L.J., a female in the Discord @ljwrites@rage.love

@kyzh @ljwrites

I prefer to represent my thoughts as something other than the ratio of two integers

@ljwrites rational thinker, is that when you "only have a small ration of thinking available during the day" right ?

https://skeptics.social/about/more

hum not sure

@ljwrites I've read about it recently too, language foreign to the person describing them being described as like bird noises. Here's an example of a Mosul dialect of Arabic https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=41687

It links to a longer discussion of the Chinese use of this too (as well as Russian, Persian, Tibetan, even English): https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=33279

@ljwrites [Caveats: I work on historical reconstructions, and I've even worked on Japanese, Korean, and Turkic languages, including a bit of historical stuff, but not on the reconstruction side.

Side note: all references to 'genetic' below are about linguistic relationships. Closer DNA-type genetic relations surely exist between Central Asian and Korean, Japanese speakers - but this is orthogonal to linguistic relations.]

The problem is that shared grammatical features turn out to be pretty bad in terms of establishing genetic relationship.

So, e.g. we know that Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language, but it's been in close contact with Dravidian over 2000 years. And, Sinhala has a number of grammatical features (e.g. a nominalising cleft construction, wide-spread use of Quantifier Particles [on which, see more below]) which don't exist in any other Indo-Aryan languages (except closely related Dhivehi) or in Indo-European more generally, but which do exist in Dravidian languages.

This is just one instance of the fact that contact between languages, whether they're related or not, very frequently leads to prominent shared features.

'Worse', since we also share the same 'wetware', not infrequently languages which aren't related (or at least aren't closely related) and aren't in contact can end up developing some similar features. And the Quantifier Particles which we see in Dravidian and which end up developing in Sinhala are very similar, in terms of their grammatical use, to what we see in the Japanese particles _ka_ and _mo_.

And even if it were to turn out that Indo-European, Dravidian, and Japonic were ultimately related, this apparent 'shared feature' of Quantifier Particles would be irrelevant, since it's clear that Sinhala developed these particles later on (nothing of the sort exists in Sanskrit).

Unfortunately, we don't have direct evidence for either Korean or Japanese before around the 8th-century, which makes finding clear evidence of a genetic relation (if one does exist) much harder. If we only had evidence of English and Sinhala from ca. 6th-c. onwards, we wouldn't be able to establish these as related either - it's only because of vast evidence from attested earlier stages which enables this.

So, while in the 'historical' periods of Japanese and Korean, there has actually been more contact with Han China, the period in question here is actually a pre-historic one. Even if Japanese and Korean are, in fact, related, they likely also were in extensive contact also at a later period, and some of their shared features likely are related to this period regardless of their genetic relationship.

None of this establishes that they aren't related. And, indeed, there's no way of proving that two languages aren't related. It's all about coming up with enough evidence as to make genetic relation inescapable. But in general the evidence so far for Japonic & Koreanic hasn't reached the level that many linguists accept it. Altaic is in an even worse position.

Of course, even with existing evidence, in theory someone could end up coming up with a more persuasive argument for genetic relationships. Or, other linguistic evidence could come to light which would dramatically shift the picture.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-energy-sustainable-again.html

(tangentially I know so little about what trees have what properties, etc.)