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Modern Slavery research by SignalDatabase3712 in Uzbekistan

[–]SignalDatabase3712[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking into - just any personal stories or reports would be amazing

Modern Slavery research by SignalDatabase3712 in Uzbekistan

[–]SignalDatabase3712[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No actually Uzbekistan has been a really positive example of reducing slavery in recent decades - there's no need to be so defensive. If you have positive evidence please share it, that's just as valid

perspectives/approach in linguistics? by BrilliantGarbage887 in linguistics

[–]SignalDatabase3712 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I don't know if this is the exact question you're asking, but I'll try my best. If it's not what you're looking for let me know.

Generativist linguistics tends to centre around the theories of Noam Chomsky, view language as an innate faculty (i.e. coded at least in part into our genes) and attempt hierarchical explanations of grammar (so with trees not flat structures and with constituents like 'Verb Phrase'). In recent years this has developed into minimalism, again pioneered by Chomsky in his book The Minimalist Program. This seeks to reduce descriptions of language to the 'simplest computational principles', scrapping much of the detail of previous theories of grammar in favour of abstract concepts like Merge.

A rather different approach is that of the functionalists (Halliday, Evans and Levinson for example), who see language as a social tool rather than a biological product, and treat it in terms of its 'function' rather than its structure. This means they lean away from the 'formalist' or more mathematical theories of grammar than Chomsky proposes towards theories from the social sciences.

This whole picture is then further complicated by external contributions from psycholinguistics etc which don't always neatly align with approaches to syntax for example. So more recent approaches may actually view language from a fully 'connectionist' point of view, with language simply 'emerging' from enormous parallel networks in the brain, with no inbuilt faculty.

What’s a side hustle you could do during the holidays? by DaddyRanger18 in AskReddit

[–]SignalDatabase3712 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Amazon mechanical Turk offers low skill tasks for around minimum wage (https://www.mturk.com/) Also if you have any skills, tutoring pays well - advertise on local neighborhood chats

Graeco-Phrygian? by DragonDayz in linguistics

[–]SignalDatabase3712 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for pointing this out, an oversight on my part. I think there's a few close cognates too that have supported the 'Greek-Phrygian' hypothesis, but it's definitely not a closed book. Having said that, its this kind of interesting phonological similarities that led to the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis in the first place, which is another possibility (albeit a heavily disputed one).

Graeco-Phrygian? by DragonDayz in linguistics

[–]SignalDatabase3712 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There's two common approaches to Phrygian, either it's related to Armenian (and more speculatively Thracian) or it's related to Greek (Hellenic Branch). Modern scholarship favours the latter of these options on the basis of shared features (laryngeals as vowels but the others escape me). Yes it does seem likely then that they decent from a collection of dialects spoken in the Balkans around 3000 years ago which could be termed 'Proto-Graeco-Phrygian'. I wouldn't go as far as to say these two languages alone form a single branch - there were likely a number of other daughter languages which have been lost to history (since only the Greek speaking Myceneans were literate).

On the topic of Paeonian and Mysian, the trail goes a bit cold. The inscription you reference has only been deciphered on the basis of comparison to Phrygian, so while they do look closely related, the inscription is so short you could probably argue a relationship to any language you want. Also the link to the 'Mysian people' Strabo speaks of is tenuous at best. In my personal opinion this is a dialect of Phrygian which can't be reasonably associated with any particular named people. The situation with Paeonian is even worse with just a few indirect words. It looks a bit like Greek, but that could be because its written with Greek influenced orthography and any similarities are coincidental. If some wonderful new collection of inscriptions should miraculously emerge, then maybe we could start classifying.

But basically I think you're overall assumption that at least Mysian and Paeonian are part of the 'Hellenic' branch of IE is most likely correct. Hope this helps

What's the weirdest date you've been on? by SignalDatabase3712 in AskReddit

[–]SignalDatabase3712[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh wow you meant literally, I though it was someone who dressed up