User:Soap/Notes
science
[edit]maybe reword
[edit]- 23:35, 11 July 2026 (UTC)
from Fermi paradox#Intelligent_life_may_be_too_far_away:
- Some SETI skeptics may also believe that humanity is at a very special point of time—specifically, a transitional period from no space-faring societies to one space-faring society, namely that of human beings.
both because its clumsy and because it doesnt really make a coherent point from what i can see. imagine a gathering of scientists looking fitfully at reams of printouts showing every possible lead we thought was alien life fading out to noise. and someone speaks up, saying "have you considered ..... WE are the intelligent life you are searching for?!" it has its own paragraph so it may be possible to simply delete it and not lose anything.
foraminifera
[edit]- 13:37, 12 July 2026 (UTC)
How do foraminifera bite each other? Usually with ultra-micropredators it's a digestive enzyme, but is it even possible for a single-celled creature to produce an enzyme that won't affect itself? i use the word bite loosely here because i know they dont have jaws, not even cell-level analogs of jaws, but we say that mosquitos bite us, when it is actually a stabbing motion with a sharp stylet. foraminifera apparently in some manner drill through the shells of other foraminifera. but how?
while it may seem ridiculous that foraminifera were mistaken for mollusks, I think there are actually some mollusks smaller than most foraminifera. Enteroxenos may be. micromolluscs
FYSP
[edit]The paragraph on Faint_young_Sun_paradox#Local_Hubble_expansion suggests that some people think the Hubble expansion of the universe is pulling the solar system slowly apart, so that Earth's present stable orbit is further out than it used to be. I'm not sure what else this implies. It could help solve the Fermi paradox by adding a new variable to filter out the rise of advanced civilizations ... not only does a planet need to evolve intelligent life, it needs to do so at exactly the right time, or else their planet will be tugged further from their star and freeze over. However I believe this is a minority interpretation of Hubble's Law and that the mainstream opinion is that bound gravitational systems will stay in place. Also it seems like the idea that space itself is expanding (with a doubling time of ~10Ga) is non-mainstream. But that goes against what I've learned. Perhaps a topic for another day.
Linguistics
[edit]Tohoku dialect questions
[edit]- 19:32, 5 June 2026 (UTC)
from Talk:Tōhoku_dialect#do_we_know....:
do we know...
[edit]- does this dialect lack /ki/ altogether?
- does it retain old /kwi/ as /ki/?
- do /ti/ and /ki/ merge? (the article Tōhoku dialect gives a /dʒi/ transcription for standard Japanese /tši/, rather than /di/)
- are loans from standard Japanese containing /ki/ borrowed with /ki/ or /chi/?
- since /p/ is marked in Japanese, does this mean that Tōhoku Japanese has almost no intervocalic /b/, only /mb/ and /pp/? Are loans with /b/ borrowed with [b], even if this would therefore be /p/?
- are the [mb nd] allophones of /b d/ distinct from sequences of moraic nasals followed by stops? Some languages do this.
I havent used WP:REFDESK in a long time, but i might be able ot get help at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language.
Other languages without /ki/
[edit]- 20:04, 28 July 2026 (UTC)
Mandarin
[edit]Mandarin has no /ki gi/; instead one hears alveolo-palatal sounds. Velars also become palatalized in standard Japanese but this is it cannot be phonemic because Japanese also contrasts these true palatal sounds with alveolo-palatals. Greek may be a good example though. Also see above; since TOhoku may also lack /ki/. Okinawan has /ki/ from earlier /ke/.
Umbrian
[edit]- 19:56, 28 July 2026 (UTC)
The Umbrian language shifted /kʷ/ > /p/ and also /k/ > /č/ before front vowels; this suggests that there should be no /k/ before front vowels in Umbrian, which would set it apart from all languages of Europe unless modern Greek qualifies. But clearly there is at least some. (Note: the article implies the palatalization also happened to /g/ and perhaps to /h/, but gives examples only for /k/).