zompist bboard

KathAveara wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:Are we sure the earth is really round?

Good question. Who is 'we'? I've certainly never seen first-hand evidence that the Earth is round.

Yes you have.

I don't look out of planes once we're off the ground. More interesting things are inside.

KathAveara wrote:I don't look out of planes once we're off the ground. More interesting things are inside.

You like watching people shifting uncomfortably in seats and struggling down the aisles?

KathAveara wrote:I don't look out of planes once we're off the ground. More interesting things are inside.

You don't have to look to see.
Other times you'll have observed the roundness of the earth (if you were looking) include climbing trees or being in tall buildings, and standing near the sea. Also, any time you travelled any significant distance, provided that you experienced either day (shadows) or night (stars) at either end. Or not, even, assuming that you have mass and are thus affected by gravity. The first two actually wouldn't apply if you only travelled longitudinally - but then you'd be able to observe the shortening or lengthening effect on the day.
Furthermore, observation of when people are online on the internet would strongly support the hypothesis of timezones - and although individual personal testimony would be second-hand for you, you have first-hand experience of the existence of overwhelming personal testimony regarding timezones. Watching live sporting events is also evidence of this. You also have first-hand experience of seeing images of the earth from space and from aeroplanes, which should be independently persuasive even in the absence of first-hand evidence regarding their provenance.

Of course, you may never have bothered to take note of all this evidence, but it doesn't mean it hasn't been presented to you!

Drydic Guy wrote:You like watching people shifting uncomfortably in seats and struggling down the aisles?

Try the stuff I brought onto the plane to amuse myself.

Salmoneus wrote:Other times you'll have observed the roundness of the earth (if you were looking) include climbing trees or being in tall buildings, and standing near the sea. Also, any time you travelled any significant distance, provided that you experienced either day (shadows) or night (stars) at either end. Or not, even, assuming that you have mass and are thus affected by gravity. The first two actually wouldn't apply if you only travelled longitudinally - but then you'd be able to observe the shortening or lengthening effect on the day.
Furthermore, observation of when people are online on the internet would strongly support the hypothesis of timezones - and although individual personal testimony would be second-hand for you, you have first-hand experience of the existence of overwhelming personal testimony regarding timezones. Watching live sporting events is also evidence of this. You also have first-hand experience of seeing images of the earth from space and from aeroplanes, which should be independently persuasive even in the absence of first-hand evidence regarding their provenance.

Of course, you may never have bothered to take note of all this evidence, but it doesn't mean it hasn't been presented to you!

All the trees I've climbed have never afforded a view of the horizon; when I went up the Empire State Building, I was looking at the city, not the horizon; at the beach, I'm more interested in the beach; I'm not that observant - I couldn't tell the difference between anywhere and England during the day (going by shadows), and I'm never up late enough at night; it's all second-hand anyway.

In all seriousness, this is thoroughly pointless, and I really don't know why it's happening. I quite simply have the compulsion to offer help wherever I perceive it to be required. I am exceedingly bad at working out where it actually isn't required.

Just because you deliberately aren't looking at the evidence doesn't mean it isn't firsthand. You're just refusing to look at it.

Therefore I have not experienced it.

KathAveara wrote:Therefore I have not experienced it.

Yes you have. You just haven't thought about it.

Is this discussion even necessary? What I experience is subjective. You think I would because you would; I think I wouldn't because I recall I did not.

KathAveara wrote:Is this discussion even necessary? What I experience is subjective. You think I would because you would; I think I wouldn't because I recall I did not.

What you see is not subjective, though how you see it is. If you have your eyes open and they function correctly and you're conscious, then you have seen whatever is in front of you. The evidence is there. The fact you have not focused your concentration on it, or thought about it, or remembered it afterwards, does not mean that you did not see it.

Salmoneus wrote:and you're conscious

We may have problems there (in the interest of humour).

I have literally watched boats come and go over the horizon

Don't eat the newcomers. It's in the house rules and everything.

Not to mention the argument is utterly vacant. If I really must do this, then: "observations" become "evidence" when you are weighing them for how well they support a hypothesis; otherwise they are merely observations. You make observations all day, every day - probably millions of them if you count all the little things that only barely register on the mind - and in principle any or all of them could be evidence of something. And you are seriously faulting someone for not drawing all the conclusions it's conceivably possible to draw from what they've witnessed? You'd better be prepared to defend the claim that you have done so yourself, then.

I don't mean to be insulting, but this is really is called argument by pig-headedness, i.e. claiming that a conclusion everyone else has already accepted as true is in fact false, without accepting the burden of proof for that claim. I'm not quite sure why everyone is getting so worked up about it though, since I have to assume this is basically being done in jest.

