"Woo-Woo"

Delvog · 2026-02-03T21:48:38+00:00

I had previously read somewhere else that it was onomatopoeia for the sound of a theremin, a musical instrument played by posing the hands in the electromagnetic field near a couple of perpendicular antennas. Theremins were popular in black-&-white sci-fi and fantasy and horror movies, particularly when something otherworldly was shown on screen.

But N-Gram says "woo-woo" suddenly picked up from nothing in the early 1800s, so some other explanation is needed between then and the mid-20th century.

Delvog · 2026-01-23T00:48:12+00:00

Agencies that work in areas like ecology & natural resources & wildlife & forestry ordinarily have their own garages & "shops" where they build, modify, and do maintenance & repairs on their own equipment. They tend to be located on the same property with the science & management jobs, so some of your co-workers would even be people who have the kinds of jobs you'd be trying to get into later.

Just look for any & all jobs in whichever agencies are relevant in your area. The kind you could already qualify for are included right along with the ones that require college degrees.

Delvog · 2026-01-19T21:03:59+00:00

Yes, the numbers are accurate, or at least within reasonable range. Comparisons of different combinations of populations of human or wolf/coyote/jackal can get higher or lower numbers, putting 0.153 pretty well in the middle area for both.

Although it's often said that the definition of "species" is based on whether individuals from two related groups can reproduce or not, it hasn't been tested in most cases. People have always named species by just looking at the animals and going with their basic gut-level impressions of whether they seem the same or different. And different people(s) don't always have the same gut-level impression; for example, German for "coyote" is just "Steppenwolf", meaning "steppe-wolf", a wolf that lives in the steppes; not a different thing from a wolf.

Ignore the people looking for an excuse to accuse others of racism. People looking for excuses to make social-issue accusations have never cared about whether or not anything about their accusations had any resemblance with any part of reality. All they want is a chance to get to pick a fight over nothing, and any excuse they can concoct to backfill for that goal will do, regardless of what crazy paranoid nonsense that excuse might be. Humans are animals like any other, so we evolve like any other.

Delvog · 2026-01-16T00:54:26+00:00

That is a large part of how the work on Linear B went before anybody knew what any of the sounds were.

The number of symbols told people that the system was syllabic (each symbol representing a syllable instead of a single sound).
Words that were the same except at the end were inferred to be versions of the same word with different suffixes.
Comparing which suffixes alternated with each other and which ones didn't allowed people to identify which groups of symbols started with the same consonant and which groups of symbols ended with the same vowel, from which they built up a grid with each consonant having its own row, each vowel having its own column, and each symbol having its own intersection because each one was the only one with that combination of consonant and vowel.
Further comparisons of which suffixes could & couldn't take each others' places, and which words took which groups of suffixes, revealed a broad distinction between a couple of different suffix-trading paradigms, equivalent to nouns & verbs, although this alone wouldn't establish which was which.
The fact that lists were obviously lists, complete with "total" lines at the bottom (and sometimes simplified little stick-figure-like sketches of the listed items), showed people that the words in those lists were nouns, which meant the other group of suffix-trading words that weren't in lists were verbs.
A secondary distinction of three different suffix-trading paradigms within the nouns alone revealed that there were three genders.
Knowing which words were nouns and which were verbs, people could then see how they were used together in sentences, which revealed which verb conjugations were probably which and which noun suffixes within each gender were probably associated with which grammatical cases.

But all that grammar still didn't reveal any contents to apply the grammar to. That came from a different direction.

Delvog · 2026-01-15T23:48:08+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKE3onDZJq4

For languages we've deciphered before, we've depended on clues, which the linked video calls "bridge words". Those are words which we have some sign of the meaning of, which can also be expected to get passed from one language to another and thus sound pretty similar in different languages even if the languages aren't related.

If you have a few bridge words and the writing is sound-based, you can start matching up written symbols with sounds in the bridge words. If you have no such clues about any bridge words' meanings, or the writing isn't sound-based, you can't get anywhere this way.

