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[Kuchigakatai]

Saw this in some chat:


American people in Amityville, NY: this house is haunted because people died here

French people in Paris, living atop old limestop quarries filled with six million dead bodies : quoi ?

the French are unaffected bc they ARE demons

[Kuchigakatai]

- Quid in vītā optimum?
- Plānitiēs patēns, equus vēlōx, falcōnēs manū assidentēs, ventus capillōs perflāns.
- Minimē! Conan! Quid in vītā optimum?
- Hostēs contundere. Prae tē eōs dēpellī vidēre. Lāmenta mulierum audīre.
- Euge... Euge.

"What is best in life?"
"The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair."
"Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?"
"Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women."
"That is good... That is good."

[Kuchigakatai]

According to a rough estimate by some people at the New York Times, perhaps about 750 million people in China are currently under some sort of domestic lockdown.

I.e., 10% of all living humans are now under a lockdown with the intention of stopping a virus epidemic. It sounds like the type of notification you'd see in a videogame, but it's reality.

Something that called my attention from the NYT article:

[In northern Zhejiang] A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Mr. Huang [who volunteers delivering food] said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

From a discussion about human hemoglobin (red blood) vs. the chlorocruorin (green blood) and hemerythrin (purple blood) of some marine worms:

"If I recall my fun facts correctly, haemerythrin is immune to carbon monoxide poisoning. And I used that fun fact for one of my conworlds where trolls would purposefully make carbon monoxide heavy dens for safety."

[Pabappa]

I guess people are posting random photos in random places on Google Maps that are nowhere near their actual location. e.g. on a PC, go to https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.3815907,-2.0544389,7z and click the Street View doll. you should see dozens of "photos" strewn about in deep ocean waters, which are not photos of the ocean in any case Ive seen so far. then you can scroll around the whole world that way and see more photos.

Some of these might just be mistakes, but digital cameras typically encode the location in the metadata of the photo itself, so i would expect that even with the enooooooooooormous number of photos on Google Maps that there would be very few such mistakes that would not get pruned out. a small numbe rof them may be real ... e.g. near antarctica i found 2 ocean photos taken from what appears to be the same ship.

[Linguoboy]

Yesterday was Pączki Day in Chicago, so I found myself chatting about them quite a lot on social media. I was surprised to discover that a-ogonek, though missing from the iPhone keyboard for English, can be found on the one for Spanish--but not the keyboard for German! Why would Spanish-speakers have a greater need for Polish diacritics than English- or German-speakers?

[Yalensky]

My best guess is that a minority language somewhere in the hispanophone world uses a-ogonek, but I really don't know what that might be. Was the keyboard specifically localized to a certain Spanish-speaking country or region? Did it have e-ogonek?

Maybe they just like a full set of diacritics.

[chris_notts]

My best guess is that a minority language somewhere in the hispanophone world uses a-ogonek, but I really don't know what that might be. Was the keyboard specifically localized to a certain Spanish-speaking country or region? Did it have e-ogonek?

Maybe they just like a full set of diacritics.

Some of the Meso- and South American languages just love diacritics because of overlapping tone + nasalisation + a shitton of other register contrasts. It must be one of those.

[zompist]

Navajo and Apache use ą (and ę, į, ǫ).

Say, I have a database of sample words in thousands of languages. That gives a bunch of hits in Oto-Manguean. (Also Siouan and Tanoan.)

[Linguoboy]

The only languages spoken in a Hispanophone area that I could find which include a-ogonek in their orthography are Southwestern Athabaskan (Navajo, Chiricahua, Mescalero Apache, etc.).

The Spanish keyboard includes e-ogonek and i-ogonek but not o-ogonek or u-ogonek.

[Xwtek]

You should watch English by Phensri. It's a video about how a teacher butchers English language. Here's a link to one of the its episodes.

[Raphael]

Was unsure for a moment whether to post this here or in the Linguistic Miscellany thread, but decided that it's not language-centered enough...

Does anyone else find it a bit weird how North American English uses the phrase "The Mob" to describe organized crime? When I think of a "mob", I think of a large group of angry shouting people, usually with little formal structure, assembled in one place. When I think of organized crime, I think of "enforcers" working alone or in small teams, even when the organization they work for employs a lot of people.

[Linguoboy]

Here in Chicago, the traditional mob organization is known as “the Outfit”.

[Ares Land]

Was unsure for a moment whether to post this here or in the Linguistic Miscellany thread, but decided that it's not language-centered enough...

Does anyone else find it a bit weird how North American English uses the phrase "The Mob" to describe organized crime? When I think of a "mob", I think of a large group of angry shouting people, usually with little formal structure, assembled in one place. When I think of organized crime, I think of "enforcers" working alone or in small teams, even when the organization they work for employs a lot of people.

Oh, yes, I always found that pretty weird. Maybe that comes with learning English as a second language?

At one point, I read a lot on the history of the American Mafia and the word 'mob' is actually fairly adequate. (As it happens, organized crime isn't, well, that organized, especially compared to The Godfather)
Word referring to organized crime apparently tend to go through a fair amount of semantic drift:
French 'le milieu' < '(social background)
French 'la pègre' < Provençal. 'the lazy'
It. 'mafia' < Sicilian 'bragging, swagger'.

