this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linguistics Humor

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(Inspired by Reddit post of the last month)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Looks like the sound holes of a violin to me.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Oh look, it's a music major.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But they are not. Those are called f-holes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

F-holes are the name specifically for the holes in the violin family and the contrabass. The more general term is sound hole, which also includes the c-holes of the viol family or the large round hole of a guitar.

F-holes, in particular, are shaped pretty much exactly like an integration sign.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks to my TI-89 I got a 3 on the AP Calc test and still don't get this joke.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

AP scores go from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. A 3 indicates an average score. It will most likely not be enough to pass out of a college course, unless the university is less intensive in its calculus courses.

[–] InfiniteStruggle 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What does the symbol mean in linguistics?

[–] h3rm17 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If I remember correctly, it's IPA for "sh" sound.

[–] darcy 5 points 2 years ago

voiceless post-alveolar fricative :)

[–] jbrains 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

It's merely a slightly longer sum, so what's the problem?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I get the feeling you haven't solved many.

[–] jbrains 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What a curious and needlessly judgmental reply!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

No judgement, but you should know it's not that simple. You can't just pull out your calculator and add together an uncountably infinite collection of values one-by-one.

I mean, you could add together a finite subset of the values, which turns out to be the only practical way fairly often because a symbolic solution is too hard to find. You don't get the actual answer that way, though, just an approximation.

The actual symbolic approaches to integrals are very algebra-heavy and they often require more than one whiteboard to solve by hand. Blackpenredpen "math for fun" on YouTube if you want to see it done at peak performance.

[–] hughperman 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

OP was surely joking in the first post

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Huh. If that's the case, I totally missed it. Integrals sounded a lot simpler to me before I had to actually solve them, too, and that's where I assumed OP was coming from. A /s would have helped.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean they're right, Leibniz used a modified s for summa, sum. And an integral is just a sum, an infinite sum over infinitesimal summands, but a sum nevertheless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yes, they are right about that being the general concept. I only take issue with the implication that it's equally simple.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

ACKTUALLY neither. It's most simply thought of as a limit of progressively longer sums. Infinitesimals help people understand ~~but they're kind of logically questionable.~~

[–] nLuLukna 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Actually that last point isn't quite right, in the 1960s Robinson proved that the set of hyperreals were logically consistent if and only if the reals were.

This put to rest the age-long speculation that the hyperreals were questionable.

This speculation is a pain in the ass since it means that we primarily use limits when talking about this sort of thing.

Which is fine, but infinitesimals are the coolest shit ever

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I did know about hyperreals, which is why I went with just "questionable". ~~IIRC you lose things like commutativity and associativity of arithmetic when you include extra numbers in the real line, and I feel like numbers should really have those.~~

~~Maybe that's just my opinion though. Should I edit it?~~

Edit: I remembered very wrong. Fixing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Nerd. Just shh away and be quiet

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Demeaning without educating. Lacks opportunity for discussion and learning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There was self-parodying irony here you might have missed. KnowYourMeme

I feel like discussion opportunities were present. In fact, a discussion about hyperreals did start, and I learned something in the process.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I do know the meme, but your use of it and your earlier statement of "I get the feeling you haven't solved many"; does not really convey irony, but rather, an elitist attitude that doesn't leave an openness for discussion. Without openness for discussion on a forum, there is little opportunity for an openness to learn.

So discussion may have occurred on the topic, by way of someone proving you wrong; but that leaves you as the only one learning, without offering the same opportunities to casual commentors.

The "irony" is that a cheeky comment went over your head, you began a closed-format lecture, and then you later tried to use irony yourself in another response (expecting to receive the same understanding that you yourself missed earlier).

So now maybe, we both have learned something. But it was through "ackchyually's" and "one-upping", rather than through openness. Be kind, be patient, be understanding, be welcoming... that helps nurture honest discourse

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Just a polynomial is the easy case, though. Once you start adding other operations, then it gets spicy.

[–] jbrains 3 points 2 years ago

See folks? Meeting dry humor with dry humor---this is the way.