alyssa

nobody talks about how weird it is that a common way for phonemic distinctions in languages to develop is when there's a single phoneme that has different allophones in different context and some aspect of the conditioning environment for an allophone disappears but they keep saying the allophone in words that used to have the right environment and therefore they're now in distinction

like why do we keep using the old (former-)allophone instead of changing to what would normally be expected in that environment.

1+
Gadfly (-booq-)

@alyssa gizmodo.com/butterflies-rememb

1
alyssa
Follow

@gaditb okay extremely cool pull, but ngl my second reaction (the preceding having been both my first and third reactions) was "damnit this also has no discussion of how or why they continue to fly the possibly formerly better route instead of a now more direct one"

· · 1 · 0 · 1
Satsuma

@gaditb @alyssa dont wanna get lost over a giant lake, and they know this one works, I guess?

1+
alyssa

@Satsuma @gaditb how do they know it works tho

1
Satsuma

@alyssa @gaditb well, it has every year for the last millennia apparently so it seems p safe to me

1
alyssa

@Satsuma @gaditb well i think it's probably a safe assumption that the butterflies don't know that. my question is how do they know what route to take (and how does that knowledge get preserved through the presumed millennia)?

0
Satsuma

@alyssa @gaditb well, not just over the lake, they’d have to remap their whole route if they skipped the going east bit, and would potentially end up in areas without sufficient food/water or that have already been depleted by other groups of monarchs

0
Sign in to participate in the conversation
📟🐱 GlitchCat

A small, community‐oriented Mastodon‐compatible Fediverse (GlitchSoc) instance managed as a joint venture between the cat and KIBI families.

Trending now

Resources

Developers

What is Mastodon?

cat.family

More…

v3.5.3+kibicat · Privacy Policy