(The last two etymologies are fairly unclear. I just picked the ones that seemed most likely.)

Oh, and the etymology of 'mob' is pretty fun too! I thought it was Germanic, but it's actually short for mobile (in the sense of fickle).

So a drift from mob, 'dangerous crowd' > 'criminal' > 'organized crime' seems reasonable, considering.

[Raphael]

I don't remember the exact date, but at some time during the early months of 2000 - twenty years ago now, when I was about to turn eighteen - I discovered a website called zompist.com - as far as I can remember, first through a link to this website on Mike Huben's old Criticisms of Libertarianism website:

http://zompist.com/gummint.html

I was enthralled - partly by the informed political commentary, partly by the fact that there was a whole fictional world there. At the time, the main homepage contained a link to what it said was an imaginary country. I had never heard of conworlding at the time, so when I clicked on the link, I expected to find a fictional country on Earth, like the fictional countries that occasionally appear in mainstream fiction and are usually collections of regional stereotypes. Instead, it was a whole fictional planet, complete with its own solar system! It blew my mind. A bit later I contacted the guy behind the website, and ended up making some minor contributions to the website myself.

It stayed one of my main online destinations. In fact, there was a time in the mid-2000s when for most of my web interests, and some of my real life interests, I could trace the line of how I either discovered the interest when it was mentioned of zompist.com, or when it was mentioned on some other place on the web that I had discovered when it was mentioned on zompist.com, or when it was mentioned on some place on the web that I had discovered when it was mentioned on some other place on the web that I had discovered when it was mentioned on zompist.com, and so on.

A while later, zompist.com got a small message board where people could talk about Almea, and I started to post there. Later, that message board was replaced with a larger board, the ZBB, which soon branched out into discussions of linguistics in general, and conlanging and conworlding in general. But at the time, I wasn't much interested in linguistics, or, for that matter, in conworlds other than Almea, so I ended up in the weird position of being one of the founding members, and for a while even a moderator, of a board that was mostly about topics I wasn't that much interested in.

On top of that, the board got worse and worse as an environment - no need to rehash that here. So eventually, I left. I still paid attention to it, though - at some times, I didn't read any threads, but I would semi-regularly use the search function to read zompist's own latest posts.

Then, years later, I had soured on one other online place after another, and I got the impression that the ZBB had calmed down again, so at some time in late 2016 or early 2017, I returned, tentatively at first. Then I posted more and more often, and now, here I am.

Thank you for everything, Zompist and the rest of the crew!

[Kuchigakatai]

One thing that annoys me is that here in Vancouver you're not really allowed to exist indoors in public places without paying. If I wanted to give free workshops for, say, calligraphy or whatever, I'd have to incurr in costs to get a room to make it free for patrons, or otherwise force every patron to pay the hosting place (say, if it is at a cafe, by buying coffee or a snack).

In theory I wouldn't mind the former option of paying to rent space; there is really no such thing as free lunch. But the problem is that the cost is surprisingly high. Public libraries are one of those merciful few places where you can exist while hardly paying (technically you do pay of course, through taxes). A couple days ago I went to a public library in a suburb a little a bit far from Vancouver (Coquitlam), and asked about the cost to rent one of the various rooms. The answer: CAD 35 per hour for the smallest room (not that small though, fits ~12 people with ease), so a single session of two hours would be CAD 70 (roughly USD 53 or EUR 47). Sigh.

Interestingly, other such places where you can exist indoors while hardly paying anything include the tables of food courts when malls aren't busy, and also, curiously, the tables of certain big chains such as McDonald's and Tim Hortons when it isn't busy. You can definitely catch students doing homework for hours at malls' slow food courts, and sometimes McDonald's or Tim Hortons (particularly when they're of the longer, bigger kind), although by convention the latter two seem to be used for talking more often than for homework. Naturally, all of these are so noisy that, in that respect, you could say they're the opposite of libraries. People use them because they generally tend to have more available chairs and tables usable for writing or typing on a laptop than public libraries though.

[Pabappa]

My favorite planets, ranked in order of how much I'd like to live there if material concerns could be wished away:

Mercury: A small, barren planet with a very interesting orbit. Because its rotation and orbit are synchronized, some areas get more sun than others at the same latitude, and one could say that there are four poles instead of two, from the standpoint of weather. The axial tilt is low enough that some areas near the North Pole get no sun at all and are colder than any place on Earth and probably also Mars. The eccentricity is very high, adding to the exotic weather patterns. Thus Mercury contains the hottest surface land in the solar system while also containing the coldest surface land among the four inner planets.

Jupiter: Jupiter has a little bit of everything, plus things all its own. It's the largest planet, and astronomers believe that it couldn't get any bigger even if a lot of mass were added to it. The only known planets larger in diameter than Jupiter anywhere in the universe are those that orbit so close to their stars that they are inflated by thermal expansion.

Jupiter also has rings and keeps trading places with Saturn for which of them has the most known moons. I think Jupiter's moons are the most interesting, all in all, within our solar system. Jupiter has a very interesting climate, with 200 year old storms on the surface and diamonds falling into a superheated gaseous ocean further down. Jupiter may share its orbit with over a million tiny asteroids, which are called trojans in this case.

