curiosityLynx

Meanwhile, India has annexed Madagascar

I’m sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It’s called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone’s profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn’t being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.

[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that’s a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]

Imagine Jesus as a director of a company that accepts all sincere applicants. The director assumes responsibility for all the mistakes his employees make, but he doesn’t assume responsibility for people who only claim to be employees. People who purposely commit crimes get fired and applications by people who apply with the purpose of commiting crimes get rejected for not being sincere. (That’s not to say someone who once was fired can’t reapply if they’re actually sincere about it, but since God sees into people’s hearts and minds, you can’t trick him.)

There is not a single word that’s universal to all languages.

1. Even if there had ever been one at some point, there are languages that have/had word retirement as part of the culture speaking it: If a word is used as someone’s name and that person dies, that word is now taboo and a new word is needed to refer to what the old word stood for.

2. Conlanging, especially by laypeople, often explicitly makes up most or all of its vocabulary from scratch or uses cyphers to make the connection invisible. I wouldn’t be surprised if a people made up their own secret language from scratch, maybe initially with very similar grammar, that developed into a native language for a community.

3. Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like “fart”, use a two part word that rhymes with it, like “raspberry tart”, then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with “raspberry” meaning “fart” and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.

4. Sign languages are languages as well, and in multiple instances developed from the ground up without influence from the surrounding spoken languages.