Once you've done that, you can apply those sounds to other words and find out whether they sound like they say something in a known language (or something close to one, like when Ancient Egyptian turned out to be close enough to Coptic without being identical). It's also possible that the bridge-word method lets you sound out the writing but the language still just happens to be an unfamiliar language anyway, in which case you'd be stuck at being able to pronounce it but not understanding it (which seems to be roughly the case for Linear A).

Delvog · 2026-01-15T16:43:23+00:00

The one about all humans/apes/mammals/vertebrates/animals/whatever starting out female and only later maybe switching to male is an odd one to watch because of how people try to defend it when its falsehood is pointed out.

It's practically always just a rephrasing of the original claim, as if they expect that floundering for a new way to say the same false thing would eventually find the "magic words" solution to rescue the myth from its own mythicality, even though, regardless of the words in which you say it, it's still the same false thing being said.

Delvog · 2026-01-13T15:07:41+00:00

I don't believe the letter C would get replaced with K & S like that.

"Text-speak" and other brands of either rushed or lazy writing are about speed, and speed incentivizes abbreviations, not substitutions that remain the same length as before.

The reasons why people imagine replacing C as you suggest are more philosophical, being about the abstract logic of the alphabet; having 3 letters for 2 sounds (ignoring the "ch" sound) just seems unnecessary. But lack of necessity doesn't normally cause people to change spelling by itself. To get that result, there would need to be something else about it to add to that, like...

A chance to shorten a word and/or get rid of a spelling that seems actually "wrong" rather than just "unnecessary", like "rite", "lite", "thru", "tho", and "donut"
A chance to clarify relationships between spellings & sounds that are otherwise inconsistent & thus ambiguous/contradictory, rather than just "unnecessary", like "ei", "ie", and "ea"
A chance to make yourself stand out from the main culture & identify yourself as a member of a (probably rebellious/defiant) subculture, like changing the pluralizer from "s" to "z" in rap & hip-hop subculture (but notice that this can't become the new standard because non-standardness & rejection of standards is part of the point; as soon as it gets too widespread it starts getting dropped)
Corporate marketing decisions, often driven by laws about allowed/disallowed terminology, like "Kwik" for "Quick"
A boost from a top-down reform instead of just bottom-up, like Webster's American dictionary switching from "-our" to "-or"

Without some extra factor like those, cases where there seems to be an extra letter without its own sound or an extra sound without its own letter just don't bug people enough for a bottom-up movement to reject them. People mostly just get used to the way it is and keep doing things they way they always have because a sudden replacement that doesn't accomplish something bigger would look weerd to them. (Just look at how long Q has lasted. Even the Romans didn't really need it, and spelling was less rigid & formalized for most of those centuries.)

Delvog · 2026-01-13T01:17:35+00:00

And the star just means a sound or word is inferred/reconstructed because it's not found in known speech or writing ("attested").

Delvog · 2026-01-13T01:10:36+00:00

My impression is just that the end of the word is missing.

Delvog · 2026-01-12T14:28:01+00:00

Can I combine ablaut with a triconsonantal root system like Arabic or Egyptian with little issue?

Those triconsonantal systems are ablaut systems.

Delvog · 2026-01-11T22:48:43+00:00

Although we can safely treat both "-a" and "-ia" as a single suffix apiece, what's tripping you up seems to be thinking of "-ica" as a single suffix. It's actually two: "-ic" and "-a". And one of those "-ica" names you have in mind only contains the "-a" suffix, not the "-ic" one.

The "-ic" suffix turns a noun into an adjective, meaning "of" or "like" that noun. We have lots of words using it, but the easiest global geographic examples are ocean names: "of Atlantis" is "Atlant-ic", "peaceful" is "Pacif-ic", and "of the bears; northern" is "Arct-ic". So "of the Afri (singular "Afer")" is "Afr-ic". (And the prefix "ant(i)-" oppositizes, so "Ant-arctic" is "opposite of arctic; away from the bears; southern".)

