I was a linguistics professor for almost a decade, and many of my comments here on Lemmy provide in-depth explanations from an informed theoretical linguistic perspective. See here and here, for example.

In my opinion, the phonetic (acoustic) resemblances are superficial, and nowhere in their paper do they identify the sorts of systematic patterns of alternations that constitute the phonology of human languages. It’s not just about seeing patterns in the sounds of the whales - it’s about showing that these patterns are specifically organized in a similar way to human phonologies, and that they also distinguish meaning in the same structured ways that human phonologies do.

But beyond just phonetics and phonology, and more importantly, the researchers haven’t provided any evidence that whale communication in any way resembles the systems of communication that we call “language”. Human language is characterized by specific features that aren’t found anywhere else in the animal kingdom in the same combination. To an extent the selection of these features is arbitrary, but the sum total of them makes a compelling argument for a categorical distinction between what we call human language and animal communication.

It’s possible, of course, that whale communication does in fact include all of these features, but the articles in question are a far cry from demonstrating it, and so using the word “language” is at best premature and at worst disingenuous.

This just seems like one of those sensationalist pop articles that come out every few months, driven largely by researchers without a significant background in theoretical linguistics, that do more to confuse people about the nature of language than to educate them. Language is much more than just “patterns of sounds that convey meaning”.

(And, for some reason, like 70% of these articles are related to whales. The two most common responses I get to telling people I’m a linguist are: 1) “How many languages do you speak?” and 2) “You know, I read this article recently on how whale language is really just like human language”. I have yet to understand the obsession with whales.)

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Whales having similar vocalizations (I think using the term “phonology” is quite a stretch) to humans is a far cry from saying that whale communication is at all similar to human language.

Edit: Anyone want to explain their downvotes? Or are you all just that desperate to anthropomorphize whales for some reason?

Edit2: I shouldn’t have to flash my linguist credentials to express doubt about a sensationalist pop science article (no shade to OP - it’s an interesting article with some good info, so thanks for posting!). When it’s about something like new battery technology, for example, skepticism seems to be the default in the comments. Why should linguistics be any different?

You’re getting downvoted (in shitpost of all places, too), so I thought I’d take a second to say that I thought this was funny.

Edit: For context, the comment above was at 1/6 when I first responded to it.

They’re not “just” misandrist; that is to say, they definitely have good reasons for existing outside of misandry, and I’m glad that they can provide that space for the people who need it. It’s also certainly not inherently misandrist to be queer or woman oriented.

In the case of Lemmy, though, yes, all of the queer and women oriented instances are very clearly also misandrist. Openly and proudly so, in fact. Your comments here are an excellent, though comparatively mild, example of that.

I knew someone from one of the misandry instances would chime in to prove my point, so thanks! ^_^

Bravo! Spoken like a true feminist, the last bastion of gender equality!

You could have listened to me, sympathized, and told me my misandrist experience is valid, but, then again, that’s a privilege reserved for women experiencing misogyny, isn’t it? Wouldn’t be very feminist of you to acknowledge just how widespread misandry is among feminists, eh?

Of course, but with some more equal than others, as my outspoken feminist boss demonstrated earlier this week. She insisted that feminist research into matriarchal societies had proven beyond a doubt that women govern better than men can, and that if we would just replace all men in power with women the US’s problems would practically solve themselves. This was one day after complaining to me about how unreliable her male coworkers were, and how you can really only rely on women when you want something taken care of.

Feminists truly are beacons of equality.

The raging misandry that commonly accompanies it, for one.

Came here to say Civ IV

Being psychologically manipulated into continuing to play a game that I wouldn’t otherwise certainly doesn’t sound very enjoyable and rewarding, but that may just be me.

I avoid achievements specifically because video games are supposed to be enjoyable and rewarding. A game should succeed or fail on its merit alone, not how well it plays the manipulative achievement metagame.

Imo this mindset is everything wrong with video games today.

This is (one of the many reasons) why I disable achievements on all of my games.

