71–80 of 109 posts
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I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.
Run of the mill, he says, he says, in his second tongue, using correct grammar, idiomatic phrases, and perfect spelling. This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages. Oy veh!
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Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.
I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on…
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I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on…
Yeah I think it's clustering and dimensionality reduction. E.g. if French people form a rough cluster in DNA space and Japanese people form another cluster, someone with a French mom and Japanese dad would show up as a data point roughly halfway between those two clusters.
So when our thread’s ancestor (pun unfortunate) says “45% Levantine” they mean they 45% of people alive today that are from that region (which includes many European immigrants). I bet this gets very messy given immigration patterns. Like which immigrants count as ancestry sample, and which don’t? For this problem I would personally use cluster analyses, however I would probably simply give up, knowing that cluster analysis would give me junk (and ultimately arbitrary) results with such noisy (and potentially skewed) data.
EDIT: The answer was right there next to this quote, in one of the aside picture for the same article[1]. They use Principal Component Analysis. Which IMO is even more fraught than cluster analysis, as you have even more control over what you want to get out of the model. If I remember correctly PCA—along with factor analyses—is used heavily in personality psychology and intelligence testing, the latter of which is very famous for radicalized pseudo science.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_DNA_test#/media/F...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on…
I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.
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You know what I mean.
No, I don't. Early jewish communities in Central Europe spoke the local language, then carried this language with them as they moved into Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Over centuries it diverged from its ancestral origin, as all languages do. At no point did anyone look at another jewish language and go “oh that's interesting; let's do something like that.”
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No, I don't. Early jewish communities in Central Europe spoke the local language, then carried this language with them as they moved into Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Over centuries it diverged from its ancestral origin, as all languages do. At no point did anyone look at another jewish language and go “oh that's interesting; let's do something like that.”
I have a hunch that Jews came from Eastern Europe (I mean Israel before that). No, I don't think they are Khazars. But Ashkenaz was in Scythia, i.e. Eastern Europe.
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Not really. They're close, but definitely not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu (Edit: pasted wikipedia link)
In theory sure. I think in practice it is very common that a Hindi or Urdu speaker will talk to someone else speaking "the other language" and not even realize it.
My favourite anecdote from this period was when my wife crossed a family on the trail at the lake, and one of the kids asked a question of the father about "the lady", as if she couldn't understand, and they were all surprised when she answered "sure, sure". ("doch, doch", written left-to-right, from her point of view; "dokh, dokh", written right-to-left in a different script, from theirs)
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As a native Slavic speaker that can also speak an almost fluent Dutch, and knowing what the quoted Hobbit line says, I can't even see how this having anything to do with Slavic languages is even a discussion.
There is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)
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There is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)
"Dripen" (oysdripen, ondripen) is the lemma (drip,ooze), so cognate to english "drip"?
Also, https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi says that "dripe" means "defecate (taboo)".
I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...
> I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic. This is a recurring theme in Ashkenazi literature: Yiddish is understood to be the מאַמע־לשין -- the mother tongue, essentially grounded and practical, in contrast with Hebrew. (Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yid…
Ah, we had one Yiddish speaker in r/germany who ragequit after it was pointed out to him that Yiddish basically just sounds like an Eastern-European dialect of German to native speakers, with a number of Hebrew words thrown in, and German native speakers usually can understand it after being exposed to it for some time (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing).
> Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however.
Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words.
> Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones
German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem...
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