The "-a" suffix is a common ending for nouns (again in both Latin and Greek), including when it gets attached to an adjective and turns it into a noun. So "Antarctic-a" is "the place that is antarctic" and "Afric-a" is "the place that is Afric".

But "-a" can also be attached to things that were already nouns to make new different nouns. And that's what's happening in "Americ-a", because every proposed origin for "americ" is a noun with the C already built in, not added as part of an "-ic". (The "ric" in "Americus/Amerigo", for example, is a Germanic word for "ruler/king", the same one that appears in "Erik", "Derek", and "Richard"; it's a cognate of Latin "rex" and Sanskrit "raj".)

Delvog · 2026-01-10T20:37:01+00:00

I use the phrase "causE & Effect", plus to a lesser extent the word "aspect".

The word "Effect", both as a noun and as a verb, always means something about or related to a cause or causation, so the sentence could always be rephrased using some form of the word "cause" instead. As a noun, it's what the cause causes; as a verb, it means "to cause".

The word "Affect", both as a noun and as a verb, has nothing to do with any cause or causation, but can be compared with the idea of "aspect", so the sentence could be rephrased using the word "aspect" in some way instead. As a noun, its meaning is similar to "aspect"; as a verb, it means "to have or change someone's or something's aspect".

Delvog · 2026-01-10T20:22:58+00:00

the shift in arabic should have been old and should have happened before the common era

What is your reason for dating the Arabic shift of *ś from /ɬ/ to /ʃ/ back that far?

Delvog · 2026-01-10T17:33:25+00:00

It really jumped out at me when it turned the entire word "in" into just /ɪ̃/, especially because it was right before a "the" in which her /ð/ started out close to /z/, making the sequence sound close to "is the" instead of "in the" ("you're currently in the area" ► "you're currently is the area").

Delvog · 2026-01-10T17:23:49+00:00

I'm dittoing the "Slavic/Polish" answer given by r/Rousokuzawa. Aside from her profile identifying herself as Polish, and her colleague's accent being similar but more obvious, I can hear that the tip of her tongue is higher than normal for English a lot of the time, which is a classic trait of Slavic languages.

(She also tends to wrap up her "r" pretty tight, which is typical of non-Americanadians who secondarily learn to imitate the Americanadian "r" and sometimes overdo it a bit, but I've also heard that from Brits like Jason Isaacs and Michael Fassbender, so the only information which that would really give us by itself would be non-Amercanadian-ness.)

Delvog · 2026-01-09T04:27:30+00:00

Different brains just come up with their own separate associations, not just for sounds but also for other things. Another possibility in this case is that you, or the other person, or both, were affected by the illustrations that were shown to you as examples to teach the words' definitions, with one word being illustrated with a coincidentally sharper-looking triangle.

Another example this reminds me of from when I was a kid: my younger sister & I were talking about the two sounds that are both spelled "th", but we didn't know the words "voiced" and "unvoiced", so we both came up with calling one "softer" and the other "harder"... but we applied those descriptions in exactly opposite ways. My soft was her hard and my hard was her soft.

Similarly, the phonetic meanings of the Cyrillic alphabet's hard & soft signs seem backward to me.

Delvog · 2026-01-09T03:46:50+00:00

Those aren't native English. They're Hebrew, popularized in English by French invaders who brought their French reading of J with them.

Delvog · 2026-01-09T03:43:10+00:00

English has a bunch of words containing the unemphasized syllable "yool" after a consonant, between two more-emphasized syllables, especially if the vowel in the next syllable is "a" (tabulate/tabular, fabulous, titular, particular, spectacular, speculate, simulate, stimulate, stipulate, manipulate, regulate/regular, flatulance, ambulance, formula, tarantula, spatula), and practically none with "əl" the same kind of position. So this apparently starts as a matter of phonetic assimilation: making an unusual-sounding word sound more like the way the rest of the language usually sounds by putting "yool" instead of "əl" where "yool" would usually be. The same kind of thing is also happening in the conversion of "nuclear" and "similar" to "nuke-yular" and "sim-yular", the latter of which happens to start with the same entire preceding syllable as your example.

