Contexti

I wish I had known this. I tried a standing desk for six months some years ago. Standing on a hard surface damaged my heels. They still get sore sometimes.

As others have said, the benefit of a standing desk is that you are not in the same position for too long. This can also be achieved via other ways. Nowadays I sit on an exercise ball or get up and stretch every 30 minutes.

il is a pronoun[0] in French.

I haven't learned French since high school, but here's how I would translate the examples:

il la viola "He raped her"

il viola la loi "He broke the law"

[0](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/il#French)

> Does there exist an abundance of data for languages close to Linear A? If not, then I admire the work of all that try to untangle this with their brains alone.

In the article, Dr. Ester Salgarella says: "we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belongs to (unless it has to be taken as an ‘isolated’ language)"

If we knew that the Minoan language belonged to some extant language family and we had an abundance of data, the mystery of Linear A would already have been solved decades ago.

In general, there's very little data for any of the Palaeo-European languages that got replaced by Indo-European languages.

Linguistic relatives of the Minoan language could have gone extinct when their speakers shifted to Greek or some other Indo-European language. It is also possible that other Minoan languages died out centuries or millenia before the arrival of Indo-Europeans. I don't believe we will ever know.

To be pedantic, Finnish is not Ugric. Hungarian is Ugric, Finnish is Finnic. They both are Finno-Ugric, a.k.a Uralic. Many non-linguist Finns mix up Finno-Ugric and Ugric.

The Proto-Uralic *weti "water" looks like it could come from IE *u̯ódr̥, *udén- "water", but that etymology is problematic because of irregular sound substitutions[0]:

- why would Uralic have *e when it's not present in the IE original?

- why would Uralic drop *r or *n at the end?

[0] Simon, Z. (2020). Urindogermanische Lehnwörter in den uralischen und finno-ugrischen Grundsprachen. Indogermanische Forschungen, 125(1), 239–266. https://doi.org/10.1515/if-2020-011

Which reminds me of the gavagai thought experiment illustrating the inscrutability of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscrutability_of_reference#Ga...

IBM Watson was using Prolog when it won in a Jeopardy! game: "We required a language in which we could conveniently express pattern matching rules over the parse trees and other annotations (such as named entity recognition results), and a technology that could execute these rules very efficiently. We found that Prolog was the ideal choice for the language due to its simplicity and expressiveness."[0]

[0] https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process...

I thought dinosaurs were not adapted to aquatic environments? Marine reptiles like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were not dinosaurs. Spinosaurus, though, was semiaquatic.

The Finnish word for walrus, mursu, was borrowed into Finnish from Sámi, as mentioned in the WordSense article. The Northern Sámi word morša is likely a loanword from some Palaeo-Laplandic language, borrowed when the Proto-Sámi language spread to Lapland during the Iron Age.[1]

As there are no walruses in Finland, it was nearly as mysterious a creature as an elephant to Finns, who mostly encountered only walrus tusks and walrus hides through trading.[2]

Russian borrowed the word for walrus морж from some Sámi or some Finnic language, as the Russian expansion to the Arctic Ocean is historically much later than the Sámi and Finnic settlement in the area. [2] From Russian, the word got borrowed into French as morse.

Btw, you had a typo in the name of the animal. marsu means "a guinea pig" in Finnish, borrowed from Swedish marsvin (literally "a sea pig"), which in turn comes from German.

[1](https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_aikio.pdf) [2](https://journal.fi/virittaja/article/view/40611)