In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.

We did not see what I’m suggesting because that’s an income tax, and in order to abolish billionaires we’d need a wealth tax.

Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money.

Yes, but if you slow the income of a person who is already a billionaire, you get a billionaire who is still getting richer, only more slowly. This does not get rid of billionaires, and everything I’ve been saying was based on your initial comment that Gabe is a billionaire, and billionaires should not exist.

In order to take someone who is already a multibillionaire and make them not a billionaire, you have to take away property that they already own until their net worth falls below a billion dollars. In the case of Gabe, since most of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock, in order to make him not a billionaire you’d need to make him sell some of his stock in Valve, which would dilute his ownership and control over the company.

Do you understand the problem now?

Again, I want to find a sensible way to eliminate billionaires - I’m just not sure how to do so without throwing corporate ownership into chaos. I’d love to hear other recommendations if anyone has any.

1. I don’t think this would solve the problem. Even if all of the outside investors are restricted to less than $1 billion in capital each, pooling their funds would easily be able to outweigh Gabe if he’s subject to the same restriction.

2. If we increase taxes on all companies across the board, the overall appeal of each individual corporation would likely stay about the same. In fact, since Steam is so profitable that might make them more appealing as an investment in a world where corporate taxes are much higher.

3. Corporate taxes are usually on profits, but in order to tax Gabe enough for him to no longer be a billionaire the vast majority of those taxes would have to come out of Gabe’s ownership in Valve. I’m not sure why you don’t think this would be an issue.

4. This seems pretty unrealistic/idealistic. I guess we are already positing an unrealistic world where billionaries are taxed out of existence, so imagining functioning regulation and antitrust suits isn’t that much more of a stretch. Still, that does seem to support my point that without significant other societal change taxing Gabe so much that he’s no longer a billionaire would likely significantly worsen Valve as a company.

I’m certainly not against taxing billionaires out of existence, but I still think that the question of what that would mean for corporate ownership is a difficult/complex one, and I don’t think your answers here really take that complexity into account.

How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process?

Yeah, you’ve overshot and ended up in Japan.

Edit: Explanation: the Japanese word for “green light”, “aoshingou”, means “blue light” even though their lights are green too.

I see what you mean, and to try to make it a bit clearer what I mean I’ll show you why English syntax and German syntax are considered very similar by syntactic standards, even though German modals/auxiliaries are all the way at the end of the sentence.

The answer relies on the assumption that German and English (and all of the world’s languages’, for that matter) syntax show basically the same structural hierarchy, regardless of how different their word orders are. I won’t get into the reasons for that assumption, because it would take us half of an introductory syntax course to do so, but I will show you the (slightly oversimplified) result.

Note that regardless of the order of the words, the hierarchy of phrases stays the same between both languages. The idea is that the English and German sentences really have this same hierarchy, but that whether each node branches right or left determines the word order, which matters less than it seems to.

So, instead of older Germanic languages having to transition from a German-style syntax to an English-style one by moving seemingly random words to seemingly random places, all they have to do is make a different binary choice at a few of the nodes in the tree, and the English sentences build themselves. This approach has a ton of other benefits that we don’t have anywhere near enough time to get into, but one in particular is useful for the Yoda sentences, in that in all cases you can elegantly determine what Yoda will move to the front of the sentence by cutting off the “Verb Phrase” node and everything that it dominates (that is, everything below it in the tree). So, for “Look as good, you will not”, we have:

Cut off everything VP and below and move it to the front and we get “Look as good, you will not”. This is the exact process that can generate all of the dialogue mentioned in the comment above - draw the tree, cut off VP and everything below it, move it to the front, and you have Yoda-fronting.

Cheers for a fun convo - it’s always great to get to talk about linguistics!

First game I ever remember buying was Final Fantasy II. I was probably about 11 and it was definitely worth it. A friend had let me borrow it for a few days and I immediately knew that I needed to get my own copy. Still one of my favorite games ever.