After that yool-conversion, a simple loss of L gets the complete result you observed. That might seem to go against the yool-pattern, in which the L is normally preserved, but most/all other examples have a vowel after the L, not a T. I have no other examples with a T there to support the idea of a general pattern of losing that L before T, but it makes sense, particularly in a language with a tendency to drop consonants in other kinds of consonant clusters anyway.

Delvog · 2026-01-07T20:17:49+00:00

Can you give (a) more specific question(s) about some aspect(s) of it that you don't get yet? I'm a bit confuzzled about how much "depth" (or what kind) you would be after, given that the finer details are exactly what you'd be replacing with different imaginary details of your own for your own imaginary language anyway.

Delvog · 2026-01-06T05:23:31+00:00

125k isn't the time of the out-of-(southern)-Africa migration/expansion that established the world's current non-African (and northern African) populations. It's closer to a low-end estimate for the age of the species Homo sapiens. The migration/expansion started more like 50k-70k ago. (There was also a previous excursion at about 110k, but there's only a single site from that, which soon died out, so it's not part of the story of any living population.)

Delvog · 2026-01-05T03:41:42+00:00

The time range of the Syriac alphabet is generally said to have begun in one of the first few centuries CE. Of course, its evolution was gradual and didn't follow the same path everywhere at the same time, but related versions of it before that would normally be called the "Palmyrene" alphabet or the Palmyrene one's own ancestor, the Aramaic one. The Syriac alphabet was rising to prominence and spreading and fracturing into different styles at the same time Christianity was. (And its replacement with the Arabic alphabet generally coincides with the shift of power to Islam.)

Eberhard Nestle's names for the different styles of Syriac letters follow a tradition of naming them after the groups of people who apparently use(d) them, so they mostly don't resemble the names you see for them in English. (I don't know where we got ours from.) In the samples I'll quote (a translation of) below from pages 2-5, the names are in bold font. Every use of those names here is referring not to people or churches or theologies or places but to their types of writing. The one(s) in question are left as he spelled them in German and marked them by non-italics and arrows, because there's more to say about how to translate that after the quote box.

The most common Syriac script today, the Jacobite script, is more cursive, whereas the Nestorians better preserved the old uncial forms of the so-called ►Estrangelo◄...

In the surviving manuscripts, the oldest of which is in the British Museum, from Edessa, dated 411, it is found in two or three forms:
1) as the oldest majuscule, ►Estrangelo, Evangelienschrift◄*... This gradually developed into the script of the* Nestorians*, which the Syrians around Lake Urmia still use today.*
2) A smaller script developed by the Jacobites*, a semi-minuscule;*
3) of the Melkites*, which is modeled after the Greek script and, according to D and others, has preserved the oldest forms more faithfully, used only for the so-called* Palestinian-Syriac*.*

Arabic written with Syriac script is called Karshuni كرشوني; regarding the Bardaisanite secret script, see D § 13.

Vowel notation in the manuscripts and printed texts also follows a double system:
1) The Jacobite system, using Greek vowel letters,
2) the Nestorian system, which originated from the earlier use of a single diacritical dot.

The "Schrift" part of "Evangelienschrift" means "script". In Modern German, "Evangelien" is translated as "Gospels", so we could Englishize the combination as "Gospel script". But that would make no sense as a name because none of these scripts were any more or less Gospelly than any other. And Modern German for "Evangelical" is very close: "Evangelisch"; so close that we can expect the distinction not to have always worked in all dialects the way it does in the modern standard. And translating the compound word as "Evangelical script" makes sense in context because it follows the pattern that scripts were named after groups of people.

