Thanks for the help!

Turns out it was a hardware issue - I eventually found that I couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi in my mint live usb or Windows 10 on that computer either after a bit more testing. A full power off and unplug seems to have reset whatever was wrong with the Wi-Fi adapter and all is working again, thank goodness.

Thanks again for taking the time to help! It’s what I’ve come to love about this community in the two months I’ve been in it!

I’m on Linux mint 22 and use surfshark as my VPN. It has a Killswitch to ensure that I can’t be connected to the Internet when the VPN isn’t active.

But, when I turned on the Killswitch, suddenly all of my Wi-Fi options disappeared completely from my network manager. I can’t connect to the Internet at all - the option is completely gone.

I disabled the Killswitch and rebooted but that didn’t do anything.

I used time shift to revert to a snapshot from yesterday but still no Wi-Fi options.

I tried disabling and stopping the process that turning on the Killswitch enables, but no luck there either.

Uninstalling surfshark doesn’t do anything either and just requires another time shift.

At this point I’m at my wit’s end. I have no idea what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated

The TSA allows food though?

Or, y’know, Vietnam.

Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the “Critical Period” hypothesis - the question of whether there is a “Critical Period” during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.

The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from “feral children” like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.

Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.

Again, however, the counterpoint of “It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that” is pretty frequent.

I’m still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like “humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion”.

Lol, I spelled it “ov” on my spelling test.

This is my favorite romcom.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

Still not buying a Samsung.

It is difficult to pull a moral out of this story

Uh no it’s fucking not. Big corpos do whatever the fuck they want and see no real consequences. That’s it. That’s the moral.

I have one of those and it’s cost me who knows how much time and effort. The only times I ever really use are 15 seconds (for melting butter), 50 seconds (for water for baking bread; 1 minute is too hot), and 1:45 for coffee (again, 2 minutes is too hot). I can count the number of times I’ve actually used the “push 1 for 1 minute” feature on one hand, and instead I have to press an additional “timer” button for absolutely no reason Every. Single. Time. I want to microwave something.

Almost half of all English words are borrowed from French, dating from when England was colonized and culturally subjugated by the Norman French starting in 1066.

When we played it you also had to go down on one knee, and the person unfreezing you had to sit on your knee while they flushed your arm.

Thank you for your service.

Unless you’re talking about Scots, the closest languages to English are separated by at minimum more than a thousand years, which is plenty of time for those constraints to change significantly.

I’d even expect different dialects of English to behave differently when adapting loanwords, because they already show plenty of phonotactic differentiation.

I have a private theory about that, actually (that is, not backed up by research yet to my knowledge).

I think this is due to accidental gaps, that some languages allow for clusters that just don’t happen to appear in those languages by an accident of history (e.g. they allowed them at one point but they were eliminated by a phonotactic filter that no longer exists in the language, etc.), so when they borrow a word with that string now, they can pronounce it no problem.

If you think about phonotactic constraints as being the result of constant rankings (as in models like Optimality Theory), this should even be predicted as a form of Emergence of the Unmarked (though stop clusters are pretty marked, so this would be more like “local” or “coincidental” unmarkedness).

I also think that studying borrowing adaptations like this would give us a more accurate picture of the overall constraint ranking of a given language than just restricting ourselves to native words.

What actually happened is that these roots were borrowed from Ancient Greek by paleontologists to form the word “pterodactyl”, not modern Greek.

In Ancient Greek, they would have pronounced both the “p” and the “t”, but “pt” isn’t a possible beginning of a word for English speakers, and so borrowed words that start with “pt-” (and “mn-” and a few others) have the first sound deleted as a repair mechanism to allow English speakers to pronounce them.

In modern Greek, “pt” consonant clusters that used to be pronounced as-is have undergone dissimilation - both “p” and “t” are stop consonants, so the “p” has instead become an “f” (which is a fricative, not a stop), to make the cluster easier to pronounce.

God Emperor is where I always finish my rereads.

Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.