Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Phonotactics.

    I believe lots of people know, that different languages use different phonemes (sets of sounds). However, what often goes unnoticed is that different languages also use different combinations of phonemes. The rules dictating which combinations are allowed or not in a certain language are called phonotactics of that language.

    So. What you’re noticing is a restriction in the English phonotactics: they don’t allow English syllables to start with /rj/ [see note], even if Japanese does. English is known for allowing some pretty weird stuff, but that sequence won’t pop up in English, so its speakers have a really hard time with it.

    And note how all your examples have that sequence:

    • ⟨遠慮⟩ enryo /eN.rjo/
    • ⟨留学生⟩ ryūgakusei /rju:.ga.ku.se:/
    • ⟨略奪⟩ ryakudatsu /rja.ku.da.tu/
    • ⟨涼⟩ Ryō /rjo:/

    There’s also the matter that Japanese /r/ is not the same as English /ɹ/. Japanese /r/ is typically pronounced as [ɾ]; I think a lot of English speakers are used to that sound only between vowels, because they associate it with /t/ or /d/. But even if the English speaker in question uses [ɹ] for that Japanese /r/, the sequence is still problematic.

    For further info on English phonotactics, check this page. Wikipedia also has a page for the Japanese phonotactics, it’s useful to contrast both.

    note: that “/j/” is the first sound in “yes” or in “やる”. It should not be confused with the sound in “jeans” /dʒ/.



  • I’ll focus on Lucifer.

    itself [Lucifer] a mistranslation/interpretation from Isaiah 14

    Yup, this is accurate.

    “Lucifer” in Latin means “light bringer”. It’s the name given to the morning star (i.e. the planet Venus, not an actual star) because it’s the first one that appears in the morning, as if it was bringing the light of the day. And people already knew, since Babylonian times, that the same astronomical object appears in the evening, and “falls” into the horizon.

    That created mythological associations between Venus and going to the underworld. Like this one:

    In ancient Canaanite religion, the morning star is personified as the god Attar ['Aštar], a masculine variant of the name of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. In myth, Attar attempted to occupy the throne of Ba’al and, finding he was unable to do so, descended and ruled the underworld.

    Remember, Hebrew is a Canaanite language. The ancient Israelis were Canaanites. This association should be rather obvious for them, even after ditching their traditional polytheistic religion.

    Now here’s Isaiah 14, in Latin and English. The whole chapter boils down to “we Israelites are tired of being oppressed, Yahweh shall turn the tables and make us the oppressors”. With 14:4-23 being what the Israelites should say to the king of Babylon. “Lucifer” in the middle, 14:12, I’ll translate the excerpt literally here:

    Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris? corruisti in terram, qui vulnerabas gentes?
    How did you fall out the sky, o morning star, you who arose in the morning? Collapsing into the Earth, you who hurt the people?

    There’s no reference to devil or anything similar. They’re comparing the king of Babylon with Venus, as if saying “you rose early like Venus, we hope you fall down like Venus too”.

    But eventually, this association between Venus and fall was lost. And someone with the reading skills of a potato did not notice what Isaiah 14 was about. And misread that “Lucifer” from the Latin version of the Bible as if it was a personal name. It’s someone opposing Yahweh, so it must be the Devil!



  • If two species can bang and produce fertile offspring… // It’s one species.

    I got another violation of this principle at home.
    \

    The plant in the photo is a Capsicum annuum (bell pepper) x C. baccatum (ají / dedo-de-moça pepper) hybrid. It’s fertile; in fact the seeds from the fruit in the pic just sprouted. Following the principle you mentioned, and that I learnt as the definition of species, both parents should belong to the same species.

    This shows biologists are using more criteria than just viable offspring to define species. But I don’t know which ones. (It also hints the matter is not racism, as it applies even to plants.)



  • I don’t bother with Calibre or anything similar; I simply use the directory structure. Easier to show it with examples than explaining it.