Planet Nine: If it exists, I place Planet Nine third on my list on the basis that the only interesting thing about it will be its orbit; other than that, it is predicted to mostly resemble the other outer planets, and we will know very little about it in any case. However if Planet Nine were shown to have a host of other interesting features, then I would rank it higher on the list.

Earth: I prefer to keep Earth off the list because it is so different from all other planets that I could easily rank it first, last, or anywhere in between depending on my mood at the time. Since this is a list of planets I'd like to live on and I already live on Earth, I will leave it unranked other than to say it falls between my favorite and least favorite planets.

Uranus: This planet has a very interesting axial tilt, giving it perhaps the most exotic climate in the solar system after that of Mercury. We only discovered one feature of the climate around 2007 when for the first time we were able to observe the planet at its equinox. For reasons still unknown, Uranus is slightly colder than Neptune, thus claiming the coldest surface temperature in the solar system. However, apart from its climate, Uranus has no distinguishing features that Jupiter doesn't also have.

I prefer the pronunciation with initial stress.

Neptune: At first, Neptune seems like a more interesting version of Uranus, but it is interesting only in ways that Jupiter expresses much better, and so I have to rank Neptune slightly below Uranus. Even so, any graphic showing the two side by side naturally draws my attention to the much more appealing Neptune.

Saturn: Saturn ranks low for the same reason Uranus and Neptune did: while it has a lot of interesting features, it has few that Jupiter doesn't also have, and I don't think the rings really add much to the appearance of a planet that is already dominated by west-east bands of colorful clouds.

Venus: Even in a fantasy in which I would survive here, I would still dislike hot weather, and there is no escape from that on Venus. Neither is the weather particularly interesting, since the atmosphere pretty much smooths everything out. I would never see the sun unless I was floating high up in the atmosphere, which I could do on any other planet just as well.

Pluto: If Pluto were on this list, I would place it here, as it has very few distinguishing features. Its orbit was long thought to be interesting, but we now know that there are hundreds of objects with similar orbits, and that some of these, such as Sedna, beat Pluto at its own game in many ways.

Mars: The most disappointing planet to me is Mars. We have long fantasized about living on Mars, but nearly everything we've dreamt about has turned out to be impossible. The real Mars is a planet a tenth the size of Earth, with two tiny moons, and no distinguishing features to set it apart from Earth.

[Kuchigakatai]

We all know about the politically unifying effects of teaching a single standard language widely, and how elites sometimes do it fully on purpose, as seen in the 16th-century Spanish Empire, Franco's Spain, and today's China. Here's an interesting parallel from Manchukuo that doesn't get talked about much:

"They encourage Japanese language study by claiming it will help students advance in the world and find business success. But this is not true, some students, despite years of diligent study, have not succeeded in business nor risen in position, and they now feel that they should have done something more practical in school. Utilitarian encouragement works even less for students living in distant mountain regions who will never meet a Japanese person face to face in their lives. The entire approach is wrong. The purpose of learning Japanese is not to have a good command of language, as in a foreign language course. Rather, Japanese language training in and of itself acts as a complete education. In other words, the students' feelings and lifestyle themselves will be reconstructed by the Japanese language. This is the real reason. Even if they never have the opportunity in their lives to use their Japanese language skills, it is worth it. They will become Manchukuo nationals, without interest in their original ethnicity. It is for this mental training that they must learn Japanese."

--Fukui Yuu, textbook editor for the Manchukuo Ministry of Education, 1939

[Pabappa]

Interesting name, that guy has.

I heard that pre-war Japan was interested in annexing Taiwan and that Taiwan, fearful of China, was cooperating with them and even began teaching Japanese in their schools. The Taiwanese would have all become Japanese citizens, and people would have free travel in both directions. This was before the Maoist Revolution of 1949 but I think the conflict was in its early stages and the Taiwanese were already aligning themselves with the anti-Communist side of the struggle, and saw Japan as a potential protector. Japan lost the war but the winning side included the USA, another strong anti-Communist power, so Taiwan survived as a US protectorate for about forty years before transitioning to full democracy.

[Linguoboy]

I heard that pre-war Japan was interested in annexing Taiwan and that Taiwan, fearful of China, was cooperating with them and even began teaching Japanese in their schools.

Um, Japan, did annex Taiwan. China ceded the island to them by the Treaty of Shimonoseki which ended the First Sino-Japanese War. Japanese started being widely taught in Japan after Hara Takashi became Prime Minister and began promoting an assimilationist policy in both Taiwan and Korea. This policy intensified with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the drafting of hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese into the Japanese army. There are thousands of people of Taiwanese descent living in Japan today. (It's hard to say how many because the government doesn't keep statistics on ethnicity, only nationality.)

[Kuchigakatai]

There is definitely this curious relationship between Taiwan and Japan with, on the one hand, the historical conquest of the former by the latter and the assimilationist policies that were involved in that, and on the other hand the ever-continuing threat of China that pushes Taiwan to be in better terms with its former conqueror...