Category: Uncategorized

Give to her joy, you callused world, give peace,
this lady who should never, ever cry.
Let it have air to bloom, roots to release,
this beauty which should never, ever die.

This smile, which neither coin nor bonds can buy,
let it be sheltered from the bondsman’s blame.
This heart so generous, this glance so wry,
let their reward be more than they can name.

Sleep now, my sweet, sleep while the world’s aflame.
There will be time to mourn it yet. Your hair
smoulders in auburn whorls, which none can tame.
Tomorrow, you’ll catch fire again and flare,

to stand your ground, and take what you deserve.
The stars fall at your feet, eager to serve.

Nothing as comprehensive or as well maintained, for the reasons given in Michael Chen’s answer: noone’s strongly motivated to reinvent NLTK when NLTK is already there.

There’s a list of projects at gopherdata/resources. There’s bits of what NLTK does among them.

What does fluency mean in a conlang like Klingon?

Actually “fluency” is something of a misnomer I committed. What does good style mean in a conlang like Klingon? People clearly do differentiate between good Klingon and bad Klingon; on what basis do they do so, when the language is made up, and we don’t have any utterances from its creator longer than a couple of lines of barked orders?

It would be a challenge to get a linguistics department to take it seriously. It would be even more of a challenge to get a literature department to take it seriously, and it would be the kind of thesis that could do with input from someone dealing with rhetoric (which linguists tend to think beneath them). But there’s a PhD in it, for sure. And it spans across mental models of style, and fads in English prose style, and translation theory; in fact, it reaches into the theory of aesthetics.

It’s the question that got me into linguistics, btw (in its Lojban iteration). And I sort of have an answer for it, as the answer linked shows. But it can be filled out a lot more than that.

Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Two sources named:

John Uebersax’s answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates XVII

And he used to say, that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; “and as they,” said he, “when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with any one else whatever.”

Michael Kambas’ answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Xenophon, Symposium (2.10)

“If that is your view, Socrates,” asked Antisthenes, “how does it come that you don’t practise what you preach by yourself educating Xanthippe, but live with a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be?”

“Because,” he replied, “I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”

Diogenes Laertius had συνεῖναι τραχείᾳ γυναικὶ “to be with a rough woman”; Xenophon had χρῇ γυναικὶ “you are supplied with a woman”. Neither of them had an explicit word for marrying at all.

Oh, shut up, QCR.

Masiello and Gwin.

Others applaud them. I panic for them. I want it to work out, they are both good souls who have earned respite, and find it in each other; I worry that they may not work out, because the world is a cruel place.

Yes, nothing ventured nothing gained. And at least, they are both old and wise enough to know.

I worry so much, that the first song to pop into my head was this. Lyrics Kostas Tripolitis, Music Mikis Theodorakis, 1981: late Mikis. Lyrics disillusioned and fearful; music soaring and yearning. Αγάπη: Love. stixoi.info: Αγάπη

Love of bread and fire,
Love of brackishness.
Billboards will choke us
and empty beer cans.

Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.

Love of bread and rain,
Love out on the balconies.
You’ll see blood on the asphalt
and plastic containers.

Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.

I worry, too, that you’ll talk each other mad. Too wise to woo, bickering constantly, exasperatingly, charmingly, like Beatrice and her Benedick. But they got to have their day in the sun, in the end. And so do you:

It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants:

Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia

The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:

• After /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/, for example chute /ʃuːt/, chew /tʃuː/, juice /dʒuːs/
• After /j/, for example yew /juː/ (compare [jɪʊ̯] in some conservative dialects)
• After /r/, for example rude /ruːd/
• After stop+/l/ clusters, for example blue /bluː/

Apparently Welsh and some other dialects kept [ju] as [ɪu], did not undergo yod dropping, and as a result they pronounce chews /tʃɪʊ̯z/ and choose /tʃuːz/ differently. I can’t tell from Wikipedia whether that extends to rude being pronounced as ree-ood.

If someone does not have the Message link on their profile, they have blocked messaging—which is their right. If you want to communicate with them, leave them a comment. Unless they’ve disabled those too, in which case, all you can do is move on.

For Modern Greek:

• parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside.
• tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally meant ‘freebie, lagniappe, baker’s dozen’. Which tells you a lot about Greek cinema practice in the 50s, and their male audiences.
• teknó ‘toyboy, twink’. From Romani tiknó ‘small child’, via Kaliarda, the Romani-based Greek gay secrecy language, influenced by Church Greek téknon ‘(spiritual) child’.
• varvatos ‘macho, manly’. From Latin barbatus ‘bearded’.
• glamouria ‘glamour (sarcastically), flashiness’. From English glamour (itself ultimately from Greek grammatikē via Scots), + the colloquial suffix –ja ‘a strike of something’.
• zamanfou ‘indifference, complacency’. From French je m’en fous ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Also zamanfoutistas ‘I don’t give a fuck-ist’, zamanfoutismos ‘I don’t give a fuck-ism’.

‘Turn turk’ in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. The Turks were the Muslims that the English had the most contact with, through the Ottoman Empire.

A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) is a play by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It concerns the conversion of the pirate John Ward to Islam.

Because of the entrenched association of peoples until recent times with religion, changing religion was broadly regarded as betraying one’s core principles, and being literally faithless, renegade. It is so used, metaphorically, in Shakespeare:

• [Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio] if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me (if my fortune betrays me)
• [Much Ado About Nothing, Margaret to Beatrice] an you be not turned Turk, there’s no more sailing by the star. (Margaret alludes to the fact that Beatrice has fallen in love with Benedick, despite her protestations: as complete a change as someone converting to Islam)

Hence, surprisingly enough, an accurate definition in, of all places, Urban Dictionary: to turn turk:

To turn turk is to be a twat and back stab people

Bad that lad didn’t expect him to turn turk on you

Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary adds: “to go to the bad: to become hopelessly obstinate”. The value judgement of Islam = bad is what you’d expect from a majority Christian culture; the obstinacy is surprising, unless it is the generic obstinacy of a renegade.

For a less emotive response, let us substitute Klingon with Norwegian, outside of Norway.

It is not child abuse to bring up your kid to speak only Norwegian in Australia. As another respondent said, if they arrive at primary school with no English, they will pick up English pretty quickly at school. As is the case for countless immigrant kids. And if the kids socialize at all outside the home, or watch TV, they will have picked up English anyway.

So the issue is not depriving a child with access to English.

Let’s substitute Norwegian with Esperanto, or Latin. There are, after all, something like 1000 native speakers of Esperanto. Have these kids been subjected to child abuse?

I mean, sure, their peers will think it’s weird and they will make fun of them. Their peers also made fun of the immigrant kids who ate weird food and looked different. And by all accounts, kids brought up speaking Esperanto end up perfectly well adjusted, although not many of them retain an interest in the language. Peer pressure is effective, after all.

And as I have said in a different answer, I’ve cyberstalked the kid who was brought up to speak Klingon (and lost interest), and I found a picture of him as a teenager in a mosh pit. I’m not worried about his long-term socialisation.

So what in this scenario makes people so aghast at Klingon? I’ve heard the child abuse accusation from professional linguists too. But a kid is hardly going to sustain brain damage from a language that violates a couple of phonological universals. No one should be taking Chomsky that seriously. If a kid can deal with a pidgin as linguistic input, and come up with a creole, they can certainly deal with Klingon. Not to mention, any Klingon that a parent would produce day to day would not be all that alien.

The only rationale for a claim of child abuse would be fear of difference and fear of unconventionality. Hippies have done far worse to kids.