antonim, antonim@lemmy.world

Promotional poster by Mirko Ilić for the 1978 Yugoslavian conference “DRUG-ca žena – novi pristup ženskom pitanju” ("Comrade-ess woman - a new approach to the female question").

An international research team involving researchers from Spain, the USA and Germany have reconstructed plausible trajectories of global language diversity across the last 12,000 years. Their study, published in Science, suggests that language diversity increased for most of the Holocene, reached a remarkable peak between approximately 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, and then declined rapidly thereafter.

I make the case that Wikipedia communities often do not live up to their intent to be inclusive in internal policy-making; that our policies are more conservative than we realize; and that a large part of the reason is structural – the twenty-year-old format we use to make decisions is quietly working against us. Our processes have been designed with an abundance of time in mind, in an era of exponential growth. That time is over. The good news, which I’ll come back to in a companion post, is that there are tangible ways to make these processes better.

Pioneering physicist Max Planck had two papers retracted decades after his death for reasons that remain mysterious.

What began as a “flamingo revolution” to protest the $1.4 billion development on Sazan Island has spiraled into mass protests against a ruling party that thousands now want out.

In October 1776, Wilkinson contracted an epidemic disease, most likely typhus, and was bedridden and near death with a high fever. The future preacher’s family summoned a doctor from Attleboro, six miles away, and neighbors kept up a death-watch at night. The fever broke after several days. The Friend later reported that Wilkinson had died, receiving revelations from God through two archangels who proclaimed there was “Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone”. Accounts by the doctor and other witnesses state that the illness was real, but none of them say that Wilkinson died. The Friend further said that Wilkinson’s soul had ascended to heaven and the body had been reanimated with a new spirit charged by God with preaching his word, that of the “Publick Universal Friend”, describing that name in the words of Isaiah 62:2 as “a new name which the mouth of the Lord hath named”. The name referenced the designation the Society of Friends used for members who traveled from community to community to preach, “Public Friends”.

Can’t find either the title or the year of painting.

Thinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investigate languages in fresh way, but against the background (and often on the basis) of a centuries-old tradition.

Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia’s “Vital Articles” are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)