Not too much we can do about it though.

A slippery slope: we've reached a point where, with some kickback, institutions like the media can nearly silence dissent from a manufactured truth to whatever end. A witch-hunt/moral crusade, leaving fame and fortune aside a bit, is a potential consequence of this dissent. The true believer can, has, and will silence, punish (or kill) a dissenter, as their mere voice and presence risks the crusade by humanizing the dissenter and threatening the discourse on which its built. Given that many of the crusaders are true believers, a sense of dignity seems to follow the process, thus the rush of the crusade's actions and the enrolment of more crusaders wishing for even greater truth and justice. I can see this rapidly spiraling out of control, with or without government support.

La lanterne? She's always been waiting.

Honestly, this whole thing reminds me a bit of the Lusitania and the way England manipulated US opinion (not saying war wasn't justified). The US and UK governments denied the ship carried munitions for close to 100 years. It was a German attack on a peaceful vessel, period. The wreck was found in the 80s, and divers were told to be careful surveying the wreck given its cargo. Later, the cargo was of course revealed to be high explosives and tons of rounds of ammunition, making it fair game for U-boats and causing the deaths of thousands (?) of travelers as a result... best of all, the German government had published warnings of the risk of traveling into a war zone in American papers.

In short, take all news with a grain of salt. The good guys are usually the ones publishing.

Addendum: I do support the Ukraine whole-heartedly; I hope this results in a free Ukraine and a new Russia.

Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't, like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo, good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit.

Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics, particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at least at the point where languages seems to alternate between the two extremes.

To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist universally. I mean that many languages, especially the lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited geographically. We once assumed that there were at most three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the verb's position in the sentence and function like a predicate. They need that those words to make sense of communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps the word also a concept that some groups have need of and others do not.

On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP. Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s) they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion. There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in speech is only one example.

Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.

These field linguists (Imperialistic Europeans, those under the colonial yoke, and disinterested, merely inquisitive parties) produced grammars noting rules, which really do outnumber the exceptions in any given dialect at a given time (that's important), and exceptions. This work has led to everything from a tighter grasp on colonial possessions, to the enhanced ability of colonized to resist their colonizers, to the decipherment of forgotten, thousand year-old and the recording of near-dead languages.

And regarding your last comment, in many cases the languages we're dealing with have no writing, so I do agree. A better Olympiad would have at least included a aural-only portion of the exam. I right there with you on this one.

Really, maybe we're agreeing more than disagreeing, because I also support your comment that "expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting". Mathematics doesn't change; no same person steps in the same linguistic twice. That was the base of the linguistic program for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century (this was also computational linguistics before it took it's rule-based -to-statistical turn), and it produced insights and tools for the field linguists, mainly to decipher morphosyntax. Yet, I'd say the BIG discoveries, like the decipherment of Maya, have come from that muddy, uncomfortable, dangerous field work... gathering evidence for regularities among the glyphs that could be painstakingly comparing those amongst themselves and with the spoken languages of the region today. Some rules have stayed very similar for a long time, and I invite you to look at the historical recreations of proto-languages to get a sense of not only the regularities of a given modern language, but the regularities in the changes of languages over >1000 years.

That being said, (statistics-borne) Computational Linguistics is a wonderful (and a little scary thing), and I'm very willing to change my mind. It certainly challenges the rule-based assumptions and just maybe we're headed towards another paradigm shift.

So, how does a rather normal Roman concept get turned into whatever liminality is now? The answer is that the idea was picked up first by Early Modern philosophers (I think Kant was first but he had a very unmystical definition of the liminal -- but I won't bore you with... Kant). Keep in mind that during this period the limit in mathematics was being developed.

It gradually regains something of its spiritual, Roman-like meaning as the 19th century progresses and also finds an appropriate home in anthropology to describe places and ideas like the Roman ones and in (Jungian I'm guessing) psychoanalysis where it's used metaphorically as turning point or a threshold between sanity and madness.

After that, the French philosophers (maybe from existentialism on -- existential literature, Satre and Beckett come to mind, have some sublime depictions of liminality) of the later 1900s, ran further with the psycho-metaphorical version. Besides its already-established connection with madness, it came to be, I guess, a sort of goal. I think the aim was to push the writer, reader, and message into a liminal space where cultural and other boundaries could be crossed with the hope of seeing things from an alternative perspective.

From there it trickled down to colleges and culture at large (again). Sorry for the ramble. I hope I got my facts correct.

They published a Mandarin translation of Galileo's Starry Messenger and notes on sunspots within about 15 years of Messengers' first publication in Italy. They were successful in converting Japanese by not attempting to replace Japanese culture wholesale. The arrival of the Dominicans, the Dutch, and the end of the civil wars put a bloody stop to that, but their temporary success does demonstrate the efficacy of their methods. They stood up to National Socialism (among many others).

They also tried to defend Catholicism in England (and indeed ministered to cryptocatholics who weren't buying what Henry and Liz were selling). They became a stereotype arch-villain of the English propaganda of the era called the Black Legend. It's largely mixed with the historical truth in the modern popular imagination of the anglosphere by now (viz. Dan Brown) . It alleges that the Spanish were treacherous idolaters, fond of torture and so on. The Spanish indeed were rabid imperialists and religious bigots, but not to a unique degree for the age. The Jesuits were the ones being tortured in England for (religiously) aiding the silenced and powerless.

This tendency hasn't really changed. Liberation theology and its less extreme brethren have largely been products of Jesuit theology. At times it seems like they're among the few Catholics who read whole catechism (there are some surprisingly progressive ideas in it) and don't focus to great excess on sex and abortion.

It is important to remember the failings of the Church too.

One good reason for not lumping ORR in with crystal healing (beyond the rigor and erudition applied to the theories) is that ORR addresses what most would consider a real mystery in our understanding of the mind (however you define that), while crystal healing addresses something demonstrably false.

I'll still contend there's some quantum woo to ORR, but for that reason it's been a brave attempt to further scientific knowledge.

I seriously doubt any quantum mysticism is true, and I'm happy to defer to the physicists to get my woo from QM as in this experiment.