Recent content by Pythagorean

English borrows heavily from Latin but I wonder if it didn't break the language barrier until around when conversion happened and churches came to England (bringing Latin scholarship with them). Old English and Old Norse were relatively mutually intelligible when they were both spoken before...

A common vowel shift I notice between other Germanic languages and English is ei vs. o home <-> heim stone <-> stein bone <-> bein ghost <-> geist

"Fart" is one of the best conserved words out there. For a general idea of the modern linguistics view of how the Proto Indo European language evolved into languages today, grok: There were actually two Proto Indo European words for fart with distinct meanings: *perd- to fart loudly *pesd- to...

From Malay dua, from Proto-Malayic *dua, from Proto-Malayo-Chamic *dua, from Proto-Malayo-Sumbawan *dua, from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *duha, from Proto-Austronesian *duSa.

Twai!

Tying up my thoughts here on how the above relates to ignorance. Human words and meanings around early forms of cosmogony were severely limited by our perspective. They had no idea what a planet was. So you get more limited definitions of our larger dwelling space, like Miðgarðr. Where we...

Something that stood out to me was that bodily parts and functions, familiar relationships, violence, sex, and resources often have well preserved phonemes in linguistics. E.g. it's fairly easy to reconstruct words like mother, father, fart, feet, etc. And they are probably among the things...

That Stocking paper sounds really interesting - I'm going to have to get onto a campus so I can get a copy.

This worked surprisingly well and falls in line with themes explored so far: To this day, the agricultural sciences are able to stand up whole college towns in the middle of farmland given the broader impact on society (maximizing yield, minimizing environment damage, safety and health, etc...

~5000 BC, Proto-Indo-Europeans: *pewg- (to strike, assail) NOTE: Here, Proto-Germanic tribes break away from Proto-Indo-Europeans and innovate p -> f, g -> k, d->t - you can see this in many examples if you compare latin/french and english (ped <-> foot, pater <-> father, pisc <-> fish, perd...

An interesting observation here is that those same kinds of themes (survival, food, reproduction) are well preserved in linguistics (you can see this if you compare cognates between French and English using Grimm's law) and factors important to survival get encoded in the names of gods (e.g. -...

Systems context can change things and I'm not sure exactly how it's implemented in the brain, but I did some research modeling the Morris-Lecar neurons and, due to their slowness (relative to sodium-based models), you can get all kinds of neat of feedback and interference effects (in fact...

David Gilmour's work on Dogs (Pink Floyd)

While I've grown tired of Pink Floyd in general, I can't deny that lyrically and musically, it's some of the best music I've ever heard: