by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)

Linguistics

What you Google-into when trying to understand English slangs as of 2020.
Euphemisms are evil bullshit.
Just say what you mean to say,
If you've been fired, say you been fired, not "let go".
If someone died, say they died, not "passed away".
Creator of Basic English.
When talking in the context of programming languages, natural language is the non-computer one.
1959 by Voice of America.
Good luck.
Ciro Santilli had to see this in a few separate places, until he underestood: that little pictur emust be a thing! Examples:
As if Chinese character weren't evil enough, their fast hand written form is even more unintelligible. It is like Hell within Hell.
It is also very beautiful it must be said.
Somewhat midway between a syllabary and an alphabet: you write out consonants, and vowels are "punctuation-like-modifiers".
E.g.: the main Hindi script (devanagari) and most other Indian languages.
Unlike abugida, these actually make you guess vowels, which are mostly or all not written down in any way. Terrible.
E.g.: the main Arabic script.
Unfortunately, physicists and mathematicians keep using Greek letters in their formulas, so we just have to learn them.
A helpful way to remember is to learn a bit of their history/pronunciation: Section "Historical correspondence between Latin and Greek".
To learn the greek letters if you have a base latin alphabet, you must learn the sound of each letter, and which Latin letters they correspond to.
Symbols that look like Greek letters but are not Greek letters:
Is Ciro Santilli crazy (he is, but for this point specifically), or do many/most Greek letters represent the mouth position used in the pronunciation of the letter?
It is fun to see that C and G have been confused since antiquity:
  • the modern sound is G
  • in terms of modern letters, both C and G split from gamma
Confusingly, in LaTeX:
  • \varepsilon rendered , is the default modern Greek glyph
  • \epsilon rendered is the lunate variant
Lower case looks like the mouth shape when you say Z, with mouth open, and you can even see the little tongue going down. Beauty.
Lowercase looks like a lowercase letter N for some reason.
Why would physicists use a letter such that:
  • the upper case version looks exactly like an upper case N. At least that is the correct pronunciation/name/historical successor of .
  • the lower case version looks exactly like a lower case V
Why? Why?????????
This one is a little confusing: the upper case looks exactly like a letter P, but as the name suggests, it actually corresponds to the letter R. The letter P corresponds to pi instead.
Two lower case variants... both used in mathematical notation, and for some reason, in LaTeX \varphi is the one that actually looks like the default standard modern lowercase phi, while \phi is the weird one. I love life.
As if it weren't enough, there's also a Cyrillic script psi that is slightly different. Life's great.
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