[QUOTE=xilman;482826]No it does not. A refracting lens eyepiece is undoubtedly very useful but the prime focus image is entirely viewable. Have you ever looked into a Newtonian without an eyepiece? I certainly have, for telescopes up to 46cm aperture.

Give me time and I could design an eyepiece which uses no refractive elements whatsoever.

I concede [b]I[/b] need a refractive lens behind [b]my[/b] cornea if I am to look into it and see anything. Not all organisms are so constrained. Neither are all observers interested in images. Lots of astronomers are into photometry (which needs only a spatial array of photon detectors) or spectroscopy (almost entirely diffraction gratings these days).

Anyway, it might help remove your blinkers if you were to start reading up on gamma-ray, X-ray and radio astronomy. None of them use refractive media to any significant degree.

There are more things in heaven and earth, rudy235,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[/QUOTE]

Ohh really? what about sunsets? and lunar eclipses and, mirages and.... eyeglasses.:smile:

[QUOTE=Dubslow;482797]And I'm slightly surprised to learn that Romanian retains case inflections as well, I had previously assumed it was like the more western romance languages, which lost their inflections long ago. Maybe in the next 500 years its cases too will go the way of the dodo (they are already highly simplified from Latin).[/QUOTE]
What are you talking about man? Which western romance languages? Spanish is one of the most inflected languages in the world, and Portuguese follows closely with its 11 inflection modes or so... Except for the case there is a more western romance language which I don't know about, hehe.... However, the fact that the old PG languages were inflected is news to me, I always assumed that the modern languages got this from Latin, which was an extremely-high inflected language (and Romanian kept most of it).

Hmm. All this stuff about refraction reminds me of an ad, many years ago, flogging a wondrous new kind of furniture -- a [i]refractory[/i] table! Perhaps this is the kind of table where you sit down to drink false cognac. Or, possibly,an oopsadaisy for "refectory."

Refraction is a curious thing, because for many materials the index of refraction depends on wavelength. This is what causes prisms to spread white light into a rainbow, and what gives diamonds their "fire." It takes a fair bit of art to minimize this "dispersion" in refracting telescope lenses.

The well known property that "the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection," as well as the formula for refraction known as Snell's Law, are both corollary to Fermat's Principle of Optics, that light takes the path of least time. Yes -- [i]THAT[/i] Fermat.

[QUOTE=LaurV;482849]What are you talking about man? Which western romance languages? Spanish is one of the most inflected languages in the world, and Portuguese follows closely with its 11 inflection modes or so... Except for the case there is a more western romance language which I don't know about, hehe.... [/QUOTE]

I should speak more accurately. All the romance languages retain large amounts of inflection, but only in the verb conjugation department. In the noun declension department, they have largely moved, like English and Dutch, to a non-cased system heavily dependent on word order to specify how the nouns relate to the verb. Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian nouns do not change form except for singular/plural, which is the same as English, and different, apparently, from Romanian. All 5 of these languages rely on prepositions and word order to determine noun-verb relationships. (Diminutives are different, and are widely used in e.g. Portuguese and Italian and to a lesser extent in Spanish, but those are not inflections, either of case or of number, instead representing new meanings entirely, at least from the perspective of the grammar.)

(Unlike the Romance languages, English is losing inflections even in its verbs, instead in the process of moving to an analytic structure with auxiliary/modal verbs to express complex tenses, aspects, and moods. This process is of course incomplete still, with most notably the past tense and present third person singular retaining inflections.)


[QUOTE=LaurV;482849]
However, the fact that the old PG languages were inflected is news to me, I always assumed that the modern languages got this from Latin, which was an extremely-high inflected language (and Romanian kept most of it).[/quote]

Allow me to re-emphasize: [i]all[/i] languages descended from Proto-Indo-European either are or were heavily inflected, like the mother language. The Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, Ancient Greek, you name it, it was inflected with mostly free word order. Obviously further evolution has affected this, with most notably the grandkids of Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic having mostly (but not entirely) evolved to analytic/word order structure; Persian, for example, has mostly lost case endings as well, and Hindi is kind of like Romanian in that it retains a few cases, but is largely simplified from Sanskrit/Latin full case systems (at least if I understood its Wikipedia page correctly). The Balto-Slavic family is of course the primary example of the greatgrandkids retaining a heavily cased system with free word order, with e.g. Russian and Polish standing out as having particularly complex grammar even among that family.

Well, really you should just read up a bit about proto indo european itself, as well as its expansion and descendants :smile: As a first step:

[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Morphology[/url]

[quote]Proto-Indo-European nouns are declined for eight or nine cases...

There were three grammatical genders...

Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited a system of ablaut. The most basic categorization for the Indo-European verb was grammatical aspect...

Verbs have at least four grammatical moods...

Verbs had two grammatical voices...

Verbs had three grammatical persons...

Verbs had three grammatical numbers...

Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participles, one for each combination of tense and voice, and an assorted array of verbal nouns and adjectival formations.

...


