Random Thread

[Ares Land]

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Napoleon. It should be unsurprizing, but I'm always surprised to find out that some people here still think Napoleon was a big fucking deal.
(I read the whole Horatio Hornblower series and a lot of Patrick O'Brian, so I always have a bit of a mental adjustment to make.)

[MacAnDàil]

And I read Black Jacobins, which mentions Napoleon's intention to exterminate the Haitian population and bring more slaves to replace them. The Real Great Repacement right there.

[Raphael]

Pedantic note: You mean the 200th anniversary of his death.

I can completely understand people still seeing him as a big fucking deal; what I have a problem with is seeing him as a big fucking deal in any kind of good way.

[Ares Land]

Pedantic note: You mean the 200th anniversary of his death.

Oh. Yes, of course!

I can completely understand people still seeing him as a big fucking deal; what I have a problem with is seeing him as a big fucking deal in any kind of good way.

Then again, military coups, reinstating slavery and treating women like property are all very relevant right now!

I'm mostly amused that this particular anniversary happened to be celebrated by a smaller than average president with a messiah complex.

[Ryusenshi]

As usual, the computers I use at work are locked for security reasons, so some operations can only be done by an admin. This means that you need an admin password to update your programs, or to scan the disks with an antivirus. The result is that most programs are out of date, and antivirus scans happen once in a blue moon. For security reasons.

[Vijay]

I intended all Dravidian language varieties to be fair game for the Dravidian Language Varieties thread, and I intend the same for an Indo-European Language Varieties thread, despite the unusually large geographic spread of Indo-European.

That sounds very ambitious but in a good way!

Thanks! Maybe I can start out by finding something to write about Odia. Odia script is the only major Indian script I can barely read at all.

[fusijui]

Two days ago, I found the name Mia[&*!#]a on a web page - according to context, the name of a Japanese musician. Of course, it really is Miyashita

That's disappointing, but I guess it's not a great surprise, in the end

[Pabappa]

Reminds me a bit of how I believed for years that there was a rare surname Masturbara, presumably getting rarer with each generation and thus harder to find, but somebody pointed out to me that it was in every case clearly a typo for the Japanese surname Matsubara. It happened that the examples I found were, except for one, not paired with obvious Japanese first names.

[Raphael]

I thought this tweet, and the tweet it's quoting, might be of interest to people on a linguistics-focused geek forum:

https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status ... 1332943883

[Ryusenshi]

Here is a survey for non-native French speakers:
https://www.psytoolkit.org/c/3.3.2/survey?s=9Zjqr
If you speak French at a good level, above B1 (but it's not your native language), I invite you to take it.

[Ares Land]

I thought this tweet, and the tweet it's quoting, might be of interest to people on a linguistics-focused geek forum:

https://twitter.com/IgorBrigadir/status ... 1332943883

Pretty funny! Maybe that AI is just a little in advance on its times -- I'm pretty sure in a few centuries no one would see any problem with the first name / name / location combination.

A few weeks ago, I thought to myselft that our names would be extremely confusing to Romans: I have a Hebrew first name with a Germanic last name; Roman family names are common as first names; and having Hebrew / Aramaic first names as last names isn' unheard of. Plus, of course, the endless combinations of Celtic, Greek or Latin names.

[zompist]

A few weeks ago, I thought to myselft that our names would be extremely confusing to Romans: I have a Hebrew first name with a Germanic last name; Roman family names are common as first names; and having Hebrew / Aramaic first names as last names isn' unheard of. Plus, of course, the endless combinations of Celtic, Greek or Latin names.

Not that confusing: the ancient empires were pretty cosmopolitan places. I was just reading about the first attestations of the word 'Arab'; these were often self-descriptions by people with (or using) Greek names. There was a High Priest in Jerusalem named Jason. In the book of Esther, the Jewish hero Mordecai has a theophoric name glorifying Marduk.

[Raphael]

Long ago, when I first heard of those 17-year-life-cycle cicadas, I thought they were a pretty obscure species mainly known to entomologists who look very closely and carefully at everything that's crawling around. But now that they're out again, I've got the impression, mostly from Twitter, that in at least some places, they're a pretty big deal, easily noticed in real life even by people who don't spend any time looking at the floor outside with a magnifying glass.

Interesting - I wouldn't have thought that!

[zompist]

But now that they're out again, I've got the impression, mostly from Twitter, that in at least some places, they're a pretty big deal, easily noticed in real life even by people who don't spend any time looking at the floor outside with a magnifying glass.

Oh yes. When I was a kid there was a big emergence, and there were bugs everywhere. You'd see several on every tree trunk. And they're huge for bugs, over an inch long (up to 3 cm). They're harmless, so I don't remember anyone being scared of them.

[Ares Land]

That's interesting. European cicadas are huge too (I had a mummified one when I was a kid) but we typically hear them a lot more than we see them. I checked and European species spend years underground too; but they're not synchronized, so I guess we don't get quite the same number.
Do these sing too?

I know it's absurdly parochial but they're so deeply associated with the Mediterranean here I have trouble thinking of cicadas in Chicago

[Ares Land]

Something of definite interest to conworlding: this insanely detailed map of Paris ca 1300.

The funny thing is, it's both huge and really tiny. Huge in the sense that Paris before the Black Plague was a megalopolis by medieval European standard and tiny in the sense you could walk the whole city in less than an hour.


(Parts of me wants to use this map for a RPG campaign, set sometime between the beginning of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague . Lots of roleplaying potential here. Available playing class include part-time theology student/petty thief, sociopathic mass murderer mercenary, and bookseller-alchemist.

This website has detailed maps from Roman times to the present day: https://paris-atlas-historique.fr/
(In French, unfortunately, but the maps are arguably the most interesting part.)

[Raphael]

Interesting map!

and tiny in the sense you could walk the whole city in less than an hour.

This is only very tangentially related to your post, but this reminds me of how, at some time around, I think, 2003 or 2004, I walked the entire distance between the place where I lived at the time and the place where my Mom lived at the time, about 12-15 km, taking me from an inner-city neighborhood to a place in the countryside, simply because I wanted to get a better feel for how long various distances felt like to people in pre-modern times.

[Ares Land]

Oh, yeah, that's a pretty interesting experience.
I often go hiking on vacation; it's always instructive to find out that getting to the next market town and getting back would take the better part of a day.

I checked with Google Maps (I'd have checked on foot, but the weather was dreary), and it actually took barely more than half an hour to cross 1330's Paris -- it's about the size of the City of London.
That was an absurdly crowded city, btw, with perhaps up to 230,000 people. Population density was 75,000 per square kilometer, or 200,000 per square mile.

City size tend to max out at one hour travel time and indeed travel time seem pretty universal, something called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

[Ryusenshi]

The French President has the title Président de la République, and that's how everybody refers to him. We only say Président français when we need to specify (e.g. there's a conference with other Presidents).

As a kid, I saw a TV show from the US, with dubbed voices, and one character referred to le Président des États-Unis. I found that jarring: the show takes place in the US, the character is American, certainly they don't need to say which President they're talking about? It must be a weird translation choice. But the title really is President of the United States, and that's how he's called even in his home country.

[WeepingElf]

Well, the President of the United States is not the only president in that country. This reminds me of a scene in a film (don't remember which one), where a scientist gets a phone call from the White House because of some national emergency in which he is expected to be able to help. His wife answers the phone and says to him, "It's important - it's the President!" The scientist replies, "Tell him that I am travelling." The wife then says, "It's not the president of the university - it's the President of the United States!".