The ⟨W⟩ is silent now, but it wasn’t until 1500 or so. Back then the word was pronounced /two:/; it would almost rhyme with contemporary “toe”. But then that /o:/ became /u:/ (the modern pronunciation), due to the Great Vowel Shift, and since /w/ and /u/ are really similar they fused together.

@FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world mentioned that in a few associated words that ⟨W⟩ letter still represents an actual /w/ phoneme, note how the following vowel is different - that blocked the “fusion”.

They evolved. Just like they would inside your body.

…in Brazil those are sold in skewers, people call them kafta. And yes, if you don’t take care while shaping them, they’ll look, well… not really appetising.

Agreed - it’s more like diversification, or “not putting all egg-users in the same basket-platform”.

I am not sure, but I believe that this political abuse is further reinforced by something not mentioned in the text:

• Twitter is mostly short texts, lacking situational info, subtlety, signs of doubt, etc. Those require a lot of contextual info to accurately understand, but as a piece of content is retweeted most of that context is gone.
• plenty people are not honest; they’re assumptive as a brick. They make shit up = assume = bullshit as it goes, never acknowledging “hey, I don’t actually know this, it’s just a shower thought, it might be wrong”.
• people holding minority views are more often dogpiled, and by bigger dogpiles, than people holding majority views. Kind of like the Petrie Modifier, but with worldviews instead of sex.

If I’m right this is breeding grounds for witch hunting: people don’t get why someone said something, they’re dishonest so they assume why, they bring on the pitchforks because they found a witch. And that’s bound to affect anyone voicing anything slightly off the echo chamber.

And I think that this has been going on for years; cue to “the Twitter MC of the day”. It would predate Musk, but after Musk took over he actually encouraged the witch hunts for his own political goals.

At least for my ex-fiancée it was about the link between husband and wife, plus tradition. It was basically “I’m married, you see?”. Just like a ring.

(We talked a fair bit about this stuff, as back then I was planning to add my maternal surname to my legal name. She was OK taking either surname.)

That’s good news. Odds are that some of those people will go back to closed media platforms after ~2 months; but the ones who stay help Mastodon and the Fediverse to grow.

Thanks for sharing this data - it’s great.

It actually makes sense; if cat urine contained ammonia the smell would be gone once you washed your cat’s impromptu litterbox, since ammonia is both volatile and highly soluble. And yet it keeps stinking - this hints that there’s something else there producing that ammonia by decomposition. (Probably proteins. Cats eat a lot more protein than we do.)

Note: chlorine gas is the one that leaks from an open bleach bottle, and gives it a distinctive smell. The ones created by reacting bleach with ammonia are chloramines, considerably more poisonous.

By “textual info” I mean plain language, like we’re using now. It’s theoretically possible to encode it in khipu, not just for Quechua but for any other language; but doing it in a practical way is another can of worms.

Instead what I think that they used is what the video calls a “semasiographic system” - there are standardised codes for almost everything worth registering (from a bureaucratic PoV), and the officer/kamayuq is expected to be able to decode it.

For a silly example using English, it would be a lot like writing “Jn Smth in ptt 20 mze 35” and then reading it as “John Smith stored 20kg of potatoes and 35kg of maize here”.

Ah, the khipu. The way that it represents numeric info is somewhat well understood already:

• it’s all base 10, positional. The tens/hundreds/etc. of different strings in the same khipu are aligned.
• zero = no knot
• 1~9 in the tens, hundreds etc. are represented by 1~9 simple knots
• 1 in the units is represented by a figure 8 knot
• 2~9 in the units is represented by a long knot with 2~9 turns

This might sound complicated but it’s really elegant, and representing the units in a different way allow you to cram multiple numbers into the same string.

So for example. Let’s say that you want to record 234 and 506 into a string. You’d do the following:

• 2 simple knots
• 3 simple knots
• long knot with 4 turns
• 5 simple knots
• space
• long knot with 6 turns

In some cases there might be geographical info in the khipu too, with numbers representing localities. Kind of like postal codes. The material of the string and the colour likely encode some info too, but AFAIK nobody knows it any more.

I’m almost sure that it doesn’t contain any sort of textual info, though. Like, something you can read. Classical Quechua had at least 17 consonants, this would be impractical to represent through knots, specially as Quechua tends towards large words.

My bet on both “paired” khipukuna is that one encodes income, another outcome. Kind of like double bookkeeping but for material.

I’m not sure if it’s because of Christianity.

Calling a language “of the people” pops up often across different cultures. Quechua for example does the same; the native name of the language is “runa simi”, it’s basically “people’s language”.

And in the case of the Germanic languages it’s so common that it was likely already in Proto-Germanic, thus probably older than the christianisation of those tribes.

I’m almost sure.

Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly shitty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some shit to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

*I hate this word but it’s convenient here.

I wish that I could build spaghetti bases, they look way better than a main bus. Sadly if I try to do it I’ll eventually get pissed at the disorder, and the “goddammit I need to pull a belt from A to B but I bloody can’t because everything is a mess here” following it.

That’s one of my cats.

The other wants to be cuddled 25h/day.

Sometimes ghosting is for people who value their own peace of mind, who predict that saying “sorry, I don’t want to be contacted further” will either cause drama or be ignored.

Plenty people. For stuff like

• insisting on a subject after I clearly said “I don’t want to talk about this”
• throwing a tantrum against me for something that is clearly not my fault
• sending me multiple messages sequentially, containing nothing of value
• trying to proselytise their stupid superstition, whichever it may be
• bossing me around with uncalled advice, after I said to drop it

And I don’t feel bad for ghosting any of those. At all.

My two choices:

• Pontic Steppe, around 3000 BCE. Likely region where Late Proto-Indo-European was spoken.
• northern Lazio, around 650 BCE. If possible/reasonable I want to spend a bit of time in an Etruscan city, then in a Faliscan city, then in a Sabine one. I’m OK travelling by foot if necessary, as long as there’s always people talking around me.

In both cases I want to be able to record everything people say. Preferably video, but audio is good enough. I just want to know better about languages of the past.

It’s kind of tempting to include 1450 Uruguay as a choice, since we barely know anything about the Charrúa language. However the Charrúa weren’t exactly friendly to outsiders, so this option would be only if neither side can interact with each other.

I get what you say, and I agree; but when it comes to the average user I wonder if they’ll even get it. They don’t think on the grounds of a “protocol” or a “platform”, it used to be “site” and now “app”. They do it even with email, of all things, even if it’s one of the oldest cross-platform protocols out there!

They tolerate each other enough to get each into a corner and not interact much.

And yet that is not what we see in the Fediverse. Those “corners” don’t exist here.

The people here and their attitude towards people who don’t agree with them are the problem.

And that’s a structural problem. The ActivityPub was supposed to allow both the “average person” and the “nerd” to coexist in the same platform, without one getting too much in the way of the other; it doesn’t.

I’m not sure on a good solution for that.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.