The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.

It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.

I’m not currently playing the game (lots to do and, well… it’s Cracktorio, you know), but I’m wondering about the impact of those changes on my typical playstyle. It’ll be probably neutral or positive.

The key here is that I only use the fluid mechanics for short-range transportation, and even then I’m likely to force a priority system through pumps; in the mid- or long-range, I’m using barrels all the time, even for intermediates.

Perhaps those changes will force me to revaluate the role of pipes, that would be a net positive. If they don’t, the changes will be simply neutral.

The video isn’t trying to imitate a German speaker with poor English; it’s simply German syntax with English vocabulary.

It’s kind of funny how extremely similar English and German are, but you notice it only when you neither natively speak. Because of that doesn’t the video even off to me sound.

(And yes, I’m doing it on purpose. Why not?)

Small tidbit that I found interesting:

Finally, the urn in L-8 not only contained bone remains and a gold ring carved with Jano Bifronte, but it was also filled to the brim with a reddish liquid.

That ring was likely something that the deceased wore in life, either as an ornament or to show their “role” in society. Still, the fact that a funeral item was carved with Janus - the god of the beginnings and ends - seems fitting.

And the German ones look like oregano - sprinkled homogeneously.

I was looking for further info, and found something interesting:

Flapping and glottal reinforcement of alveolar stops [in Australian English] occur variably according to stylistic requirements or speaker-specific idiosyncratic patterns and are not usually obligatory (Ingram 1989).

It seems that the “rules” in this case are pretty much individual, not even dialectal. And to add confusion to the mix, it seems that your dialect allows both flapping and glottalisation, and they’re competing with each other.

That backtracks to what you mentioned about the vowel quality - perhaps [i] (and potentially other vowels) block flapping for you.

Frankly, I think that the only reason why this is considered “disputed” is because a lot of pedants that gravitate towards classical texts are like Gladstone. They don’t see what the author says, on a discursive level; they see individual words, and that screws with their ability to understand metaphors, thus poetry, thus the epics.

For reference. I don’t speak Greek, but I do speak Latin. If I were to drink a sip of booze every bloody time that a muppet translated Plautus (a comedian) with unfunny shite, or Caesar (a general) with flowery and convoluted words, my liver would be probably floating the same seas as Odysseus’ ship. (It’s likely the same with Sanskrit given the egregiousness of “I am become Death”.)

Dyes play a huge role, but it boils down to relevance.

Dark vs. light is probably the first thing that becomes relevant for us, as the difference is [literally] like night and day; then hot colours (red, etc.) because of fruits and blood. Then the rest.

I didn’t dig too much into Homer’s usage of “bronze sky” (unlike the wine-faced = inebriating sea), but if I had to take a guess, he wasn’t referring to the colour but calling it “glorious”, or perhaps a “noble” sky.

No, the ancients did not “fail to see the colour blue”. Nor the Himba, mentioned in the text. Both simply don’t assign the shades that you’d call “blue” in English to their own special colour word. Each language splits the colour space in different ways.

I’ll illustrate this with an example in the opposite direction - English using a single primary word for colour, while another language (Russian) uses two:

In Russian, those three are considered separated colours; they aren’t a hue of each other, goluboj is not sinij or vice versa, just like neither is zeljonyj. In English however you’d lump the first two together as “blue”, and the third one as “green”.

Does that mean that your typical English speaker fails to see one of the first two shades? No. And if necessary they might even use expressions to specify one or another shade, like “sky blue” vs. “dark blue”. They still lump them together as “blue” though, unlike Russian speakers, and they might not pay too much attention to those silly details.

That’s basically what Himba speakers do, except towards all three of them. Here’s how the language splits colours:

You could approximate it in English as:

• vapa - white, light [anything]
• zoozu - black, dark but not reddish, purple
• serandu - more saturated reds and reddish oranges
• dumbu - more saturated yellows, yellowish oranges, and extra saturated greens
• burou - your run-of-the-mill green and blue

Now, check the colours that I posted with Russian terms. Just like English doesn’t care about the difference between two of them, Himba doesn’t care about the third one either.

There’s also an interesting case with Japanese, that recently split 青/ao and 緑/midori as their own colours. Not too much time ago, Japanese did the same as Himba, and referred to the colour of grass and the sky by 青/ao; however people started referring to the yellower hues of that range by 緑/midori (lit. “verdure”), until it became its own basic word.

That’s actually problematic for traffic legislation, because it requires the colour of traffic lights to be 青/ao, and people nowadays don’t associate it with green. Resulting into…

…cyan lights. They’re blue enough to fit the letter of the legislation, but green enough to be recognised as green lights!

Now, regarding specific excerpts from the text:

Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,” not “deep blue,” sparking his inquiry.

Gladstone (and sadly, many people handling ancient texts) likely had the same poetic sensibility as a potato.

