lvxferre

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago

Likely - they didn't get any promising result fast enough, and kids be damned. That would explain Alder's abrupt transition into the standard orthography.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Caesar was a major slut before he became fabulously wealthy (or bald, for that matter), so I guess that gilded tongue had uses outside of the political arena 😏

Sadly unlikely. Cunnilingus was seen as degrading for the man.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not a native English speaker, I don't have any experience with this ITA crap, nor any emotional investment on it. However I studied enough Linguistics to smell the bullshit from a distance.

I'm sceptic on claims that ITA hindered or helped those people to learn English. It looks like fluff; not specially helpful, but not specially harmful either. At most you could claim it wasted time that could be better spent teaching something else, but that's it.

The hardest part to teach someone to read in an alphabet is not to teach them the value of the letters, but rather the idea behind the alphabet - that those lines in a paper are related to some abstract segments of their speech. And that "idea" is trivial to transpose, if you need to relearn the former; for example, if you're learning a second alphabetic script.

Now look at the personal anecdotes being shared. I'll emphasise some parts:

And then, at A-level, I’ll never forget my English teacher said to me, ‘You’ll never get an A because of your spelling.’ That was crushing. English was the one subject I loved – I felt so aggrieved.”

I know plenty people around her age who can't spell Portuguese for shit. As in, "eçeção" tier. Even with a more transparent spelling system, and no Initial Teaching Alphabet. But just like her, they had shitty teachers really, really eager to put students down.

For Alder, the abrupt transition from ITA to the standard alphabet felt like a betrayal. “It was like they said: ‘Right, we’ve told you a pack of lies for the past two years, now this is how you’re actually meant to read and write.’ My disgust at being lied to, that loss of trust, that stuck with me. I was never interested in English after that.”

"We're going to teach you this, but you'll never be told why."

Is the issue really ITA? Or primitive didactic methods of those times, that treated students as stupid little things instead of rational human beings? I'm betting the later.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

Only if I sleep belly up. If I sleep on the side, I don't.

The one actually noticing this was my ex-fiancée, we typically spooned when sleeping and she never complained about snoring, but once I was too tired to wait for her and slept first - belly up - she woke me up, worried because I was snoring.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

What I want (for Civ 5; I don't care about Civ 7) is semi-auto exploration: let me tell the scout the rough area I want it to explore, then ask me again once it's done. It's enough to reduce micromanagement, but it allows me to set up my priorities, that might be different from one playthrough to another.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago

This is amazing - thank you!

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

You mean Ø? I accidentally inverted it, but it should be easy for people to flip it. Here's a full list of what I've tried to represent:

ABCDEFGHIJ
LMNOPQRST
UVXYZ!?.,"«»
ØİKWYÐÞŁ
БГДЖЗИЛПЦ
ШЩЬЮЯФ
1234567890
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago

I didn't include Ч because it's easy to sub it with 4, Volapuk style.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago

Mine is simply orthographical. Some are informally transcribing it to the nearest English equivalent, but pronunciations are different, there are different ways to transcribe it, and even the original spelling is influencing it a bit:

  • "Uh-Gah Teh Emm-y-El" implies the first /a/ from "agá" (H) got reduced to [ɐ], the last vowel in "ele" is being elided, and the /e/ in "eme" (M) is being lowered to [ɛ]. I bet the -y- is to represent [ɨ], English lacks the sound so it gets tricky to represent it.
  • "Agga Teh Emi Eli" implies the ending /e/'s are actually /i/'s. There's some orthographic interference though - the "e" in "eme" (M) is typically [e] for those folks, but the one in "ele" (L) is [ɛ] instead.
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Do you have some good examples of that? The more, the merrier - it might help people to get ideas.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 24 points 1 day ago (9 children)

I'll repeat a few things I've been saying about this. To keep it ~~short:~~ less verbose:

What people call "toxicity" online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.

Now look at social media. You'll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.

Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ah, that's OK.

As I mentioned in another comment, I'm aware this is not the "only" way to do things. It's more like a starting point - 5x3 letters look decent enough, they're easy to distinguish, and even for the same size you can twist things up a bit (like adding a few pixels to ⟨A⟩, or making the ⟨8⟩ only seven pixels in total).

