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Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by numpad0 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:44AM (#50479297)
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Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by konart on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:13AM (#50480023)
>But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF

As a russian I need some explanation here.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by somenameforme on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:27AM (#50480141)
I think he was just, somewhat dramatically, referring to tones in Chinese and ы in Russian. Neither of which being what makes their respective languages particularly difficult.
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by numpad0 on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:41AM (#50480255)
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Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by alboy on Friday November 13, 2026 @07:12AM (#50482410)
> Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.

That sounds like your are remembering one of those Tomatis's charts, which are simply bullshit. All natural languages are quite similar in terms of their "frequency bands", what is different is the clustering of their phonemes within those bands, e.g. Russian has lots of consonant sounds but very few vowels when compared to English.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by somenameforme on Friday November 13, 2026 @10:54AM (#50485356)
I assume you know this, but Chinese is a tonal language. 'Mom scolds the horse' translates as ma ma ma ma. With nothing but tones distinguishing the various 'ma's. People who grew up with only tonal or non-tonal languages tend to do poorly with languages on the other side because they're extremely alien.

Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by sls on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:39PM (#50489323)
> Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.