legitimate Slavic language because I cited George Shevelov’s work and obviously his last name was Russian, so he was a propagandist…when Shevelov is Ukrainian-American and spent a long time teaching at Columbia.
Being a linguist on the Internet is an utterly Sisyphean task.
More often than not, I am wrong, and if I reply to everyone like that I will garner the reputation of being a girl-crazy freak/creep. I cannot afford to suffer that.
I saw a post once over on another site that rhymes with deaddit, listing all the sites for "AI" art, writing, coding, speech, video, music, mimicry, you name it. Does anyone have a graphic, or... (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
…care to contribute a link to their favorite site for an AI activity? I’d be really interested in seeing what’s out there, but the field is moving and growing so fast and search engines suck so hard that I know I’m missing out....
What is the most impressive music video you've ever seen?
Most music videos, especially modern ones, are pretty boring.
What's up with "whinging"?
I have noticed lately that a lot of users on Lemmy spell whining as “whinging” what’s up with that? I could understand if it was misspelled “wining” or somthing but that extra g really confuses me. Is this a misspelling specific for some region or is it lingo of some sort?
I'm his biggest fan! (lemmy.world)
Songs in the Key of Egg...
what are some dying niche lemmings?
Attempts to create niche communities that ended up being the owner talking to himself and receiving 2 upvotes. (niche coms appear to be gaining steam)
deleted_by_author
How to learn to play drums?
I’m thinking about learning to play drums for some time now and I have a question. If I’m a complete beginner should I still get a full drum set? I know you can buy a cheap electric set for like $300 but can I start with something smaller and simpler? Are there some kind of electric pads that would work for taking first...
deleted_by_author
Ever have one of those days?
Days that nothing catastrophic happens, but lots of moderate things happen all in the same day? You wake up not feeling great, so the morning plans are toast. Then afternoon plans fall through. The stuff you do in the meantime doesn’t work out well either. To add insult to injury, dinner just doesn’t come out right. You feel...
@[email protected] explains technical specs in computer chip manufacturing (kbin.social)
To the people that would consider themselves once having been crazy and now feel sane again - what was the narrative that helped you sort out your mind?
A bit of background; Someone I know told me, sometimes they feel crazy 'cause there are just so incredibly many different narratives and stories in their mind, about all the relationships they’re in… they forget who they are themselves sometimes, don’t know what to trust and believe so they feel very overwhelmed. Like,...
Reddit implements hidden "credit scores" only visible to admins (old.reddit.com)
Have you ever felt a imaginary switch click that changed the trajectory of your life?
It could be over a few months, like a new job where one day you feel like actually going to work thinking, hey I actually like these people and don’t mind working here....
Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it?
(Wikipedia) Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme...
So why is 3 nm chip better?
Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It’s been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it’s smaller, making it stronger and...
What type of lie do you tell most often?
When I lie, it’s most often a lie of omission. Are you more of a falsehood teller? Or do you lie out of ignorance? Or is there a particular subject you’re likely to lie about? Or a person who you tell most of your lies to?...
What's a current or growing trend only you seem to have concerns about?
I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before....
My wife says standing over the sink at 3am cleaning tea infusers with a brass tooth brush, dremel tool, and dental picks is not normal. Is she right?
Context: I currently have a back injury and as such my sleep schedule has been destroyed. There are days that I simply cannot get comfortable no matter where I sit/lie....
What was the best burger you've ever had?
Don’t doxx yourself please
Should you apologize to someone you ghosted before if there is a chance you might run into them?
Say you went out on like 2 dates and said person was too clingy and you ghost em, now you might have to face them due to work. Apologize or not? And if apologize, do it preemptively or upon meeting?...
What's the coolest thing you've found in a thrift store?
Or just second hand in general
What is the one most astonishingly dumb things that, as a child, you believed was absolute truth?
I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.
Should there be a UK Minister for Men? (lemmy.world)
A UK Member of Parliament recently suggested that there should be a Government minister for men which would presumably do similar things to the existsing minister for Women....
Help me stop accidentally hurting my dog
I wear UGG boots in winter because it’s fucking cold....
What questions do you hate being asked and why? (kbin.social)
I hate it when people on social media, dare ask questions when you know they're fishing for personal information/ammo on people to exploit. Like asking for people's dark secrets. Why do you want to know? Is there a fetish to this? Nobody is going to be dead serious, they're just going to give softball answers and why should they...
If having a career wasn't a factor, what would you have liked to study in college?
Most of us gotta pick a practical choice instead of what we really wany.
What do you think will happen to the middle class in the next five decades? (kbin.social)
With inflation, soaring costs of living, the housing crisis, climate change and more devastating impacts that seems to crush the global middle class, what do you think our society will look like in the future? Do you think any of these problems will be addressed effectively?
How do you get over unilateral heartbreak? (kbin.social)
Not sure where else to post this besides here…if it’s more appropriate somewhere else, please direct me there....
What is the most fascinating emotion or feeling for you?
A few I like;...
Have you ever been accused of something that wasn’t true, yet you had no way to prove your innocence?
I’ll start. Teenage me driving up the street to hang out with friends at the mall and passed my younger neighbor and his mom. When I got back a couple hours later, the neighbor’s mom was livid - confronting me for the slight. I seriously had no idea wtf she was talking about and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.
What are some (realistic) things you wanted to get for a while, just for fun?
I’ve got 3 on my list....