Fun read, but alas factually inaccurate. Article says: "almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way."
1. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish...
2. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are probably others.
> almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European
This is where we see "almost". Basque, for example, is a European language, but famously does not belong to the Indo-European language family.
> and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way
No qualifier here. Armenian is an Indo-European language with no grammatical gender (making it even less gendered than English), which the quote states, boldly and without qualification, to be impossible.
You could make the argument that he ignored the word "European", because to you Armenian is an Asian language and not a European one -- but saying "English is the only language within an oddly-shaped geographic region to have some special feature" is a very strange way to assign significance. Saying "English is the only descendant of Proto-Indo-European to have mostly lost its grammatical gender" gets the idea of "what might be interesting" right -- it makes more sense to compare English to sister languages than to compare it to unrelated languages that happen to lie within the same weird gerrymander outline you drew on a map -- but it isn't true.
"them" in that case is the group of languages belonging to the family "Indo-European". He was selecting a group of language from the european ones and then making a statement about that group.
You're agreeing with me. Where "them" is the family of Indo-European languages, the claim "of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way" is false, and is not qualified with the word "almost".
Where "them" is the special-pleading-based group of Indo-European languages currently spoken within "Europe", the claim is less false than otherwise (but still not great), and it's still not qualified with the word "almost".
Yeah, i misunderstood you a little. Nevertheless your initial complaint is mistaken.
Honestly, this is a nice example of attribution of responsibility in message comprehension. As a professor he constructs elaborate structures to convey meaning and puts the responsibility to understand on the reader. As an internet commentor you put the responsibility to express himself clearly on him.
You considered it ridiculous that he may have meant "European" languages, but he clearly constructed the group out of those.
On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.
That's very strongly dependent on your native dialect. I know people who have to put on the subtitles to understand the movie Trainspotting, and (I think) that's not even full-blown Scots.
It seems that the article found some bits of the language which are genuinely unique ("in conjugation only third-person singular changes") but these are so specific as to be irrelevant. If English had no way of expressing the conditional, for example, that would be genuinely interesting.
As it is, it reads like a teenager talking about their uniqueness because only they like eating peanut butter and ice cream while listening to Leonard Cohen.
I work at UpCounsel.com and we can definitely help your business or any business with legal needs. Although we are a marketplace, and we align with the on demand economy, the uber reference doesn't necessarily fit since it assumes the supply (drivers) are all created equal. With UpCounsel our supply (lawyers) are carefully curated, and we match you with a set of lawyers who meet your specific needs. Similar to uber, our lawyers must maintain a high rating while on the platform. Unlike Uber, once you find a lawyer who meets your needs you can continue to work with them on the platform, easily and on-going. Please email me with any questions, or if we can help you with your legal needs. My email is brad [at] UpCounsel.com
You can think of "resource" as an object in your application exposed on the web. REST actually talks about "resource representations" not: resources per se. This has to do with the Facade pattern and not tying your public interface with your internal implementation.
That said, for getting started you can think as "resource" being a web-addressable representation of an object in your application.
Architectural style for building scalable applications. Fielding wasn't talking about APIs specifically.
There's nothing "weird" about links in APIs. For an easy metaphor, think of "links" in APIs as you think of foreign keys in your database tables. Link doesn't just mean something you can click :)
Unfortunately, in popular programming it has become to mean anything and everything that uses resource-oriented URLs and at least loosely: HTTP methods as verbs to "operate" on those resources.
1. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish...
2. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are probably others.