Since all the early attested IE languages were inflectional, PIE is thought to have relied primarily on morphological markers, rather than word order, to signal syntactic relationships within sentences.[34] Still, a default (unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. This was reconstructed by Jacob Wackernagel as being subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit, and the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but as of 2015 the "broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been a subject–object–verb (SOV) language.[35]

The SOV default word order with other orders used to express emphasis (e.g., verb–subject–object to emphasise the verb) is attested in Old Indic, Old Iranian, Old Latin and Hittite, while traces of it can be found in the enclitic personal pronouns of the Tocharian languages.[34] A shift from OV to VO order is posited to have occurred in late PIE since many of the descendant languages have this order: modern Greek, Romance and Albanian prefer SVO, Insular Celtic has VSO as the default order, and even the Anatolian languages show some signs of this word order shift.[36] The inconsistent order preference in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic can be attributed to contact with outside OV languages.[/quote]

[QUOTE=Dubslow;482893]I should speak more accurately. All the romance languages retain large amounts of inflection, but only in the verb conjugation department. In the noun declension department, they have largely moved, like English and Dutch, to a non-cased system heavily dependent on word order to specify how the nouns relate to the verb.[/QUOTE]

Declensions are the *worst*, glad VL got rid of them. Keeping conjugations around is a small price to pay.

[QUOTE=CRGreathouse;482897]Declensions are the *worst*[/QUOTE]

That's a highly debatable opinion :smile: I tend to agree, but I think that's largely influenced by my own native language (guess what it is) being a non-declined language. But of course the drawback is that to emphasize a topic that isn't a natural subject, we have to go though long metalinguistic/prose gymnastics to promote the thing to the subject, e.g. "It was the girl that was stung by the bee" as opposed to "the bee stung the girl (and not the boy)". These sorts of literary hoops to jump through are the trade for declensions with free word order. Not to mention an otherwise-complex syntax that can occasionally be difficult to parse.

Edit: Here's a fine example of an (apparently) controversial grammar feature born of the literary tendency to put the emphatic/important things first: [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive#Double_genitive[/url]

[QUOTE=Dubslow;482905]That's a highly debatable opinion :smile:[/QUOTE]

Definitely -- though I wasn't being entirely serious. :smile:

If language becomes too precise then you lose a whole class of jokes!

French literature on "Big band theory."

[url]https://youtu.be/FlPjwUKocZw[/url]

[QUOTE=Nick;482924]If language becomes too precise then you lose a whole class of jokes![/QUOTE]

What, exactly, is humour?

The unexpected? The subtle? The outrageous?

I sometimes think I'm being really funny; often others disagree.

[QUOTE]Fun"ny, n.; pl. funnies (?). A clinkerbuit, narrow boat for sculling. [Eng.][/QUOTE]
[url]https://www.websters1913.com/words/Funny[/url]
:smile:

This is a general comment and not necessarily related to chaisal which I do find humourous at times (I am a bit embarrassed to say). :smile:

Personally I think comedians which rely solely on profanity to get a laugh are not very talented in their profession. It reminds me of 1st graders who break out in laughter/giggles as soon as someone utters the f word or the likes in the class.
A real comedian can get a laugh without resorting to profanity or in spite of it like Lewis Niles Black (my favourite ).

[QUOTE=a1call;482932]A real comedian can get a laugh without resorting to profanity or in spite of it like Lewis Niles Black (my favourite ).[/QUOTE]

I completely agree with you.

However, as a sometimes manager, sometimes dropping the "F' word" gets the point across more clearly. Such as "What the F' did you think you were doing?" when a major mistake was made.

As a white person, however, I would never use the "N' word". And yet several of my people would use it between themselves. Jokingly.

Language is a subtle yet powerful tool.

[QUOTE=chalsall;482933]sometimes dropping the "F' word"[/QUOTE]
This I got recently from the little LaurV which is studying abroad, part of her last quiz/test, and I couldn't stop laughing. I would like to have a professor like that. Our teachers use to hit us on the head with the ruler, etc...

[ATTACH]17953[/ATTACH]

[QUOTE=LaurV;482762]Correct. Contrarily we could say, English is (arguably) the most Germanic language spoken today. That is because the Germans adopted this "Greek" grammar style somewhere two centuries ago, and from that point onward, they started drifting away from the "Germanic" part. Nowadays, German grammar is much (and I mean MUCH) closer to Romanian, for example, than to English. It has the same grammar constructions, it keeps 4 of the grammar cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative) from old Greek/Latin (Romanian has 5, including Vocative, but there is no distinction between declension of the nouns on Nom/Acc or Gen/Dat, so we can say we actually have 3 cases, some other languages have 6 or 7 cases).[/quote]

I'm going to have to disagree. I would argue that of the Germanic languages, English is the least Germanic. Most of its vocabulary comes via French, it rarely uses compound nouns, rarely follows V2 word order, nouns have no gender, frequently uses auxiliary verbs, etc.

Instead, I would consider Icelandic. It keeps the same four grammar cases; has masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns; has compound nouns; sticks to Germanic word order, etc.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;482893]Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian nouns do not change form except for singular/plural, which is the same as English, and different, apparently, from Romanian.[/quote]

Acteur, actrice? Cómico, cómica? The nouns also change for gender.

