1,252 karma · joined September 4, 2021
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.
The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.
"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"
In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.
With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).
I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?
For example, about 8% of men get excluded from certain professions such as being a train driver, due to color blindness. And society doesn't seem to care enough to switch to colorblind-friendly signaling.
With gene editing, this problem could be repaired in the other end, so that men will have the same chance as women to get perfect vision.
(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)
Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.
>Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?
It could be that some gender-neutral behavior patterns are part of the modern Western equivalent of "tatemae", and that they easily appear in studies because of interaction with strangers.
Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.
The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.
One example can be seen on the Croatian 2kn coin, which features a tuna and a title written T U NJ.
Hungarian has more of these multi-symbol letters (with each letter having 1-3 symbols. It also has some other complications, such as having two "sz" in a row appear like "ssz", unless separated by a line break or a hyphen (then it's just two "sz").
IMO it was probably a mistake to let the article focus so much on Hungarian, as these Unicode points don't seem to be created for the purposes of the Hungarian language.
What is it with people nowadays, can't there be at least some room for touching this type of sensitive topic?
My post seems to become a downvote magnet. I just wanted to try an unusual perspective that is seldom talked about.
I know several people who have escaped a war-torn country and had a successful life elsewhere, instead of getting affected by military propaganda, and possibly losing everything just because of other people's territorial conflicts.
Will male risk behavior be more similar to female risk behavior, 10000 years from now?
Nowadays, the use-case for masculine bravery is more or less obsolete. It had a purpose when there were wild animals roaming around human habitations, but nowadays it may very well trick a man into becoming a war casualty.
Historians of the future might look back on pro-conscription advocates as those who stood in the way of the modern human.
https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1cozkpa/blinkade_di...
Medieval monks used to do this with the first letter of the word for "eye" (oko), and those got added, despite the fact that one of them had only one historical occurence.
This is probably the "license" they're mentioning.
However, only some consonants get this treatment, such as "sa" and "shi", because it only takes into account what a typical English speaker can distinguish.
Do they have to keep such an English-centric approach? Why not "nyi"?