> no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet)
There is already an ecosystem of for-profit social events in European cities (and probably elsewhere) profiting off people's desire to meet up with other human beings when social opportunies have shrunk. Once has seen this on e.g. Meetup.com or Facebook for years now, where bot profiles are used to swell event-signup numbers so people think they will meet more people. Indeed, with the enshittification of Meetup, the only forces that prosper on that site are for-profit ones.
I don't know much about Andrew Tate (what I've heard suggest I don't even want to look him up, but maybe I should)
For Social Media and dating apps - both ran into similar problems: they are a small part of the means. Facebook only have 5-10 minutes of real friend content per day. Dating apps can perhaps fill more time per day - but success means you "find someone" and close your account never to return. If you want to get rich you need to find some way to extend the time people spend on your platform - and that means something other than your premise. Facebook is filled with garbage. Any mildly successful dating app will be bought out by a big player because that app is taking away from the big player.
> There is already an ecosystem of for-profit social events in European cities (and probably elsewhere) profiting off people's desire to meet up with other human beings when social opportunies have shrunk.
They're called nightclubs and bars lol trust HN to be so insulated from the wider world
Those have always been around (but in many markets are declining as younger people are less likely to drink alcohol). My post was obviously about developments in the recent, especially post-Covid world.
I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing to talk to you at any length, you are not interesting any more (in fact, in some cultures, local people will have heightened suspicion of you). Language learning becomes more a passive endeavour with few opportunities for real-world speaking.
This is either a problem with you, or a problem with the specific place you live in.
I talk to people every day in my 2nd language. They are generally delighted to do so.
Yes, some people are suspicious of me, depending on the context. But even then I can generally disarm it with body language etc, because I'm a skilled and empathetic human.
Your post history suggests your sole personal experience is Spanish. Congratulations, you lucked out learning the language of speakers more likely to be friendly and sociable than not (though there are corners of Latin America colder than others). But that experience will not be representative of many other languages spoken by other peoples.
You made a blanket statement about being a man over 40 makes it impossible to converse with people. I refuted that. Would you like to revise it to say "I happen to be in a place(s) where people are just generally anti-social, so that makes it difficult to practice a language"?
Since my late teens, I have spent ~6 months a year traveling the world, and language learning has been a big part of that. And now I am in my 40s having seen how, in most regions, interest from locals in intensive conversation steadily diminished as I approached middle age. So, my experience has been comprehensive enough to make such a blanket statement.
What? Come on. I’m on that demographic and have zero issues talking to people out in the world. If you believe this then certainly it’s true. Otherwise, just go meet and interact with people normally.
"Bread and circuses" refers to a public free grain dole and free entertainment events in Ancient Rome. Precious little of that in the US right now, except for food benefits whose recipients probably on balance do not support the current guy.
There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.
Yep, it's the same in Māori, a Polynesian language, where "moana" refers to oceans and large lakes alike.
What's really interesting is that in Hawaiian, a close relative with some sound shifts (k/t, l/r, n/ng, so taboo is kapu in Hawaiian, in Māori, tapu, path is ala / ara, the God of the sea is Kanaloa/Tangaroa) they have more than one word for ocean, kai is coastal waters, moana is the deep ocean.
But it makes sense in the geographical context of both societies and how they evolved to their environment, the Hawaiian archipelago is made up of multiple smaller islands separated by waters exposed to the full force of the Pacific, while the archipelago of New Zealand is dominated by two large landmasses separated by a narrow strait that together are about the same area as Germany.
So the Hawaiians remained more tightly wedded to the sea to build their archipelagan societies than the Māori did.
In fact, the Māori lost the knowledge to build ocean-going vessels like the ones that had carried them to New Zealand within a few hundred years because there was no need for it. And their language lost the distinction between "coastal waters" and "ocean" while Hawaiian retained them.
While we have evidence of Māori traveling to Raoul in the Kermadecs early on, as classical Māori culture evolved on much much larger islands, their technology focus on boats switched from ocean going vessels to coastal travel and river travel.
In fact, while "Wai", water, is often considered the Māori word for "river", there's another word that also means river in Māori:
Are there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Māori, Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open ocean.
Lake Taupō, the largest lake in New Zealand, is about the size of Singapore.
The Hawaiians distinguished between coastal waters and open waters because in their archipelago of far smaller and more numerous islands, the distinction between the two was important. Think currents, waves, depth.
And I guess I failed to adequately make my point, but I'll try again - when the Polynesians who would become the Māori reached New Zealand, the far larger islands they now inhabited lead them to focus far less on oceanic travel as they pivoted to a focus on the land and rivers they now inhabited.
So a big lake was effectively the same as the ocean for them - a big body of water.
