Supergrunch

Accidentally dropped my phone in the toilet, yay. Have done the required battery removal etc. and drying and it now seems to be mostly working, but not entirely. A replacement battery might work, but else I hope insurance will cover a new handset. As for white ice cubes, I expect several factors affect it, but basically it results from irregularites and bubbles in the crystal structure. Getting a totally transparent crystal requires purer (i.e. semen-free) water, cleaner surfaces, and probably a more even freezing process.

Metonymy followed by semantic drift/bleaching, I guess.

But none of it's Latin, it's all Greek. It's just same-fear, which is really just a shortening for same-sexual-fear or something, everyone is clear what it means. It's irrelevant that homo means something else in Latin, although looking in the OED it seems that sex is a Latin rather than Greek root, which confuses things a little.

Ell gave the rhotic (e.g. American or Irish) transcription. As for a/æ, I think it's standard or at least accepted to replace the second with the first in broad transcriptions. And neither transcription is all that narrow - for instance Fish's t could also be marked as aspirated, and various other coarticulation/allophonic things I don't know are probably present too.

Came across this online which is quite clever/amusing:

Happy birthday chaps.

I... don't think the CE people will like that too much.

It's no Friday, but it is pretty bad. Wasn't her second single supposed to be called LOL?

Yeah that'd be cool, although it'll have to be on Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I'm sure 5-6 stones will make it an interesting game, and it could always be fun to play (or at least start) an even match too, just to teach fuseki and so on. How long have you been playing go? Edit: I've just noticed the talk of computers earlier on. I wouldn't recommend playing them much, as they tend to mess up your sense of the order of play and so on. Edit 2: Also, does that XBLA game only do 9x9s? If so, that means it'll play a lot better, but the games won't be nearly as interesting.

But who wants to play me for fakez? I've been trying to get a rank again, but nobody will play [?]s, so I had to play with a 13k and a 11k, and now I feel like a sandbagger, especially after both ran away without wanting a review. Ah well, if I end up getting a higher rank than that, the ranking algorithm will stop it from negatively affecting their rank. I'm still making several stupid mistakes that I need to iron out, and I can't remember much fuseki or joseki...

Right, I'm reregistered now, my KGS name is "unmarked." I'll play anyone who's interested. Iun, have you got any idea what strength you are in Chinese ranks? I think they're a lot harder to get, to the extent where a Chinese 1 dan is something like a European 3 dan.

Cool, well I'll have to re-register on KGS because I found out my account died, but let me know when you're free for a game. My rank may have taken a bit of a hit from lack of practice, I say we start with 5 stones and see how it goes. Edit: Actually now I think, I was a BGA 8 kyu, which is a bit different to the KGS system, so 6 stones might be better.

Yay, another go player! I was around about 8 kyu last time I played seriously - how about you? Would be happy to play whenever, my preferred server is KGS. I was actually thinking of getting back into it this summer.

Clearly you're unaware how poorly paid linguists are, if they can get jobs at all. I don't mean people who speak languages, they can get plenty of money.

Don't worry, I'm sure with your talents you'll get a job soon enough. And I'm pretty sure there's more money in art than there is in linguistics!

Thanks! I'm on a research project looking at comparative syntax, and am specialising in constructions where things are fronted in sentences to give them discourse prominence. If that makes any sense... Anyway, I can see why you chose not to do a PhD, I was having cold feet about it earlier. It must be nice to get a real job after a long period of studying.

Yay - finished my masters, and can now do a funded PhD next year. More academic fun!

This game is basically the best thing ever if you like stick men, memes, and games. Try and get all three endings.

Well, they're arguably necessary to show that there's no racial discrimination going on in organisations and so on, but only arguably, so I'm still not sure. As for your point about nigger - the same is basically true of any swearword, so you get to the somewhat problematic question of whether a word itself, independent of any intention on the part of the speaker, can be offensive. Oddly, it seems that the answer is yes, as many people genuinely don't like to hear swear words, but nobody's entirely sure why this is. Steven Pinker has suggested that people necessarily link swear words to unpleasant thoughts/feelings, and so when they hear the word, they're forced to go back to that unpleasantness, which is a good a guess as any. Of course, if you think about it logically, there's nothing inherently offensive, but that doesn't reflect the way people behave.

Well, it's at least as meaningful as things like "do you consider youself English?" which arguably aren't meaningful, but some people think they are. And also, you need statistics on the distribution of races to help reduce racism, so it's kind of a tricky area. I never know whether or not to refuse the information, which is usually an option.

It's not ridiculous, it's a viable hypothesis which has (thankfully) been disproven, also leading to the discovery that "race" can't be accurately defined scientifically.

Well, race is a cluster of related features which were originally adaptations to specific environments, such as brown eyes and black skin (etc.) in people originating from Africa, as an adaptation to e.g. heat and strong light conditions, and fair skin and blue eyes (etc.) in people originating from Northern Europe, as an adaptation to e.g. cold and lower light conditions. There is a problem with calling the first of these clusters "black" as that's only one of several features, so black means both "black skin" and "black race." The second problem is that these features get harder and harder to associate uniquely with specific "races" the harder you look, as some but not all are shared by populations in all sorts of different areas, and race is pretty much impossible to define genetically, with there being far more genetic variation within races than between races. So race is ultimately a cultural concept, whereas skin colour is just a fairly arbitrary biological variation. It seems problematic to me that the same term should be used to refer to both these things.

Yep, fair enough, that's different to etymology. But I'd argue that connotations are all just part of the meaning of a word, so if you don't know them in a particular context, you just don't know what the word means in that context. As you can tell, linguists know hardly anything about lexical semantics.

Of course, it would (and probably will) change in meaning. But lexical semantic change is notoriously impossible to predict, so it's unclear exactly what'll happen in the future. But changes from positive to negative and from negative to positive are both possible. (I think nigger was originally coined by white people just as a descriptive, if slangy, term, which then of course got bundled up with slavery and racism)