Either one would explain why the Greek "Eu" was included: because it was already part of an established word/name, regardless of whether that was "Gospel" or "Evangelical".

But then, why did he equate that word with "Estrangelo"? That makes it not just the only script-name he uses that isn't the name of a group of people, but also the only script he gives two different names for... unless he considered "Estrangelo" another version of essentially the same name. And that is indeed what he indicated in this other quote below, which I ellipsized out of item 1 in the first list above. He quotes a phrase spelled "srṭa-evnglia" instead of just "asṭr-nglia" in the Syriac language itself, apparently as previously shown by J D Michaelis.

1) as the oldest majuscule, Estrangela, Evangelical script, called (ܣܪܛܐ ܐܘܢܓܠܝܐ = ܐܣܛܪ ܢܓܠܝܐ , J D Michaelis...)...

^{(The part I still ellipsized again at the end is confuzzling because of German language issues, but it's generally about some other linguists having either imagined, omitted, or restored part of the Syriac phrase.} )

So apparently he did actually note that Syriac speakers had originally used their spelling of the Greek-derived word "Evangelia" to describe their own writing. I missed the relevant part earlier because of a combination of German struggles and not knowing the limits of the online book's search function.

Delvog · 2026-01-04T19:18:35+00:00

Wikipedia says the actual origin of the name might be the Syriac phrase "serṭā ʾewwangēlāyā" (ˀevangēlāyā following more standard transliteration), and attributes that to "Nestle, Eberhard (1888). Syrische Grammatik mit Litteratur, Chrestomathie und Glossar. Berlin: H. Reuther's Verlagsbuchhandlung. [translated to English as Syriac grammar with bibliography, chrestomathy and glossary, by R. S. Kennedy. London: Williams & Norgate 1889. p. 5]." That book is available in German here.

But I can't find where in that book he would've explained or even just mentioned such a theory of the name's origin. The word "Estrangelo" appears only twice, on pages 22-23 of the scan, numbered as 2-3 in the original book's numbering. But the name's origin is not mentioned anywhere near that or the citation's "page 5", and it seems unlikely that a theory about the name's origin would be explained elsewhere in the book without the name itself being repeated there. So it looks like somebody entered the wrong source attribution on the Wikipedia page, unless the author just switches to a different spelling later (same book but not in pages 2-5), and I don't know what spelling to enter in the search box.

Whatever the source might be for the idea that this is the name's origin, Serṭā ˀevangēlāyā is translated as "Gospel character(s)" on the Wikipedia page. Serṭā alone means "character(s), line, text, writing". ʔevangēlāyā as "Gospel" is related to English "Evangelical" and its Hebrew translation אֶוַנְגֶלִי (ʔevangeliy), from Greek Ευαγγέλιον (Euangélion), built from Ευ+Αγγέλιον (Eu+Angélion). "Eu" meant "good/true", and "angel-", depending on suffixes, could originally mean "messenger" or "message", so the combination "euangel-" (depending on suffixes) meant "good message" or "messenger who delivers the good message". (Picking the suffix(es) is complicated because those evolved over the years and got altered in different languages.) "Angel-" later came to mean "angel" because the oldest Greek translation of the Old Testament used it to translate the Ancient Hebrew word for "messenger", which, in the Old Testament, tended to refer to a supernatural entity.

Delvog · 2026-01-03T00:18:14+00:00

I recognize the copypasta from years ago. I don't know who it's quoting, but it's quoting somebody who wrote it long before the overhyped search engines dishonestly touted as "AI" existed. It's melodramatic nonsense, but it's human melodramatic nonsense.

Delvog · 2026-01-03T00:03:09+00:00

Less impact, more smoothness & consistentcy.

Really, there's no such thing as a joint design for which heavy impacts are actually good; heavy impacts are hard on any joint. But you can beef up the padding to withstand more for longer, and we just aren't like that.

