stevula

Possibly because there’s such scant linguistic evidence for the (undoubtedly many) pre-PIE languages in Europe? It’s hard to study something that didn’t leave behind much writing, if any. Basque being a notable exception to that, of course.

With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.

Greek has several things in favor of it being conservative: 1. It’s been a written language for longer than most other languages 2. It’s been the language of empires 3. It’s been a liturgical language With that said, I find Modern Greek speakers tend to overstate the similarities between Modern and Ancient Greek. The spelling is conservative but pronunciation is very different and conjugation/declension patterns have been significantly simplified.

Still there’s a lot more intelligibility than between English and Old English for example, which is a good example of how much can change in about 1000 years. Similar with French or Romanian and Latin.

People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.

An LLM can absolutely center a div and then use a browser MCP or playwright to visually validate that it was centered.

I think that is how the smarter agents do things? Just like Claude/ChatGPT sometimes does a web search they can do other tool calls instead of just making a statistical guess. Of course it doesn’t always make the bright choice between those options though…

Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even have trial (three).

Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.

I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases following that pattern?

Most tools do, yes.

Probably “more”

There are plenty of unvaccinated people this side of the border and it seems to be a growing trend. If the government is going to intern people in close quarters then they should probably make sure to vaccinate them. I would not be optimistic about the level of medical care sick patients will have access to in this scenario.

If they paid for themselves then the DoT wouldn’t have a multibillion dollar highway budget, and that’s not even including all the state funding.

To preserve backwards compatibility and not require all those old sites to update, the legacy behavior would have to be the default, with opt-in for the new behavior.

I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).

Why stop there? It’s in meat, water, mother’s milk, and newborns are even born with microplastics already in them.

The problem is other people/teams making PRs to your code that you then have to maintain or fix later. It’s in your interest not to half-ass the review, creating an asymmetric amount of work for you vs them.