Paulo Coelho is one of those authors that remind me how huge the impact of a good translator is.

I read three of his books: Veronika Decide Morrer (Veronika Decides to Die), O Alquimista (The Alchemist), and Onze Minutos (Eleven Minutes). All in the original, in Portuguese. They weren’t as bad as people say, but they all felt lacking polish and substance.

Then I checked Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of Veronika, and it’s like she sprouted life into it. It’s all in the subtle things: replacing a metaphor with another that works better, removing indirection from a more emotional moment, this kind of thing does wonders to make a book feel more alive, like she breathed life into it, while still being faithful to the original.

(Another situation reminding me this impact is Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice’s original is… okay? Kind of meh, to be honest. Clarice Lispector’s translation into Portuguese is a gem, though.)

you would have to have some sort of developmental disorder

Comparing dialectal variation with developmental disorder? That’s xenophobia and ableism in a single stroke, it’s as filthy and disgusting as the nationalism and classism you parroted in your earlier comment. You’re a bigot and deserve to be treated as such.

And you’re still spreading misinformation. Yes, both words sound the same in a lot of pronunciations. No amount of you lying will magically change this.

I shared it ITT, but basically:

There’s that stereotype of gay people being flamboyant, and often hopping in excitement. That created a bunch of associations between hopping animals and gay people; e.g. “gazela” (gazelle), “bicha saltitante” (jumping/hopping beast), but specially “veado” (deer). Often spelled as “viado”.

And there’s a gambling lottery called “jogo do bicho” (critters’ game, or animals’ game). Illegal but extremely popular, to the point some knowledge of the game is part of the popular culture. It associates 25 animals with numbers, and #24 is “veado” / deer.

So: if 24 is veado, and veado is gay, then 24 is gay. Plop it into a macho culture, much like in the rest of Latin America, and you’ll see people avoiding the number. Even for their birthdays.

Nowadays it’s mostly a joke; but frankly I don’t like it, it still treats gay people negatively, as if “gay” was “to be avoided”. Roughly in the same level as “we did $thing but no homo!” in English, you know?

For people who might be tempted to trust the witch hunting liar above, check the transcriptions in Wiktionary for veado and viado. Both lists are incomplete but they already show, that what I’m saying is accurate, and that the user above is at the very least lying, if not worse (vomiting assumptions and re-eating their own vomit).

Also relevant to note I’m reporting words associated with prejudice. I’m not condoning their usage. The way I’m referring to gay people and their community ITT is consistently polite, even if I’m talking about a slur used to target those folks. Gay rights — much like trans rights — are human rights; rights depend on power, power depends on knowledge. That applies to slurs; one can only fight against prejudice if they know how it’s conveyed, and how words associated with prejudice pop up.

It’s only the same if you ignore Portuguese pronunciation
Viado e veado não soam igual, [viado and veado don’t sound the same]
Nem os tugas falam assim. [not even the Portuguese speak like this]

Portuguese pronunciation varies a lot depending on the region. There isn’t a “single” one, like you’re implying; that’s fiction created by nationalists who believe languages should be homogeneous.

For “veado” you’ll see the [e] being raised to [i] or [j] in three situations:

• Caipira, Paulistano, Sulista, Mineiro, Gaúcho dialects; mostly due to pre-stressed vowel raising. Typically people doing so also say “bisoro” (besouro), “tisora” (tesoura), “minino” (menino), “durmi” (dormir) and similar, as it’s the same underlying change.
• Widespread across Portugal, but specially in the Centre and North. The fast prosody of unstressed syllables triggers diphthongisation, so you get something like ['jV] for more conservative [e.'V] and [i.'V].
• Speakers of many other dialects in fast speech. The underlying process is similar to the above.

You’re lying.

this is still some rightwing snowflake shit

No, it is not. Learn to read then stop being a liar / an assumer.

But you know, what’s rightwing shit? This:

Veado and viado will only sound the same if you speak some ignorant, backwater version of Brazilian Portuguese

You’re oozing linguistic prejudice, rooted in nationalism (the myth of homogeneous language), further mixed with classism (“backwater”). What you’re saying is the same as “my Reichsprache has a single pronunciation, everyone else is an ignorant degenerating it!”, it doesn’t get more disgusting than that.

so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
eu não sei de que você tá falando.

If you don’t get what others say, you don’t get to label it either, unless you’re a disingenuous / assumptive piece of shit and deserve to be treated as such.

But the concept of honesty is a wee bit too complex for you, innit? Bloody hell.

