this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linguistics Humor

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Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it


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(Inspired by Reddit post of the last month)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I get the feeling you haven't solved many.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What a curious and needlessly judgmental reply!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No judgement, but you should know it's not that simple. You can't just pull out your calculator and add together an uncountably infinite collection of values one-by-one.

I mean, you could add together a finite subset of the values, which turns out to be the only practical way fairly often because a symbolic solution is too hard to find. You don't get the actual answer that way, though, just an approximation.

The actual symbolic approaches to integrals are very algebra-heavy and they often require more than one whiteboard to solve by hand. Blackpenredpen "math for fun" on YouTube if you want to see it done at peak performance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP was surely joking in the first post

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Huh. If that's the case, I totally missed it. Integrals sounded a lot simpler to me before I had to actually solve them, too, and that's where I assumed OP was coming from. A /s would have helped.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean they're right, Leibniz used a modified s for summa, sum. And an integral is just a sum, an infinite sum over infinitesimal summands, but a sum nevertheless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, they are right about that being the general concept. I only take issue with the implication that it's equally simple.