> a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more
> in fewer characters.
True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.
But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.
Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.
English has sometimes been called a creole, i.e. what was a pidgin language but after it has been spoken by several generations of native speakers. One thing it lost some time around the Norman Conquest was the case marking phonology (apart from some pronouns).
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think what he meant when he said that a "strict phonetic transcription" would be bad is phonetic vs. phonemic. Most writing systems (apart from things like Chinese) represent (some of) the phonemes of the language, not the phones (not phonetic). For example, in English we have two kinds of p-sounds: one is found in words like 'pill', the other in words like 'spill'. We write them both the same, because which sound the letter should take is determined by the environment: after an /s/, it's pronounced without a puff of air, elsewhere (or mostly elsewhere) it's pronounced followed by a puff of air. It's actually hard for most native speakers of English to tell the difference, although speakers of languages like Thai, where the two sounds can appear in the same environment and can be used to distinguish different words, can hear the difference just fine.
Bottom line: writing systems that are easy for native speakers to use, usually represent the phonemes of the language, not each phone.
I tried to do a little (web) research on this. It is of course the reason a prism separates white light into its components. I didn't find out much about sea water, though.
And then there's "slow glass", in which the passage of light through half an inch of glass takes years; the subject of the short story "Light of Other Days" :).
One of my favourite stories, heartbreaking though it is.
Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter wrote a novel of with the same title, but the two stories have nothing in common. It's worth a read in these surveillance heavy times.
I'm hoping the Streisand Effect will take hold, and this editorial becomes the most read article ever of that journal. I've posted this news on my FB (yes...) page. And I downloaded a PDF, in case the journal takes the editorial down.
Well, there is one problem here: not everyone is interested in diabetes/nutrition. So the Streisand effect may kick in with regards to the ousted individuals, but I am not sure it will generate more interest in the topic/paper at hand. For instance, I am not particularly interested in diabetes per se; I'd be more interested in molecular medicine and what not. Either way the current administration is very hostile to science. It is kind of a sign of a dictatorship model. Trump wants to be the final authority. His cognitive decline is enormous though, it's like a broken stick that will remain broken.
Good point, so here's how I worded my FB post without even mentioning diabetes (URL truncated here because that's how FB displays them, but it works):
"Scientists were ejected from a meeting of the American Diabetes Associate for distributing printouts of an editorial that had appeared in the ADA journal. Here's the link: https://diabetesjournals.org/.../Misguided-Brushes-of-a.... The article highlights "the many threats the current U.S. administration pose[s] to the health of our nation". I recommend that you do read it: it is not technical, you don't need to have a degree in medicine or biology to read it.
What do people not understand about the First Amendment?"
Now it is funny to look for signs enabling us to decide whether Trump presidency is a personal enrichment or a vanity project. It seems that it is both, but I can't decide what is more important to him.
Well, that may be true. I've heard that when a dog sees its master loving it, feeding it, caring for it (minus the vet visits, I guess), the dog thinks "My master must be god." When the cat sees its humans treating it well, the cat thinks "I must be god."
True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.
But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.
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