For example if you have less space you could make most letters 2x3 or 3x2, but it'll look messy.

 

I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.

I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.

 

Interesting video on the stone that allowed researchers to decipher Ancient Egyptian. Check comments for a few notes.

 

Additional links with press coverage: ArcheologyMag, Oxford.

For context:

The Huns were nomadic people from Central Eurasia; known for displacing a bunch of Iranian (e.g. Alans) and and Germanic (e.g. Goths, Suebians etc.) speakers, that ultimately invaded the Roman Empire. They reached the Volga around 370 CE, and one of their leaders (Attila) is specially famous. Often believed to be a Turkic people, but if the study is correct they're from a completely different language family instead.

The Xiōng-Nú are mentioned by Chinese sources as one of the "Five Barbarians" (i.e. non-Han people). They would've lived in Central Eurasia between 300 BCE and 100 CE or so, and eventually became Han tributaries.

The Paleo-Siberian language in question would be an older form of Arin, a Yeniseian language. Yup, that same family believed by some to have relatives in the Americas.

 
 

For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.

 

Era só um trote.

 

The main idea behind this language is to become evolutionary food for other languages of my conworld. As such I'll probably never flesh it out completely, only the necessary to make its descendants feel a bit more natural.

Constructive criticism is welcome.

Context and basic info

The conworld I'm building has three classical languages, spoken 2~3 millenniums before the conworld present: Old Sirtki, Classical Tarune, and Mäkşna. And scholars in the conworld present are reconstructing their common ancestor, that they call "Proto-Sitama".

What I'm sharing here, however is none of their fancy reconstructions. It's the phonology of the language as it was spoken 7 millenniums before the conworld present. Its native name was /kʲær.mi.'zɑst/, or roughly "what we speak"; the language itself had no written version but it'll be romanised here as ⟨Cjermizást⟩.

Its native speakers were a semi-nomadic people, who lived mostly of livestock herding. They'd stay in a region with their herds, collect local fruits and vegetables, and then migrate for more suitable pasture as their animals required.

It was quite a departure from the lifestyle of their star travelling ancestors, who were born in a highly industrialised society in another planet.

Grammar tidbits

Grammar-wise, Cjermizást was heavily agglutinative, with an absolutive-ergative alignment and Suffixaufnahme. So typically you'd see few long polymorphemic words per sentence. Those morphemes don't always "stack" nicely together, so you often see phonemes being elided, mutated, or added to the word.

Consonants

Manner \ Set Hard Soft
Nasals /m n/ /mʲ ɲ/
Voiceless stop /p t k/ /pʲ tʲ kʲ/
Voiced stop /b d g/ /bʲ dʲ gʲ/
Voiceless fric. /ɸ s x/ /fʲ ʃ ç/
Voiced fric. /w z ɣ/ /vʲ ʒ j/
Liquids /l r/ /ʎ rʲ/

Cjermizást features a contrast between "soft" and "hard" consonants. "Soft" consonants are palatalised, palatal, or post-alveolar; "hard" consonants cannot have any of those features. Both sets are phonemic, and all those consonants can surface outside clusters.

Palatalised consonants spawn a really short [j], that can be distinguished from true /j/ by length.

Although /j/ and /w/ are phonetically approximants, the language's phonology handles them as fricatives, being paired with /ɣ/ and /vʲ/ respectively.

/r rʲ/ surface as trills or taps, in free variation. The trills are more typical in simple onsets, while the taps in complex onsets and coda.

The contrast between /m n/ is neutralised when preceding another consonant in the same word, since both can surface as [m n ŋ]; ditto for /mʲ nʲ/ surfacing as [mʲ ɱʲ ɲ].

Coda /g/ can also surface as [ŋ], but only in word final position; as such, it doesn't merge with the above.

Liquids clustered with voiceless fricatives and/or stops have voiceless allophones.

