Is Math a Universal Language?

-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
Continue »

1171: Terms of Venery Feb 22, 2018

-
Names for groups of animals such as 'murder of crows', 'pod of whales', or 'tower of giraffes' are called 'terms of venery'; as the name suggests, they were originally when hunting (compare with ' venison '). Many of the names may sound silly to people now, and not unreasonably; there is no reason to memorize all of them, so in practical use people will opt for 'herd' or 'group' rather than saying other specific words, with a few exceptions for more common animals. It may seem that this is because we have less of a need to discuss animals nowadays, as few people need to hunt and farm than in the past, but before the 11th century, and in some ways even before the 14th century, nobody used terms of venery much anyway either. Considering that there would not have developed a hunting culture around, for instance, wombats (for whom a group is a 'wisdom') in England and France where these terms began, it should be reasonable t...
Continue »

973: New Sounds (Phoneme Inventory 2/2) Aug 8, 2017

-
After discussing yesterday how English has lost phonemes from its phoneme inventory , one might wonder what would happen if too many sounds are lost over time. It is possible to differentiate two words' meanings from context—or in some languages, also grammatical gender—such as 'there', 'their' and 'they're', and in German 'das Tor' and 'der Tor' (neuter and masculine respectively) mean 'door' in neuter but 'fool' in masculine. Nevertheless, this would not be too easily sustained if too many sounds were lost over the years; in languages with smaller phoneme inventories, the words tend to become longer rather than becoming homophones, such as in Hawai'ian. It should be noted that there is little need for concern that there will be only a handful of sounds used in English in the future; while some sounds merge or indeed even are dropped, new ones develop. In Old English the consonant sound /ð/ as in 'the' was not...
Continue »