    Full path description
    /storage/reading/language/David Marcus - A Manual of Akkadian.pdf language book
    /storage/reading/light novels/The Faraway Paladin/04.epub light novel
    /storage/music/Die Ärzte/2003 - Geräusch/05 - Dinge Von Denen.mp3 music track
    /storage/tarballs/ROMs/snes/Donkey Kong Country 2 - Diddy’s Kong Quest.smc SNES game
    /storage/tarballs/Utils/Android/F-Droid.apk installation file for F-Droid, Android system
    /storage/videos/movies/The Lord of the Rings/2002 - The Two Towers.mkv live-action movie
    /storage/videos/animes/Kimetsu no Yaiba/Season 3 - Entertainment District/01 - Sound Hashira Tengen Uzui.mkv anime episode

    You get the idea, right? No additional software needed, any automation tool to move/rename files can be used to help you out, and since metadata isn’t used for the organisation you can take your sweet time checking and fixing it. And sharing it across my network means simply sharing a directory with everything in it.

    Key points to use this approach effectively:

    1. Keep it simple. If you need to think on where an item should go, you’re probably over-engineering your sorting.
    2. Keep it objective. For example, genre is usually a bad sorting criterion, as the same piece of media can belong to 2+ genres. Author, franchise, set (season, album, etc.) are typically better.
    3. Keep it flexible. It’s fine and good if each subdivision has its own sorting criteria. Just be consistent with it.
    4. Keep it accurate. Names are part of the sorting structure, and should be descriptive.
    5. Keep it clean. Don’t add unorganised items to the file structure; if you must, keep a separated “to sort” directory elsewhere.
    6. Keep it broad. You’re probably already used to this due to the Johnny decimal system, but broader categories are usually better. Just don’t create artificial divisions to arbitrarily nest divisions, though; remember #2.
    7. Keep changing it. Ultimately the goal of a sorting system is to find your stuff; it is neither to be a control freak, nor to follow the advice of some random internet person like me. So if something is not working well for you, change it.

    Ah, on automation:

    • GPRename and Bulky are useful to… well, bulk rename files.
    • EasyTag can do it for audio files, based on the metadata and/or info retrieved from the internet.
    • Wikipedia “$series_name list of episodes” for descriptive names for anime or live action seasons. Often you can copypaste the whole text bloc into a text editor, and use some find-and-replace to get rid of everything except episode number + episode name.
    • Calc (yup, the spreadsheet program!) is a godsend. Specially with the above, plus a terminal; it means you can create on the spot a bunch of commands like
    mv 01.mkv "01 - The Sphere.mkv"
    mv 02.mkv "02 - The Inhabited.mkv"
    [...]
    



  • Relevant to note diacritic usage is language-specific, and sometimes different orthographies for the same language prescribe different things. And since the text did a great job explaining it for French, might as well exemplify with another language, Portuguese:

    • acute ⟨á é í ó ú⟩ - stressed vowel in an unexpected position; ⟨á é ó⟩ are [ä ɛ ɔ]
    • grave ⟨â ê ô⟩ - stressed vowel in an unexpected position; ⟨â ê ô⟩ are [ɜ e o]
    • tilde ⟨ã õ⟩ - nasal vowel in a position where spelling ⟨n m⟩ would be awkward; typically [ɜ̃ ɔ̃~õ]
    • diaeresis ⟨ü⟩ - omitted from newer orthographic standards, formerly used to distinguish ⟨qu gu⟩ /k g/ and ⟨qü gü⟩ /kʷ gʷ/ before ⟨e i⟩
    • grave: ⟨à⟩ - grammatical aid indicating crasis; for most people it doesn’t change pronunciation, although a few ones pronounce ⟨à⟩ as [ä:] in slow and monitored speech.

  • For real, I like old style emoticons way better than emojis. For a few reasons:

    1. Colour. Or lack of. They blend better into the text, I find the colourful emojis too distracting.
    2. Mix-and-match. The author mentions this with different words, but: you aren’t bound to a specific set of icons, you create your own.
    3. More platform-agnostic. Every single corporation out there has a package with a different set of emojis, and what they convey might change because of those differences.
    4. I’m a millennial. I grew up with the old style emoticons.