Zompist Bboard Again

Jonlang wrote: ↑Fri Aug 27, 2021 10:57 am I've just watched this YouTube video about Vulgar Latin, made by an American. Every time he says "Latin" he makes an effort to fully pronounce the /t/, where Americans usually pronounce it something like /læʔn/ as far as I can tell. I don't know why, but it sounds very creepy and disconcerting.

At 3:08, he says 'Old Latin' with /læʔn/, then again at 3:45 in 'written Latin', at 5:45 in 'late Latin period', and around 6:40 in 'Old Latin' again. But he seems to release /t d/ in a lot of places most of us wouldn't.

I may have shared this before, but I just got done colorizing a higher-res version of the graphic, so I feel like sharing this again.

I am an armiger and these are my arms:

The discussion above reminds me of something.

Many years ago (probably a decade), I was browsing YouTube and came across a small channel on the topic of classical languages. It was this guy who I think had been self-studying Latin and Ancient Greek, and made videos about different study methods etc. In one of his videos, he mentioned that the reason he started studying Greek was that he read a translation of something (the Odyssey, maybe?) and it was bad for some reason (this was like ten years ago, my memory is fuzzy) and so he "vowed to never read another translation again". In a different video he got into a debate with some troll from the comments section, who claimed that his Latin must be bad because he pronounces the English word <Latin> as [læʔn], and this is "incorrect."

Anyway I don't really have a point other than now that I've remember this, it's going to bug me until I find this guy again. Not for any good reason, just cause I'm like that. Do the above anecdotes ring a bell for anyone?

unicode is FINALLY giving us a backwards k, as I've been wanting for many many years.

https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-14.0/

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-14.0/

I dont know how long until the implementations will start showing up in fonts, but Ive been wanting to use this for the ejective /k_>/ for a long time, partly because q just doesnt look right, and partly because some languages with that already have /q/ too. In the meantime Ive been using mostly ḳ but the cleaner the script, the more i like it.

what are some good wines. i have noticed the existence of fauquier county va & as a result feel like i oughta learn what wines are. i had concord wine once and it was good but very rare. what's like, the opposite of a muscadine

i may not be able to help you there ..... i drink wine a lot but my tastes are primitive. to me all wines are good wines, because i mostly mix the wine with other drinks anyway .... i used to mix it with icecream too .... and all that really matters is what type of wine it is. i like fruity drinks and that applies to wine too. once in a while when i worked at Walgreens we would put the more expensive wines on markdown, so i have had some exposure to champagne and wines that people would consider high quality. i also drank some old bottled wine out of desperation once. i wouldnt say it all tastes the same .... there are some wines i dont care for ... but neither price nor age seems to make a difference to me.

Why have Brits suddenly started pronouncing the name Anthony with a [θ]? This certainly isn't the usual or traditional pronunciation, but it's gaining ground quickly. I'm not going mad, am I?

Jonlang wrote: ↑Sat Sep 25, 2021 10:17 am Why have Brits suddenly started pronouncing the name Anthony with a [θ]? This certainly isn't the usual or traditional pronunciation, but it's gaining ground quickly. I'm not going mad, am I?

Huh, as an American, it never even occurred to me that it would have anything other than /θ/. Is there perhaps some American celebrity or character named Anthony that's become popular lately?

It is traditionally pronounced with /t/, but the American spelling pronunciation is probably just spreading because the American variety of English is simply the most widely-used standard in the developed world (the population of the United States being larger than the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all together).

Well on www.alternatehistory.com a timeline-maker got banned for supporting Zionism against the very anti-Zionist admin and all threads he made, even those majority-other people were locked out of spite.

i misread that as Zompist at first. oh my eyes. anyway ... I sympathize with that person, and its one reason why I mostly keep my writing private, and when I do share, its with people i trust. that said, i dont do maps of Earth, and even when I used to, they werent really alt-histories but wholly different worlds that just happened to use the Earth as a setting. (one explanation I had planned was that at the end of the universe, some minor gods created our universe using theirs as a model)

Setting matters. My early childhood writings involved wars with casualty counts in the millions, and even whole planets being destroyed, and I kept at it into my teenage years when I had less of an excuse for childishness. Still I dont think that too many people would object to that because it was plainly science fiction, a genre that regularly involves catastrophes on a scale out of reach of day-to-day human interactions. (I remember once reading the opening of a novel series describing a war that resulted in trillions of human deaths ... this was just the prologue.)

While my childhood writing did involve Earth, I still think people mostly wouldn't have found it offensive, since the Earth usually behaved as a unitary entity, ... the only countries picked out from the planet were the United States and Japan, and only as extensions of an interplanetary war. There was nothing particularly Japanese about Japan, or American about America, in this writeup .... Japan happened to be one of my favorite countries at the time (maybe my very favorite) so I chose them to represent the rebels, the only country on Earth that chose to side with the invading foreign planet during the war.

if any aspect in my writing would offend people, i'd say most likely it would be political movements that bear resemblances to those in our world. Humans on planet Teppala are more peaceful than on Earth, and developed party politics at a stage of civilization where they were barely able to feed themselves. This leads to seeming anachronisms such as social credit, capitalism, communism, and the like appearing amongst other culturebound issues such as hygiene habits. But I typically dont play favorites .... there are still wars on this planet, and when an army wins a war, it's because they fought better than the opposing side, not because they bore a resemblance to the favored side in a war that took place on Earth.

