Lvxferre

A good definition of witch hunting would be “to publicly label one or more individuals as belonging to an undesired group, with little to no regard to accuracy”. It fits really well what the article claims those users to be doing.

Since Contramuffin answered most of it, I’ll focus on the diacritics.

The acute in *ḱ *ǵ *ǵʰ shows that they aren’t the same as *k *g *gʰ. Odds are that the ones with an acute were pronounced with the tongue a bit fronted (palatalised).

The acute over other consonants, plus in *é *ó, is something else entirely. It’s the accent - you’re supposed to pronounce those consonants with a higher pitch. “Yay, consistency” /s

The macron over *ē *ō is to show that the vowel is loooong.

Those floating ⟨ʰ⟩ refer to aspiration. Aspiration is that “puff” of air that you release when you say ⟨pill, till, kill⟩ but not when you say ⟨spill, still, skill⟩. In English this is not distinctive, but in a lot of other Indo-European languages it is, and the mainstream hypothesis is that it was distinctive in PIE itself.

In the meantime, a floating ⟨ʷ⟩ means that the consonant is pronounced with rounded lips. The difference between something like *kʷ and *kw is mostly that the first one behaves like a single consonant, the other as two.

That ring under some consonants is to highlight that they’re syllabic, as if they were LARPing as vowels. It’s a lot like writing “button” as “buttn̥”.

If you ever see *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ etc., pretend that that “ə” is “h₁”. It’s simply different ways to annotate the same stuff.

*H means “this is *h₁ or *h₂ or *h₃, but we have no clue on which”.

four *kʷetwóres == french “quatorze”… 🤔

Close: it’s French quatre (4), not “quatorze” (14). It goes like this: PIE *kʷetwóres → Latin ⟨quattuor⟩ /kʷattuor/ → Old French ⟨quatre, catre⟩ /kʷatɾə/~/katɾə/ → contemporary French ⟨quatre⟩ /katʁ(ə)/.

French ⟨quatorze⟩ does contain that *kʷetwóres, but it’s only the “quator-”. The “-ze” is from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥ (10). This gets easier to see in Latin, as the word for 14 was ⟨quattuordecim⟩ (literally four-ten).

Note that almost all English words that you used to translate the PIE words are also examples of those PIE words being still in use nowadays - they’re direct descendants, for example *kʷis → who, *éǵh₂ → I, etc. In English, German, Swedish and other Germanic languages, this gets a bit obscured due to some old sound change called Grimm’s Law. (EDIT: the only exception is the second line - *túh, *te became “thou, thee”.)

This is mostly correct so I’ll focus on small specific details, OK?

Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you’ll also see them before things that you don’t expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn’t use it.

It is kind of “guesswork” but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an “anything goes”.

The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they’re simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it’s more like the sound in “oh-oh” than like [h]. And some argue that they aren’t even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).

[Shameless advertisement: we have a linguistics community, !linguistics@mander.xyz . I’m the mod there; I apologise for the relative lack of activity nowadays, but everyone is welcome to post this sort of stuff there.]

What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.

I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.

Brandolini’s Law is great to keep in mind when discussing online - because as you’re busy refuting a piece of bullshit, the bullshitter is pumping out nine other bullshits in its place, so discussing with obvious bullshitters is a lost cause.

On a lighter side pointing the bullshit out is considerably easier/faster than to refute it, but still useful - as whoever is reading the discussion will notice it. As such, when you see clear signs of bullshit*, a good strategy is to point it out and then explicitly disengage.

*such as distorting what others say, assuming, using certain obvious fallacies/stupidities, screeching when someone points out a fallacy, etc.

Hohenheim, in the meantime: “visiting my children? Teaching them how to cope with loss? Nah, too busy chitchatting with the souls granting me immortality.”

The one that I tasted was the red piranha, the same as in the video. The taste is… okay, not delectable but not awful; it’s simply a bit too strong. It goes great on soups/stews though.

That’s some awesome effort for the sake of a silly joke.

Training to become the beast of the Nile!

In the meantime, my nephew be like: [no answer]

…although it’s unfair to call it “male communication” as I know exactly whom he got that shitty habit from, his grandma (my mum).

I gave it a check. If Pocketpair plays it smart they can make Nintendo look like a herd of muppets in the court, and even potentially acting on bad faith. Pocketpair might also simply change a few elements of its own game through an update, much like PvZ replacing Michael Jackson zombie with a disco zombie.

I’m not even sure how much patents apply to games.

Nor the whole idea of capturing opponents to raise them and make them fight for you. That’s from 1987 already, from the Shin Megami Tensei series; it predates Pokemon by a fair bit.

Good catch - you’re right.

Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.

I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.

Embrace the paradox: «è un schifo ale lubię to».

Of course they do. Beans, no poop challenge, ???, profit!!! repeat as needed.

(…we need more memes!)

The [hi]story of my life in a single pic. (My tarot deck is even the same as the one in the pic, a Rider-Waite.)

Absurdity is like seeing your cat go “mrwn! mrwn!” at the passing plane, then suddenly flying and catching it. Then cruelty is what your cat does with the passengers.

You’re mincing words to not acknowledge the blatant qualitative difference between what those Greek philosophers were doing under the label “natural philosophy”, versus what people past Bacon (exemplified in your comment by Newton) were doing.

And, as a result, your comment boils down to an “ackshyually” leading to a clearly idiotic conclusion.

Even Pythagorean astronomy was implicitly testing

Emphasis mine. Doing it “implicitly” doesn’t cut it out; this shit needs to be explicit and systematic. You need to take the bloody window off the car and see if it still moves, then take off the lights, so goes on.

Even when direct experimentation is not possible due to the nature of the subject, you need to formulate a bunch of alternative explanations and find a way to sort them out. i.e. explicitly test shit.

And this is so fucking obvious that I’m not wasting my time further with you. If you’re so blatantly ignorant on the scientific method, Wikipedia is a good start.