• IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    29 days ago

    “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

    • Isaac Newton
      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        29 days ago

        I always enjoyed it because it’s very significant coming from Isaac Newton. Even he admitted that he had only scratched the surface with all the work that he had done and that there was way more out there in the universe that we don’t know about yet.

    • GraniteM@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      29 days ago

      The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.

      -J.B.S. Haldane

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    29 days ago

    If you collect and learn all languages that ever existed, then perhaps you would gain a better understanding of the world. I’m not a linguist, but I am fascinated with the fact that languages each have their own unique quirks and words untranslatable to another language. These quirks and words which are only unique to a language reflects the value of the culture speaking that language. For example, Austronesian languages are gender neutral. There is no “he” or “she” pronouns. That reflects the largely gender egalitarian value of Austronesians. The Japanese have another word for a shade of blue, which most other people won’t easily recognise except the Japanese. Some African greetings say “I see you”, which is not only a salutation, but is recognising the person being greeted as an individual.

    • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldOPM
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      29 days ago

      The quirks about colors are especially interesting to me.

      Like English is one of the few that makes a distinction between pink and red. In Russian, they draw a similar a distinction between what we would consider light blue and dark blue. I don’t remember which it is, but I recall that some languages merge orange and brown. I think yellow/green is another one.