The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • If you speak Portuguese maybe.

    I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn’t even take the browser config into account.)

    Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.


  • Since Contramuffin answered most of it, I’ll focus on the diacritics.

    The acute in *ḱ *ǵ *ǵʰ shows that they aren’t the same as *k *g *gʰ. Odds are that the ones with an acute were pronounced with the tongue a bit fronted (palatalised).

    The acute over other consonants, plus in *é *ó, is something else entirely. It’s the accent - you’re supposed to pronounce those consonants with a higher pitch. “Yay, consistency” /s

    The macron over *ē *ō is to show that the vowel is loooong.

    Those floating ⟨ʰ⟩ refer to aspiration. Aspiration is that “puff” of air that you release when you say ⟨pill, till, kill⟩ but not when you say ⟨spill, still, skill⟩. In English this is not distinctive, but in a lot of other Indo-European languages it is, and the mainstream hypothesis is that it was distinctive in PIE itself.

    In the meantime, a floating ⟨ʷ⟩ means that the consonant is pronounced with rounded lips. The difference between something like *kʷ and *kw is mostly that the first one behaves like a single consonant, the other as two.

    That ring under some consonants is to highlight that they’re syllabic, as if they were LARPing as vowels. It’s a lot like writing “button” as “buttn̥”.

    If you ever see *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ etc., pretend that that “ə” is “h₁”. It’s simply different ways to annotate the same stuff.

    *H means “this is *h₁ or *h₂ or *h₃, but we have no clue on which”.


  • four *kʷetwóres == french “quatorze”… 🤔

    Close: it’s French quatre (4), not “quatorze” (14). It goes like this: PIE *kʷetwóres → Latin ⟨quattuor⟩ /kʷattuor/ → Old French ⟨quatre, catre⟩ /kʷatɾə/~/katɾə/ → contemporary French ⟨quatre⟩ /katʁ(ə)/.

    French ⟨quatorze⟩ does contain that *kʷetwóres, but it’s only the “quator-”. The “-ze” is from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥ (10). This gets easier to see in Latin, as the word for 14 was ⟨quattuordecim⟩ (literally four-ten).

    Note that almost all English words that you used to translate the PIE words are also examples of those PIE words being still in use nowadays - they’re direct descendants, for example *kʷis → who, *éǵh₂ → I, etc. In English, German, Swedish and other Germanic languages, this gets a bit obscured due to some old sound change called Grimm’s Law. (EDIT: the only exception is the second line - *túh, *te became “thou, thee”.)


  • This is mostly correct so I’ll focus on small specific details, OK?

    Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you’ll also see them before things that you don’t expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn’t use it.

    It is kind of “guesswork” but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an “anything goes”.

    The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they’re simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it’s more like the sound in “oh-oh” than like [h]. And some argue that they aren’t even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).








  • Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.

    I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.



  • But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

    True that.

    Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.