Yes, there are many substantial ones in New Zealand. Lake Taupo is an obvious one, and there are some large ones in Otago and Southland which are not abutting the sea.
I would imagine Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones, since they need to be able to drink. Even small islands can have pools.
[Edit to add: much of Polynesia is of volcanic origin, so freshwater crater lakes are a feature of these landscapes.]
> Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones
Māori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to whether or not it was a lake or sea or river.
Wai tai: Salt water
Wai māori: Fresh water, water for regular daily usage
Waiora: Pure water that restored/healed a person
Waikino: Dangerous / polluted water
Waitapu: Sacred water
Which makes sense right? You can have a river that is significantly salty and hence unpotable some distance from the sea, depending on the strength of the tides - likewise you can have a lake near the sea that intermingles with seawater to the extent that it's brackish.
So Māori naming was more based on utility than the geographical distinctions than we're used to in the Eurocentric worldview.
And this also extended to their view on land ownership, which caused so many issues when Europeans turned up and wanted to "buy" "land" from the local iwi/tribes - a chief would grant a European the exclusive rights to grazing in an area, and the European would interpret it as exclusive ownership, and then get angry when the Māori would continue harvesting tuna/eels or birds on "their" land that they'd "purchased".
I am not sure what you mean by "Eurocentric" here. These distinctions exist in most Asian languages and probably in other continental landmasses.
Peoples living on remote oceanic islands are the exception rather than the rule, and lost the words for larger freshwater bodies because they didn't tend to encounter them, just as some inland peoples had no words for oceans. You've even mentioned a distinction... "brackish". It is pretty important to know if one can drink water or not.
By the way, in some parts of Europe these distinctions don't quite happen either. "Loch" is used for branches of the sea as much as freshwater. In some places "lake" and "lago" are used for both. In fact, without looking it up, "lagoon" is probably related to the Romance word for "lake". River isn't reserved for freshwater in European languages. The Menai Straits are Afon Menai (Menai River) in Welsh. In tradition, the ocean was described as a river encircling the continents.
"Which makes sense right?"
Most of them do, except waitapu. Taboos often make little sense, and the reasons can be long forgotten. Sometimes they are just dangerous stretches of water. We used to have notions of taboo here too.
Not related but related: "tapu" means both "forbidden" and "sacrosanct" and that same double meaning exists in Arabic for "haram" (pork is haram and the Kaaba is in the Masjid al-Haram, for instance). I wonder if that's a pattern in many languages.
You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).
I read your post, and it got me thinking because, round here in Cheshire,v'mere' is a very common name for a bigger stretch of water ('pool' is generally reserved for smaller stretches of water).
So I did a quick search to check, both from memory and by looking at the map – not because I doubted you being right in general across the UK, but because locally 'mere' is so common.
Anyway, towns or bodies of water with 'Mere' in Cheshire: Mere, Mere Heath, Ellesmere Port, Blakemere, Delamere, Oakmere, Tatton Mere, Comber Mere, Pickmere, Manley Mere, Shakerly Mere, Marbury (means 'Fortified town by the lake'), Marbury Big Mere, the Quoisley Meres, Flaxmere, Hatchmere, Radnor Mere, Astbury Mere, Rossmere, Rostherne Mere, Nunsmere, The Mere, Little Mere… and then I got bored, so I may have missed a couple. Anyway, that's at least 23, and Cheshire is not a noticeably watery place, compared to some other counties.
In contrast, there are very few lakes: I could find Oulton Park Lake (man-made in the late 18th Century), and Acre Nook Lake, Lapwing Hall Lake, and another unnamed one – a series of quarry pits turned into a watersports centre in the 2010s.
So it looks like that in Cheshire at least, the normal name for a 'larger than a pond' body of water or nearby town is 'mere'.
Thanks for sending me down this interesting (well, to me, anyway) rabbit hole…
I don't know of a single "mere" in Scotland or Ireland. I doubt there are any in Wales... Maybe in the eastern bits that are less Welsh speaking. I'm surprised about Cheshire. Maybe it is more widespread than I thought it was! But it isn't a word I hear used in spoken in English outside of place names.
Some of it is regional. "Tarn" turns up in the Danelaw. "Lough" turns up in the far north of England for about twenty place names, which is a variant of "loch", but is pronounced "luff". You can find some "loughs" near Hadrian's Wall.
You wouldn’t really expect many in Wales itself, because ‘mere’ is from the Old English. There are a few in Shropshire (including Ellesmere – the other end of the never-built Ellesmere canal on its way to Ellesmere Port) and there are some in the Fens and elsewhere. Apparently, there are a couple in Wales – near Wrexham and in Pembrokeshire. (I got this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_(lake)…).
As a Dutch person, we were taught German in secondary school and Meer/See were the textbook example of false friends:
het meer - der See - the lake
de zee - das Meer - the sea
I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.
