I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play? If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
>> It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true?
>I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?
I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language.
By "subdued", I meant that (again, from what I understood), the Rébus principle is the first "interaction" between the spoken and written language, and the "acrophonic principle" goes a step further in a sense, so that the written language is not anymore an independent system, but a symbolic representation of the spoken language (sounds -> symbols).
This is quite counter-intuitive to me, hence my asking about it.
* It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true? It would intuitively seem to me that a written language is easier to organize into clean rules and principles, contrasted to a spoken language. Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?
I think the parent is maybe referring to something else, that I also heard in a documentary: that all writing systems with a "reduced" alphabet descend from the same source.
I guess the japanese case is a counterexample to this, but the idea was, iirc, that writing systems appeared at different places, and followed this pattern:
* At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to.
* These evolve to symbols.
* Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols.
This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are.
* Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound.
If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound.
The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment.
It does sound a bit much.
I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!
I feel like linuxfr.org also deserves a mention: had pretty thorough articles on lots of subject, as far as I could judge them (and knowledgeable members!).
What's the best way to ventilate an old european house during winter?
I've taken up the habit of letting my bedroom windows (slightly) open at nighttime to have fresh air while sleeping.
I'm unsure this is really wise ecologically since outside air == cold air, but at the same time, there is no other way to get fresh air…
Personal experience:
I came to like mathematics by way of computer science: so first got an understanding and appreciation for discrete maths, logic, etc, and only later on analysis and “phyisics” related mathematics.
It's hard to say exactly why, but I'd wager it's the following: discrete maths is easy to formalize and axiomatize for first year student, so you quickly get a grasp of the “rules of the game”: what axioms you're allowed to use, how an argument works, etc.
On the contrary, when you learn first year analysis, you see all those theorems talking about this (intuitively very simple but) quite complex object – the reals – of which you don't know the axioms (say linearly ordered field something something).
Thus, when you learn about the basics results, you're faced with a kind of two-faced problem: on the one hand, all the basic results are intuitively obvious, while on the other, you have no idea how to build a proof because you don't know what facts you can safely use.
I don't really know how to phrase all that, but discarding the CS/axiomatic side of maths while praising the intuitive physics-inspired one is not the right approach imo.
which seems promising, from an outsider's perspective.
But I guess it's not the same league, even though it seems olive aims at being professional grade (well, which project doesn't)
I'm no expert but it seemed to me the whole Pascal, Modula, Oberon story is in big part about Wirth chasing/exploring some optimal/balanced¹ programming language.
So, it makes a lot of sense to have many variants and an evolution retracing both his learnings and opinions (that can change with time, and do, hopefully) and exploring different variations on a common theme.
And developping an OS in any of these languages is pretty much a real-life test of their adequacy (meaning they are not just some vacuous formal exercise).
Iirc, Wirth achieved some relatively lean but powerful languages at some point.
Also, I don't understand your opposition to writing a kernel in some form of Oberon, but accepting pretty much any other language/paradigm ?
Well, thanks for telling me that!
I went swisscom-> mbudget on my fixed line but it seems wingo offers the full 1gbs up/dow for less than I pay now for mbudget mini. Guess I'll change soon
On the subject of side/long term effects of covid:
I've heard, second-hand from doctors/physicians, that the long term effects of covid are not necessarily that bad compared to e.g. the flu.
The argument being that:
1. covid has been one of the most studied viruses of this kind, so that you have good chances of stumbling upon lots of size effects, simply due to the sheer size of scrutiny.
2. a bad flu also can yield nasty side effects, but we don't talk about that that much.
I don't know what to make of that, and since it's second-hand information, I don't even know how true it is… can anyone shed some light on these arguments?
And for the international market, probably "swiss" is mostly to be understood as "not american/russian/chinese"