Lvxferre [he/him] @ lvxferre @mander.xyz

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at nigh

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2 yr. ago

I'm game. ba dum tss

Seriously. I don't post often but if there's interesting content about modding the games that I like (RimWorld, Factorio, ONI, Stardew Valley, stuff like this), I'd be happy commenting there.

Get your belly full, reverse genocide purple worms, wield a rubber duck, and leave Team Ant alone. And remember: you aren't there to fight, you just need to offer that bloody amulet on the right altar.

And what do you guys do about the faces in the slip gates that speak in latin?

Just don't #chat with them. The most that they'll say is "quid esse credis, Bellum?" anyway.

I'm fein mit this.

Kind of. @storksforlegs@beehaw.org is right that journalistic standards prevent too much meddling. Plus commercial news defending interests have a better resource for manipulation - instead of lying, they pick which true pieces of info to release as relevant, and paint them one or another way.

For example. Let's say that Alice insults Bob, and Bob slaps Alice in return. Someone defending Alice would say that she was the victim of aggression, while someone defending Bob would say that he reacted to Alice's verbal abuse. Neither is false, but they don't get the full picture. While LLM/A"I" style bullshit be saying instead "Alice picked a puppy and beat it to death with Bob's face".

Or as in older Spanish varieties. Around 1500 or so Spanish phonology was considerably similar to the one of Portuguese, but then a bunch of changes affected the fricatives - like Spanish [ʃ] becoming [x] (from "ship" to "loch"). That likely happened to increase the distinction between [s] and [ʃ], there was a "gap" in the phonology (no back of mouth fricative) left behind by Latin [h] kicking the bucket, and Spanish filled it.

Eventually for most Portuguese speakers the same "gap" would be filled too, but with another consonant - [r] becoming stuff like [ʀ ʁ x χ h ɦ]. So the chance that Portuguese [ʃ] follows the same path is slim at best. (I say "most" because some Gaúcho, Sulista and Caipira Portuguese speakers still use the old style trill. Myself do it sometimes, but for me it alternates between [r] and [h].)

[Sorry for the info dump. I love this shit.]

Any outlet accepting the deal should be immediately put into a list of sites spreading disinformation and potentially harmful content.

Just to be clear, the name of the word is supposed to be read like "shbosh" or "shboash". Native languages often use ⟨X⟩ for what English uses ⟨SH⟩, because it's what Spanish used to do back then.

...my lizard brain is now confused, because it really your question word order as in German to interpret wants, thus still for the ending "is" waiting is.

I'm not assuming when the formalisation happened. I'm saying that it's harder to get everyone to agree on how the orthography is supposed to be, when 2+ governments and populations associated with them are forcing distinctions even when there's none.

You're right that it is not impossible however, and your historical example shows it. Historically Lithuanian is the exception that proves the rule because

• the local population didn't see themselves as Prussians or Russians, but as Lithuanians, so there was a community even across borders; and
• neither Prussia nor Imperial Russia were backing specific varieties of Lithuanian. They were backing German and Russian instead.

And nowadays it's simply not an exception. (I was referring mostly to modern times.)

Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.

That's a great tidbit of info, and it's related to what I'm saying: those Lithuanian speakers in Russia only accepted the books as suitable for their language, even if they were printed in Prussia, because they didn't see it as coming from "those other guys".

[Thank you for the info, by the way! Across the whole comment, not just that paragraph.]

It's actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting "everyone" (more like "enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored") on the same page. Doubly true when it's a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there's none.

For English there's an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).

Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

It's all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

• Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
• Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
• English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
• Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
• Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)

I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you're right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should've said "English" alone.

The reason why people talk so much about the terminal is:

1. It's easier to tell newbies "input this command" than to guide them through a GUI.
2. The terminal gives you a lot of flexibility to customise stuff.

You'll probably want to learn the terminal for any serious customisation. However, you don't need to deal with it in your everyday usage.

I'd suggest you to use a Live USB, like other users recommended. Linux Mint, plus plenty other distros, can run straight from the USB. It'll be better for you to judge if you could/should be using Linux this way.

About the thousand distros, most of them don't matter. And if you're a newbie, stick to Mint and you'll probably not regret it.

Just for reference: in my State (somewhere in Latin America), since 2007, we have a law that TL;DRs to "if you offer a service through a certain mean, you must offer the cancellation method through the same mean; plus by phone, or internet, or snail mail".

It works like a charm because, contrariwise to what Michael Powell is claiming, customers aren't such disgustingly stupid trash that will "accidentally" hit the cancel button, nor they deserve to be punished by making cancellation a fucking pain in the arse. (There's probably similar laws elsewhere.)

It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol

You can, but it isn't that common, it's even considered a form of hyperbaton (messing around with word order).

Note that those distinctions that you mentioned (subjunctive vs. indicative, the right negation, perfect vs. imperfect) are all handled through the morphology in Latin, not the syntax (as in English). And yes Latin morphology can get really crazy, just like Polish or any other "old style" Indo-European language.

English syntax hard?

Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don't really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and blue famous raincoat (instead of "famous blue raincoat").

That happens because any language is complex, there's no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won't be able to get rid of it.

There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.

That's something else, the spelling. It's a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you're supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.

Ah, what you're saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.

For example, here's how to ask a yes/no question in...

• Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for "yes", but still has this sort of question.)
• Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
• Polish - start the sentence with "czy".
• German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
• English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support "do", then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that "do" instead. Noting that semantic "do" also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support "do", yielding questions like "did you do this?"

Then there's the adjective order. In Latin for example it's just a "...near the noun? Whatever, just don't be ambiguous." Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don't you dare to switch them - "your famous blue raincoat" is a-OK, but "your blue famous raincoat" makes you sound like a maniac.

The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.

The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"

The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.

So you're saying that blowing sucks, and sucking blows?

...okay, serious now. I think that it has to do with air pressure - sucking reduces it while blowing increases it. And water evaporation happens faster on regions with lower pressure.

I don't, but I've seen plenty people saying it. Just like "defed", Snooggums didn't see it but I did.