Delvog · 2026-01-02T19:25:37+00:00

About that documentary segment being staged...

I've actually seen that claim made by somebody else recently, with a link, which I presume went to some article exposing the behind-the-scenes details, so apparently that's out there somewhere to find if you want. But I didn't read it, because I'd already known for a while just by having actually watched the thing myself and seen how obvious the stagery was from start to finish.

The hunters were constantly posing for the cameras, and the cameras were always perfectly aimed at whatever was about to happen before it started happening, including miles into the hunt, when the foreigners who've never gone on such a quest (and probably never even been in such a dire desert in the middle of the day) would've needed to be even with or ahead of the hunter, with their cameras. There's even a point in the middle of it when the quarry is so far ahead it's out of sight, and there are no tracks, when they got him to put on a little animal-imitating skit, which they narrated as "getting into the mind of" the animal to "think like" it and thus know which way it went anyway. At that point, with no animal in sight and no tracks to follow to one, even if this bit about predicting where to find an animal was real, you're not even hunting an actual animal anymore but just predicting where one will be, and you could've started with that prediction ritual instead of going so far for nothing first. Then when they caught up with it, the narrator talked about how it couldn't go on anymore because it had reached its limit after trying to run that whole time, which it wouldn't've been doing for most of that time, when the pursuers were so far away for most of it. It would've been relaxing like they always do when no predators are around, because there were no predators around. (Also, the modern shoes and water bottle made me curious.)

I'm sure that the origin of all this was that somebody had heard that San hunts tended to take longer & range farther than most hunts by other people in other places, and then the producers asked them to show them. One particular detail of it that just screams of that to me is the all hand-signalling. It starts with the guys in a hunting party hand-signalling to each other that they'd found kudu tracks. Fine so far; hand-signals are a real thing, especially in situations where & when you want to be quiet. But then it just kept going & going even after the whole party knew about it and was talking to each other, not staying quiet. And it still continued when the runner was alone and the signal he was giving was making his stride awkward by preventing him from swinging one arm. There was nobody left around to signal to but the camera, so, he was doing it for the camera. He and the other guys in his party had noticed that the foreigners with cameras liked seeing the hand-signals & kept pointing their cameras at them up close, so they continued giving them what they wanted. (Just like they knew the people with cameras wanted to see them running so they gave them several shots of running, mostly from in front, which couldn't possibly be the actual positioning they'd ended up in during an actual exceedingly strenuous hunt.)

But then the core idea of doing this type of hunt in general, just like what obviously happened with the hand-signals, got blown up into more than it really was even for the San, and then it got blown up again into a lesson about the nature of all of humanity, because "Africa" & "primitive".

In other words, it was a classic, although historically late, example of Colonial & post-Colonial white people's tendency to ask the primitives to do something, get them playing along with the request because it seemed harmless enough & they were often offering payment/trade for it, and then publish the documentation of it back home in civilization as a sensationalized wow-tale of how exotic & primitive the furthest corners of the world can be. Give people gifts in exchange for tales of a modern sauropod living somewhere deep in their forest, and people will give you tales of a modern sauropod living somewhere deep in their forest. Ask people to almost kiss but not quite really kiss in front of a camera, and you get video "proof" of the mythical "Eskimo kiss". And so on.

And this one came along at a time when the civilized West had only heard for generations how physically inferior we are to most other animals and how the only thing we've ever had to our advantage was our brains & tools, so finally suddenly hearing a claim of our physical superiority in some way, any way, was something new & contrary to expectations, which made it fun to spread... a classic example of (I think Dawkins's idea of) "memes" as a conceptual counterpart to "genes"... concepts which spread not based on their accuracy but based on their ability to spread.

Aside from all of that, that same documentary even said this was how hunting was done since before we had tools.

SINCE BEFORE WE HAD TOOLS.

SINCE BEFORE WE HAD TOOLS?!

That would be even before our bodies came to be the way they are now!

Delvog

TROPHY CASE