The relevant expression here is ⟨οἶνοψ πόντος⟩ oînops póntos; it’s roughly translatable as “wine-faced sea”, or “sea that looks like wine”. Here’s an example of that in Odyssey, Liber VII, 250-ish:

[245] ἔνθα μὲν Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ, δολόεσσα Καλυψὼ 
ναίει ἐυπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεός: οὐδέ τις αὐτῇ
μίσγεται οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ τὸν δύστηνον ἐφέστιον ἤγαγε δαίμων
οἶον, ἐπεί μοι νῆα θοὴν ἀργῆτι κεραυνῷ
[250] Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ **οἴνοπι πόντῳ**

Murray translated that as “wine-dark”:

[245] Therein dwells the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas, guileful Calypso, a dread goddess, and with her no one either of gods or mortals hath aught to do; but me in my wretchedness did fate bring to her hearth alone, for Zeus had smitten my swift ship with his bright thunderbolt, [250] and had shattered it in the midst of the wine-dark sea.

Why would be Homer referring to the colour of the sea? It’s contextually irrelevant here. However, once you replace that “wine-dark” from the translation with “inebriating”, suddenly the expression makes sense, Homer is comparing the sea with booze! He’s saying that it’s dangerous to enjoy that sea, that you should be extra careful with it. (You could also say that the sea is itself drunk - violent and erratic).

The ancient Egyptians were the first to adopt a word to describe the color blue.

I’m really unsure if this is the exception that proves the rule (since the Egyptians synthesised a blue dye from copper silicate) or simply incorrect.

At least accordingly to Wiktionary, the word ḫsbḏ* refers to lapis lazuli (the mineral) and its usage for colour is non-basic (a hue). The actual primary word for what English calls “blue” is shared with what English calls “green”, and it would be wꜣḏ*.

*in hieroglyphs:

I think that it’s a parallel development. It’s unlikely to be a borrowing from some PIE descendant because

• Proto-Germanic shifted PIE *k into *h (Grimm’s Law), so the word would end as *hahha. Plus a direct descendant of the word isn’t even attested in Germanic languages [see note].
• Proto-Balto-Slavic and its descendants show a single consonant in that word, as PBS *kākā́ˀtei (see Latvian kakāt, Russian какать/kakat’). The result would be *kaka or *kakaa. (A double consonant often becomes single, but the opposite is rarely true.)

*NOTE: before someone mentions German “kacken”, it’s likely a borrowing from Latin “cacō” I shit. Now that’s some borrowed shit!

I think that you’re stressing in the last syllable of “ghoti”, while OP is stressing the second-to-last. That explains why it’s triggering intervocalic flapping for them, but not for you - while flapping rules change depending on the dialect, it’s typically blocked in intervocalic environment if /t d/ are followed by a stressed vowel.

That might also explain the final vowel, why it’s [i(:)] for you and [ɪ] for the OP.

It’s not the “English R” but kind of the Spanish or Italian one.

More specifically: it’s similar to the R in Spanish “pero” and Italian “correre”, a tap; unlike the RR in Spanish “perro” and Italian “correre”. In English typically when you hear the trill it’s for /r/, among Scottish speakers.

I didn’t read the context so this might be old news, but you can even read it as nothing since all the letters can be silent (as much as they can be fish)

G as “gnaw”, H as “hour”, O as “rough”, T as “listen”, I as “business”. Done, ghoti = Ø.

That “/r/” is representing tapping. It’s technically incorrect because the phoneme is still /t/, it’s just the sound that is [ɾ]. That /h/ is probably from parsing ⟨gh⟩ as a consonant cluster instead of a digraph, just because why not, with epenthetic /ə/ dissolving the illegal cluster. (Oi, cluster! Where’s your loicense?)

I partially agree. I do think that people in Lemmy (including me) are getting more hostile than before, but I also think that this doesn’t tell us the whole picture, and there are other potential factors at play. Such as:

• Lemmy developing its own social norms, apart from the ones in Reddit. This means that a lot of behaviour and discourses that would be accepted in Reddit aren’t well received here, and vice versa.
• Reddit doesn’t show you the number of downvotes that your piece of content got, only the total score. So for example, if you get 25 upvotes and 10 downvotes there, you’ll see “+15”; here you’ll notice that you’ve been downvoted 10 times.
• I think that people already used to the platform use downvotes more liberally because they’re less impactful here than in Reddit, due to lack of karma.

[EDIT - cut off verbose example. Added another potential factor.]

Side note/off-topic: I’m glad to see that this comm grew really fast!

Context for the joke.

For spelling reform proponents it’s kind of a fishy ghoty argument, as it ignores positional value.

I have some fun etymological trivia related to that.

Late Proto-Indo-European had a root typically reconstructed as *kakka-. It means “to shit” or “shit”. It’s imitative in nature so not exactly a “fancy” word, right off the bat; more like a “child-friendly vulgarism”.

That root is still present in Armenian (k’ak’), Russian (kakat’), Lithuanian (kaka), the Romance languages (cacare/cagar/etc.), the Iranian languages (kaka/kakā/kake/etc.), and other Indo-European languages. Still ranging from childish to vulgar.

A word that stops being used is not inherited. If that root was inherited by so many languages, it means that it kept being used, from ~five millenniums ago to now.

Obligatory musical reference: this goliardic song. “Oh, how beautiful it is, to shit [cagar] in the mountain, where the grass tickles you in the hole of the butt”. It’s just keeping up with a 5000yo tradition.

Clarke’s third law, applied to incompetence/malice

Fuck. That’s brilliant.