Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
LagDotCom wrote:
As for the 'Kite' thing, I think that looks exactly how you say it. Have you ever heard of the 'magic e' rule? Pick, pike. Till, tile. And so on. Of course, there's always exceptions to the rule...
Also, live (verb) and live (noun).
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
I've always interpreted the doppler effect to mean the change in frequency that occurs as the object passes you.
No, you have apparently only memorized the popular illustration of the doppler effect, as when an emergency vehicle passes you there's a change in the pitch of the sound.
The doppler effect predicts that the frequency perceived by the listener is the signal source's signal frequency modified by the derivate of the distance between the listener and the source. I.e. when the distance is increasing, the frequency appears lower, and when the distance is decreasing, the frequency appears higher.
Applies to sound waves as well as radio waves (light etc).
By the way, speaking of the English language, why does 99% of English-speaking people and some % of non-English-speaking people write "it's" when they should write "its"? You can see it *everywhere*, from random webpages and random forum posts to serious news articles (I mean in the news agency websites, not usenet, although you of course can see it a lot there too) and other similar serious online articles, and so on.
Is it really so hard for people to think of "it's" as "it is" and that way check if the sentence sounds good? Nobody says "the car lost it is wheel while turning" or "the program saved it is state in a file". Yet that's what most people *write*, just condensed (with "it's").
Of course you can see other similar errors, such as "you're" instead of "your", but those are much rarer.
Well, a lot of people think it's because people learn how to use apostrophes, then get paranoid about their usage and use them on any word with a trailing 's'. This would explain the so-called "Greengrocer's Apostrophe" on things like apple's, banana's, etc. I know, it's horrible, but English is no longer taught formally in schools here (at least, not in public ones), so children never learn the theoretical basis and just think about what sounds right.
Key part: sounds right.
Also, by the prevalence of 'ur' and other txt-isms, most of the common homonyms are being lost in meaning. I see the your/you're thing done wrongly at least twice an hour on Subspace/Continuum, an online game I play.
How does "it's" sound righter than "its"? They are pronounced the same (AFAIK). They just mean completely different things.
It's (hee hee) because most native English speakers write by instinct rather than reason. Using apostrophes is usually an unconscious act, because the usage is generally obvious. For example, any average English-speaking moron knows to never write something like "look at Tommys booties," because the possessive apostrophe is obvious when you're dealing with a name (in this case Tommy). On the other hand, using an apostrophe for a contraction is equally obvious: for example, your average English-speaking moron would never write something like "I wont do it" or "I wouldnt do it" because it's completely unnatural.
The problem with its and it's is that it isn't a name, so it isn't always immediately obvious that the possessive form of the word wouldn't require an apostrophe.
No, you have apparently only memorized the popular illustration of the doppler effect, as when an emergency vehicle passes you there's a change in the pitch of the sound.
The doppler effect predicts that the frequency perceived by the listener is the signal source's signal frequency modified by the derivate of the distance between the listener and the source. I.e. when the distance is increasing, the frequency appears lower, and when the distance is decreasing, the frequency appears higher.
Applies to sound waves as well as radio waves (light etc).
I would call that doppler shift, not the doppler effect. (Whereas, to me, the doppler effect is when the doppler shift changes direction by passing the detector.) Again, I realize the dictionary doesn't agree with me, but changes in frequency due to relative motion of emitter and detector are so universal as to be not worth calling the phenomenon anything as grandiose as an "effect".
just stumbled upon this (german) article:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/79712
as difficult as german might be for humans to learn, it seems to be easy to understand for computers - just because there are so many suffixes.
Maybe latin would be even easier..
I would call that doppler shift, not the doppler effect. (Whereas, to me, the doppler effect is when the doppler shift changes direction by passing the detector.) Again, I realize the dictionary doesn't agree with me, but changes in frequency due to relative motion of emitter and detector are so universal as to be not worth calling the phenomenon anything as grandiose as an "effect".
The fact that the doppler effect is *always* explained with the ambulance example and that people have thus become confused about what the doppler effect really means and use it to denote the wrong thing doesn't make it the right thing.
just stumbled upon this (german) article:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/79712
as difficult as german might be for humans to learn, it seems to be easy to understand for computers - just because there are so many suffixes.
Maybe latin would be even easier..
The fact that the doppler effect is *always* explained with the ambulance example and that people have thus become confused about what the doppler effect really means and use it to denote the wrong thing doesn't make it the right thing.
True, but my personal opinion that it is appropriate to differentiate between "doppler shift" and "doppler effect" the way I do does make it the right thing, whether or not that happens to agree with the common misconception. Plus, I've always heard it was a train, not an ambulance :P. I guess always ain't always ...
One of the reasons why Finnish may be a bit hard to learn for an adult is that Finnish is a highly agglutinative language.
Yep. You should try Inuktitut, the eskimo language. It has for example the word "tusaanngitsuusaartuaannarsinnaanngivipputit" which consists of 9 different morphemes: tusaa(listen)+nngit(negative)+su(participle)+usaar(try to make me believe)+tuaannar(always)+sinnaa(modal verb can)+nngi(negative)+vip(absolutely)+putit(singular 2nd person indikative). The completeword would translate to something something like "You absolutely cannot try to make me believe that you never hear". The object comes after the word.
A point worth noticing is that for example the word "always" appears within the word. This is called incorporation, the combining of lexical morphemes. Yep, sure wouldn't want to try to learn that one.
Kyrsimys: You sound like you actually know Inuktitut! Where did you actually go to learn it, and why did you even decide to learn it? One of the most unlikely choices to occur to me... no offence though
That said, I'm sure the information was taken from a public source of some sorts, not from Kyrsimys's actual knowledge of a language he wouldn't want to try to learn…
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The example is from a book called Yleinen kielitede (Karlsson 2004) (Yleinen kielitiede = General linguistics). I have it as an exam book right now. I'm studying English linguistics at the moment and we are required to study some general linguistics as well. The book contains some interesting information about language universals as it talks about Maddieson's UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database)-study, which took 317 languages (each one from a different language family) and studied their qualities. The study revealed that there was at least one plosive in every single language, no fricatives in 7% of the languages, only 1 language studied didn't have the letter t or d in it, two didn't have k or g and 3 didn't have p or b. Universals like this are interesting as they can really help us understand the development of language better. I'm sure there are loads of information about UPSID in the web.
That would probably be an isolate (not belonging to any language family, i.e. they have developed on their own with little outside influence). A good example is Basque, which is the only surviving isolate in Europe. The most "different" languages from our perspective are probably the click languages spoken (well, clicked) in Africa. There are something like 30 surviving click languages.