Some prescriptivists would argue “viado” isn’t an actual word, and that even the slur should be spelled “veado”. But just like “buceta” the misspelling has become way more popular than the original word.

Number 24 corresponds to deer, which is “veado” in portuguese - which is very similar to"viado", which is a slur for gay people persons.

The slur isn’t just similar to the name of the critter — it is the name of the critter. You also see people using “gazela” (gazelle), “Bambi” (that Disney critter), “biba saltitante” (jumping… “biba”, dunno what was supposed to be) as slurs for gay people, always under the “flamboyantly jumping” stereotype.

The reason it gets spelled with an “i” is that slurs and swearing often get misspelled in Portuguese. It’s the same deal with boceta→buceta (pussy), caralho→caraio→carai (dick), foder→fuder→fudê (to fuck).

Years = anos; anus = ânus. They’re spelled different. Depending on dialect they may or may not sound the same.

It’s more like a lottery than a board game. But a really popular one, regardless of the prohibition against gambling, and the numbers / critters association never changes.

There are other popular expressions from the same game. Like “deu zebra” (the result was zebra) for something extremely unlikely to happen. (Note how there’s no zebra in the sheet.)

No, it’s because of an old betting game called “jogo do bicho” (critters’ game):

Check #24. “Veado” (deer), often misspelled “viado”, is used as a slur for gay people.

A few comments, in no specific order, about random related stuff.

Sometimes characters change depending on nearby characters. Arabic provides a good example of that, as a character can take up to four forms depending on its word position (isolated, initial, medial, final); but you’ll see this in a larger or smaller degree elsewhere, too. Failure to implement this feature m a k es y o urtex t loo kbrok en and hard to read.

A special case of the above is the ligature, 2+ characters that get joined. Compare for example ⟨f i⟩ and ⟨fi⟩, note how the later is missing the dot.

Characters can be also modified. Classical example are diacritics; e.g. ⟨c⟩ + ⟨´ ^ ¸⟩ = ⟨ć ĉ ç⟩. Diacritics tend to have simpler shapes and look similar to other diacritics (e.g. the diaeresis and umlaut sign nowadays look the same, but their origin is different), but that’s a tendency, not a rule.

Sometimes characters are intrinsically associated with other characters. Modern European scripts do this a lot due to the bicameral system; curiously Latin as used natively didn’t (the capital/minuscule distinction is Mediaeval). Sometimes the correspondence is language-specific, e.g. the capital counterpart to Latin ⟨i⟩ is usually ⟨I⟩, but for Turkish Latin it’s ⟨İ⟩.

Speaking on that, sometimes variants of the “same alphabet” vary on the letters they include / exclude. Or if they interpret a sequence of characters as a single one, for collation purpose.

The typical character width in relation to the height varies wildly from script to script. For example your typical Greek/Latin/Cyrillic grapheme is still fairly readable if you make it 1:2, although far from ideal (you’ll get issues with a few characters, like ⟨Щ⟩ and ⟨W⟩). On the other hand your typical Han character becomes messy to read if not 1:1.

\

Just in case you guys want to fight each other like kernel devs, and need some raccoon GIFs for that.
GIF is pronounced /ɣi:f/ by the way.

Veni, vidi, clicked it.

I see some angry person. The good type of angry — directing his anger at the right things.

To be clear: Bode is not criticising the fact that journalists quote what CEOs say. He’s criticising the fact they do it and call it a day, as if saying “trust the CEO”.

It goes without saying that CEOs are really loud when saying what they want the sucker (you) to believe. So if that’s all you want, you need no journalist. A journalist is only useful if you want to know the factual reality; but for that they need to contextualise and challenge the claims, not just parrot them.

I’d end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it’s abundantly clear they don’t want to.

If it’s any consolation it isn’t just the United-Statian media.

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’m unsure how to feel about this. From some screenshots online it seems the project is really polished, and it’s apparently fairly popular, this makes me hope someone picks it up. But on the other hand there are already rather similar distros, like Mint MATE*, so this might be slightly pointless.

*I used it for a few years, it’s great. In fact I’m still technically using it, I just installed Cinnamon over it.

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!

This sort of battle scene reminds me Greek art (influence, perhaps?), but the lions are clearly Persian. A beautiful piece regardless.

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.)

Nope. Even if the government (Brazil) controlling my homeland is one of those shitting “think on the children! [because we don’t]” laws.

I don’t know if this is related to my browser reporting my geolocation as NZ, and the default page language being Italian, it’s possible bad design is helping me out.

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

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"
[...]