Vowels

Proto-Sitama's vowel system is a simple square: /æ i ɒ u/. They have a wide range of allophones, with three situations being noteworthy:

  • /ɒ u/ are typically fronted to [Œ ʉ] after a soft consonant
  • /æ i/ are backed to [ɐ ɪ] after a hard velar
  • unstressed vowels are slightly centralised

Accent

Accent surfaces as stress, and it's dictated by the following rules:

  1. Some suffixes have an intrinsic stress. If the word has 1+ of those, then assign the primary stress to the last one. Else, assign it to the last syllable of the root.
  2. If the primary stress fell on the 5th/7th/9th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 3rd-to-last
  3. If the primary stress fell on the 4th/6th/8th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 2nd-to-last.
  4. Every two syllables, counting from the one with the primary stress, add a secondary stress.

Phonotactics

Max syllable is CCVCC, with the following restrictions:

  • complex onset: [stop] + [liquid]; e.g. /pl/ is a valid onset, */pw/ isn't
  • complex coda: [liquid or nasal] + [stop or fricative]; e.g. /nz/ is a valid coda, */dz/ isn't

If morphology would create a syllable violating such structure, an epenthetic /i/ dissolves the cluster.

Consonant clusters cannot mix hard and soft consonants. When such a mix would be required by the morphology, the last consonant dictates if the whole cluster should be soft or hard, and other consonants are mutated into their counterparts from the other set. For example, */lpʲ/ and */ʃp/ would be mutated to /ʎpʲ/ and /sp/.

Stops and fricatives clustered together cannot mix voice. Similar to the above, the last consonant of the cluster dictates the voicing of the rest; e.g. */dk/ and */pz/ would be converted into /tk/ and /bz/ respectively.

Gemination is not allowed, and two identical consonants next to each other are simplified into a singleton. Nasal consonants are also forbidden from appearing next to each other, although a cluster like /nt.m/ would be still valid.

Word-internal hiatuses are dissolved with an epenthetic /z/. Between words most speakers use a non-phonemic [ʔ], but some use [z] even in word boundaries.

Romanisation

As mentioned at the start, the people who spoke Cjermizást didn't write their own language. As such the romanisation here is solely a convenience.

  • /m n p t b d g s x w z l r/ are romanised as in IPA
  • /k ɸ ɣ/ are romanised ⟨c f y⟩
  • "soft" consonants are romanised as their "hard" counterparts, plus ⟨j⟩
  • ⟨j⟩ is omitted inside clusters; e.g. /pʲʎ/ is romanised as ⟨plj⟩, not as *⟨pjlj⟩
  • /æ i ɒ u/ are ⟨e i a u⟩
 
 

Use this thread to ask questions or share trivia, if you don't want to create a new thread for that.

[Note: the purpose of this thread is to promote activity, not to concentrate it. So if you'd still rather post a new thread, by all means - go for it!]

 

Quick summary: a tablet written in Hittite, from a likely vassal to their king, recounts how Attaršiya [Atreus?] of Ahhiyawa [the Achaeans] and his sons attacked Taruiša [Troy]. And at the end there's a fragment in another Anatolian language, Luwian, saying the following:

wa-ar-ku-uš-ša-an ma-a-aš-ša-ni SÌ[R
wrath.ACC god(dess).VOC? si[ng

So roughly "Sing, oh goddess, the wrath..."

This is pretty much how the Illiad starts in Greek:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
mênĭn áeide theā́ Pēlēïádeō Akhĭlêos
rage.ACC sing.IMP goddess.VOC Peleus.GEN Achilles.GEN
Sing, oh goddess, the rage of Achilles [son] of Peleus

 

Here's a direct link to the journal article.

Summary: phylogenomic study found that Hexapoda (insects, springtails, headcones) is a sister clade to Remipedia (venomous, cave-dwelling "crustaceans"). So it's basically the same that happened with birds and dinos, except with bugs.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by lvxferre@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz
 

Feel free to use this thread to ask small questions or share random language / linguistics trivia, if you don't feel like creating a new thread just for that.

(Just to be clear: yes, if you want to create a new thread for your question/trivia, you can. I'm only trying to stimulate discussion in the comm.)

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