Several rather specific animal names:

drake (male duck)
flange (a group of baboons)
jill (female of various animal species)
jack (male of various animal species)
sawt (a group of lions; "pride" is more common and, in that sense, is quite technical)
shoat (recently weaned piglet)

Then there's also pip (1/10,000 of a currency unit, used in forex trading; similar to "basis points"), and various less-common non-metric units of measurement like the thou (1/1000 of an inch), chain, link, rod, perch, gill, grain, and - oddly - the quart, which isn't seen that often even in America (most of its uses having been subsumed by liters/pints/gallons).

Cud.

Also, has no one read this thread before posting? It's a bit ridiculous.

Mongolian has 'shaa' which means 'fuck.' Such a simple sound to mean 'fuck.' Any word starting with 'Sha' I imagine sounds to them like shiitake mushrooms sounds to us.

Crosswords are great for these though, like Tret.

Viktor77 wrote:Mongolian has 'shaa' which means 'fuck.' Such a simple sound to mean 'fuck.' Any word starting with 'Sha' I imagine sounds to them like shiitake mushrooms sounds to us.

Ain't English "fuck" exact equally simple sound? And do words like "factorial" sound ludicrous to English ears?

No, because it's a different sound. We are tittered by words that look like they should be pronounced beginning with "fuck", even though they tend to be place names like Fukuoka or Phuket.

"shit" is such a common series of letters in japanese that i hardly notice it anymore. I was teaching someone how to pronounce the word "receipt" properly last week and it wasn't until I looked back up that I realised I'd written "reshit" on the board as my guide for how it's pronounced in japanese.

bulbaquil wrote:the quart, which isn't seen that often even in America (most of its uses having been subsumed by liters/pints/gallons).

It isn't? What does milk come in?

Also, the one brand of kefir sold around here is sold in one-quart containers, and I don't think they had that before this year. So it's not like it's an archaic unit only used for one thing.

finlay wrote:No, because it's a different sound. We are tittered by words that look like they should be pronounced beginning with "fuck", even though they tend to be place names like Fukuoka or Phuket.

"shit" is such a common series of letters in japanese that i hardly notice it anymore. I was teaching someone how to pronounce the word "receipt" properly last week and it wasn't until I looked back up that I realised I'd written "reshit" on the board as my guide for how it's pronounced in japanese.

Do the Japanese pronounce 'shi' as [si]?

Japanese 'shi' is [ɕi].

din wrote:

finlay wrote:No, because it's a different sound. We are tittered by words that look like they should be pronounced beginning with "fuck", even though they tend to be place names like Fukuoka or Phuket.

"shit" is such a common series of letters in japanese that i hardly notice it anymore. I was teaching someone how to pronounce the word "receipt" properly last week and it wasn't until I looked back up that I realised I'd written "reshit" on the board as my guide for how it's pronounced in japanese.

Do the Japanese pronounce 'shi' as [si]?

No the point was trying to remind her not to say shi. Why do you think we write shi if they pronounced it si? That makes no sense. (in reality it is pretty much the reverse and it's permissible to romanise shi as si instead)

(Actually her problem was slightly different because she was pronouncing the p, unusually for Japanese because their nativised loan is レシート or "reshīto" with no p)

finlay wrote:

din wrote:

finlay wrote:No, because it's a different sound. We are tittered by words that look like they should be pronounced beginning with "fuck", even though they tend to be place names like Fukuoka or Phuket.

"shit" is such a common series of letters in japanese that i hardly notice it anymore. I was teaching someone how to pronounce the word "receipt" properly last week and it wasn't until I looked back up that I realised I'd written "reshit" on the board as my guide for how it's pronounced in japanese.

Do the Japanese pronounce 'shi' as [si]?

No the point was trying to remind her not to say shi. Why do you think we write shi if they pronounced it si? That makes no sense. (in reality it is pretty much the reverse and it's permissible to romanise shi as si instead)

I knew it was pronounced [ɕi]. I intentionally asked the question because I was confused, since you said that you wrote 'reshit' as a "guide for how it's pronounced in Japanese", which I interpreted as "how receipt is can be properly pronounced using an invented spelling that would be more intuitive to a Japanese speaker" rather than the intended "how the word receipt was borrowed into Japanese and how it would look if English re-borrowed it"

More often than not, Japanese speakers are quite poor at differentiating [ɕi] and [si]. I guess he was probably spelling it that way explicitly to draw attention to the sound difference.