A political system I prefer is turnismo except for social classes. For example, during the Year of the Scientist, Scientists act as politicians, the Year of the Ecologist, Ecologists rule. This eventually becomes a norm so you get peaceful transfers of power without elections

Nachtswalbe wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 5:01 pm A political system I prefer is turnismo except for social classes. For example, during the Year of the Scientist, Scientists act as politicians, the Year of the Ecologist, Ecologists rule. This eventually becomes a norm so you get peaceful transfers of power without elections

Some issues I see right from the start:
- Define your classes. Who is in and out? How do other classes participate in ruling? If you have a big number of classes, it will be ages until a class can determine things again, so big parts of the population become disengaged; if you have a small number of classes, there will be very little cohesion and common interest inside the classes.
- How does a class rule? Not all members will be able and ready to take on political posts, but for those who want and can, it needs to be decided who does and decides what. And how does the class arrive at collective decisions? You'll still need mechanisms like votes, elections, reconciliations, hieratchies etc.
- People being in office only a year lack experience and time to finish their projects, so you'll either get a lot of erratic and amateurish behaviour or you'll get structures that ensure continuity and professionality, like a bureaucracy, grey eminences and facilitiators in the background, lobbyists, which in that set-up will play an even bigger role than our system.
- Accountability - in a democracy, politicians want to be re-e-elected, providing at least some accountability to voters. That factor is absent in a system where someone is in office for a year and then never again probably forever. So the only means left are judiciary review and social pressure (which also exist in our system).
On the whole, to me it looks like a system which requires a lot of the same mechanisms that you probably don't like in our system, probably will increase the role of bureaucrcaies, lobbies, and background facilitators, and that for the price of robbing a large part of the population of the chance to shape policy even by the low-level instrument of elections for long stretches of time.

I see that as leading to rather erratic governance, since if every year a whole different group with different priorities governs, then the whole system will lurch from one set of policies to another each year.

well if it's for a conworld, especially one that's just starting down the untrodden path towards a healthy democracy .... i'd say it's a great idea. Societies with a lot of problems are more interesting than Marysuetopias. And societies can be perfectly stable even if they are dysfunctional, particularly if there is no convenient alternative model to follow.

also given that you used a real-world term for it, we know that at least a superficially similar system existed in our world.

I guess a lot depends what you mean by "prefer" .... if you mean you're using it in writing, then, as I said, I think it's a great idea. If you mean you support your system in the real world, then, while it certainly wouldnt be the worst governing system in the world today, I wouldnt think it would be a particularly good idea, either.

Oh, I didn't know about the Turno. That's a real interesting bit of history.

First observation: it doesn't look this was very stable long term.
Second observation: aren't we under that system already? (Okay, that's perhaps too cynical.)

It seems (and we've observed this in several countries, the US, Italy, France), when parties start to establish a monopoly/oligopoly at some point voters lose patience and more radical actors get a competitive advantage. (Your Reagans, Trumps or Grillos.)
Some countries seem to escape this, but I don't know how. (For instance Germany manages to keep the AfD under control. It's worryingly high but under control. From an outsider perspective, Austria was very similar but the far-right won.)

On the idea of replacing parties by various social groups... I think putting scientists in power is a terrible idea!

(Eminent scientists have a way of being completely out of their depth outside their own field and yet keep the intimate conviction that they know better than anyone else. Look up 'Nobel disease.' )

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 11:26 am Some countries seem to escape this, but I don't know how. (For instance Germany manages to keep the AfD under control. It's worryingly high but under control.

Well, there's still the 1933-1945 experience. This still helps to concentrate minds, especially not to underestimate seemingly crazy people on the Right.
Austria got let off more lightly after 1945, as "liberated nation", and AFAIK never made the reckoning with its Nazi past Germany did.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:29 pm

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 11:26 am Some countries seem to escape this, but I don't know how. (For instance Germany manages to keep the AfD under control. It's worryingly high but under control.

Well, there's still the 1933-1945 experience. This still helps to concentrate minds, especially not to underestimate seemingly crazy people on the Right.
Austria got let off more lightly after 1945, as "liberated nation", and AFAIK never made the reckoning with its Nazi past Germany did.

Indeed, most countries take far-rightism more lightly than Germany. Either because they never experienced a right-wing dictatorship (like the UK), or it was imposed from outside (like France), or it was not nearly as genocidal as Nazism (like Italy).

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:29 pm

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 11:26 am Some countries seem to escape this, but I don't know how. (For instance Germany manages to keep the AfD under control. It's worryingly high but under control.

Well, there's still the 1933-1945 experience. This still helps to concentrate minds, especially not to underestimate seemingly crazy people on the Right.
Austria got let off more lightly after 1945, as "liberated nation", and AFAIK never made the reckoning with its Nazi past Germany did.

Also, the greens were 'more radical actors' at some point and are slowly gaining their share of power.

is AfD so thoroughly infiltrated that they decided to stop prosecuting it, or is that just NDP? I can't imagine very many people would want to vote for a fed honeypot