[quote](Unlike the Romance languages, English is losing inflections even in its verbs, instead in the process of moving to an analytic structure with auxiliary/modal verbs to express complex tenses, aspects, and moods. This process is of course incomplete still, with most notably the past tense and present third person singular retaining inflections.)[/quote]

This is further along in Swedish, where verbs don't inflect at all based on the subject. (It almost makes up for the damned ɧ phoneme haha.)

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;483071]Acteur, actrice? Cómico, cómica? The nouns also change for gender.

[/QUOTE]

Do not confuse gender as an immutable, inherent characteristic of a noun with gender as a mutable quality which must match other nouns in the sentence.

As far as I know, neither Proto Indo European nor any of its descendants include gender in the latter category (though in the former category it had three genders, commonly reduced to two or zero in modern descendants). Nouns are not declined for gender; for example in Spanish, "table" is "la mesa", and if you say "he goes to the table", you say "él va a la mesa". In particular, "mesa" does not inflect to "meso" to match the subject "él". "El meso" doesn't exist. There is no gender declension in Spanish (nor in any other PIE language). Grammatically speaking, "acteur" and "actrice" are two different nouns, with independent meaning (although [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation"]morphologically they are clearly related[/URL]) (and same with cómico and cómica). Also be sure to not confuse article and adjective agreement with their anchor noun with one noun declining relative to another independent noun in the sentence.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;483078]Do not confuse gender as an immutable, inherent characteristic of a noun with gender as a mutable quality which must match other nouns in the sentence.

As far as I know, neither Proto Indo European nor any of its descendants include gender in the latter category (though in the former category it had three genders, commonly reduced to two or zero in modern descendants). Nouns are not declined for gender; for example in Spanish, "table" is "la mesa", and if you say "he goes to the table", you say "él va a la mesa". In particular, "mesa" does not inflect to "meso" to match the subject "él". "El meso" doesn't exist. There is no gender declension in Spanish (nor in any other PIE language). Grammatically speaking, "acteur" and "actrice" are two different nouns, with independent meaning (although [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation"]morphologically they are clearly related[/URL]) (and same with cómico and cómica). Also be sure to not confuse article and adjective agreement with their anchor noun with one noun declining relative to another independent noun in the sentence.[/QUOTE]

Thank you for the enlightenment. :smile:

On the Russian-Persian similarities:

[url]https://youtu.be/7IexL5q1W5I[/url]

Here is an interesting observation on how AI might affect the evolution of language.
* I can pronounce th (being a Persian it comes unnatural to me)
* I normally pronounce it as t
* I often lie awake at night thinking about prime related subjects
* I check ideas I come up with by doing numerical calculations which I ask my Google Home, answers for
* My Google assistant has no problem recognizing my pronunciation of th in context
* My Google Home does not recognise my pronunciation of 3, 13, or 30 in context of calculation requests
* I have adapted to this by pronouncing th as th in this context only
* The other day I was speaking to a colleague and unconsciously pronounced the 30 minutes on hold as th.:smile:

Nice!
In English, some words spelt with th are pronounced voiced instead of voiceless.
For example, the th sound in "the" is not quite the same as the th sound in "thing".

For those of you who love language, check out [URL="https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/"]History of English podcast[/URL].

[QUOTE=Nick;528361]Nice!
In English, some words spelt with th are pronounced voiced instead of voiceless.
For example, the th sound in "the" is not quite the same as the th sound in "thing".[/QUOTE]

Great, I was having enough problem when I thought there was only one variety.
Now I have to listen in for the difference.
I live in Quebec which as time goes by becomes less and less populated by Anglophones and most of the ones which are left are likely immigrants who speak English as a second language.
I was thinking that it might be that people like myself (say Persians) might not have the auditory recognition to decipher the differences in sounds of t-th.
Personally for me the difference is hard to judge by sound alone even though the tongue is obviously pressed at different positions.

[QUOTE=a1call;528374]Great, I was having enough problem when I thought there was only one variety.
Now I have to listen in for the difference.
I live in Quebec which as time goes by becomes less and less populated by Anglophones and most of the ones which are left are likely immigrants who speak English as a second language.
I was thinking that it might be that people like myself (say Persians) might not have the auditory recognition to decipher the differences in sounds of t-th.
Personally for me the difference is hard to judge by sound alone even though the tongue is obviously pressed at different positions.[/QUOTE]Try listening, carefully, how native English speakers pronounce this and these.

It's rather similar to the difference between feel and veal.

[QUOTE=rogue;528369]For those of you who love language, check out [URL="https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/"]History of English podcast[/URL].[/QUOTE]
I just recommended that to someone today.

Couple of more observations Re OTR:
* A very common phrase which seems to be out of current use:
"What goes on here?"

* There was some significance to replying a goodnight by a goodbye

You can see both cases used in the first few episodes of Whistler available on demand below.

Be prepared to be hooked on the series. It's much more entertaining than reality TV and make excellent bedtime stories for adults.:smile:

[url]https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/the-whistler/[/url]