"die See" refers to the sea in general, not to a specific body of water, unless it is part of a name, like "Nordsee".
The English word "sea" is also sometimes used in this sense, but it's less apparent since "the" carries no gender: "He liked living close to the sea." - doesn't really refer to a specific sea or ocean even though the definite article has been used. (I'm happy to be corrected if this is an ungrammatical sentence since I'm not a native English speaker)
Yeah, my mother tongue is similar, "sea" and "ocean" has the exact same word, so of course when I speak English I accidentally call a bunch of seas for oceans instead.
This is a well-established field where you can read experts discussing the word in depth, including its derivational properties and ablaut behavior. This isn't something where an HN's armchair guess is worth anything, just like when laypeople use HN threads on quantum theory for their own inane ideas.
Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch) are just a few of the philologists who have posited this "dead water" hypothesis
It's funny how you cited sources and rather than be given information you were just told that you were very wrong without any attempt to distill knowledge.
For someone in the field, teaching is work, while telling people they are wrong isn't. Unless you are paying good money, you don't have a right to the former instead of the latter. In any event, the GP (note: not the same as the OP) could just look for himself on the shadow libraries, which now have pretty much everything.
The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working today believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idée fixe of the scholar Robert Beekes well over a decade ago now, and very flawed research as Beekes was succumbing to dementia then. In fact, within the field "Pre-Greek!" has become something of an inside joke.
The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception for some paragraphs, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.
I don’t agree with this characterization of the article at all. What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is good, engaging writing.
The author does mention the possibility of more than one non-IE pre-Greek language, as well as the possibility of an Indo-European predecessor in the region.
There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.
Even for a non-linguist like myself, the article didn't feel right. I expected to find more information about the Thracians, who inhabited those lands for quite some time and left some extraordinary (albeit non-written) heritage.
Ya, barrrrmp!
disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how words and full languages moved around.
perhaps of interest was an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local languages became incomrehensable to distant
tribes, but the ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with marsupials.
Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.
Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.
English dog has had an etymology for the last 20 years or so (Gasiorowski's) that many find convincing. But with regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many of these words.
I have corresponded at length with composers who seemed to appreciate the interest. On the other hand, I know a composer (not even that famous, just successful enough) who has his copyist answer all correspondence with stock replies, since fans don't do anything for him and just annoy him; they aren't part of the ecosystem of commissioning works that is how he gets paid.
John Paul Hayward and Trevor Alan Gomes are fantastic musicians and have done well for themselves it seems but I highly doubt they have staff for that!
Some cultures would mind, China for instance: the anthropology of the CCP holds that the ability to labour is what makes us human and separates us from lower primates. Therefore, as AI grows more powerful and takes over jobs, it is important people be given other jobs to occupy their lives even if they are just makework.
When several EU countries are already struggling with large Indian Subcontinent communities that don't integrate (and dodge taxes and food-processing regs--Indians where I am have their own large underground cash-only food economy among themselves), opening up flow of people from Canada's mobile classes which has seen vast demographic change seems like it would only exacerbate the problem.
I am assuming you are somewhere in Europe and given your apparent dislike for Indians, let's look at an alternative narrative. As a Canadian of East Indian origin, I can tell you that if these individuals are Canadian citizens, they are very unlikely to leave Canada for Europe. If they are not Canadian citizens, the point is moot anyway. In fact, I would expect more European citizens of South Asian origin to move to Canada, where English is spoken, integration is generally easier and salaries are far higher. So, breathe easy.
Which countries are these? There's a large population of Indian immigrants in Ireland, who seem to be integrating fine and are not notably doing much tax dodging (they would largely work in high-skill PAYE jobs, where tax dodging is virtually impossible).
The point is that traffic streams are not unbroken: when there is a crosswalk and cars are obliged to stop in front of it in the presecence of a pedestrian, then the flow is broken.
Just blundering up to crosswalks because "they have to stop, hurr durr it's the law <foams at mouth>" results in a substantially more hazardous pedestrian (and driver) experience than timing your approach and using your body language so that the drivers know what you're gonna do and can take action to hedge against it.
There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional.
Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka.
Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units.
These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."
Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920s and even early 1930s saw architectual designs for public buildings that were remarkably modernist. Wikipedia has more than enough coverage if you want to learn more.
This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims.
Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details.
This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.
There is already an ecosystem of for-profit social events in European cities (and probably elsewhere) profiting off people's desire to meet up with other human beings when social opportunies have shrunk. Once has seen this on e.g. Meetup.com or Facebook for years now, where bot profiles are used to swell event-signup numbers so people think they will meet more people. Indeed, with the enshittification of Meetup, the only forces that prosper on that site are for-profit ones.
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