demetrius

> If the great grandkid isn't torturing anyone, why should they be held responsible for that?

They shouldn't.

But at the same time, they should take the words of their grandparents about how great Soviet Union was with a grain of salt.

This is not about shaming the grandchildren, this is about having a more realistic picture of the past.

This is especially important because the past is used as a justification for doing things in the present: Putin doesn't think he is conquering a real country, he's just restoring a precious situation. And many Russians would think "well, we did live in Soviet Union together, why not join again" without knowing how much violence was needed to keep Soviet Union together.

> Btw “demetrius”, my other pet peeve is Latin endings on Greek words and names.

You seem to choose pet peeves that are opposite to mine! I don't like Greek word declinations in Latin (why write Leopolin if you can write Leopolim?) and I like the i/j, v/u distinction in Latin.

> good to know I will be safe from bastardized Latin!

You should stay away from the house 1255 on rua de Constituição, then (it has this: https://imageup.ru/img91/3990079/porto.jpg — although it's the only text in Latin I've seen here so far)

> I only read monumental inscriptions, that's where Latin shines

Even with monumental inscriptions, you'd need to carefully filter them to make sure you only read old ones. The newer ones frequently include U, e.g. I like this little poem in a park in Coimbra: http://bloguinho.casa/img/2017/01/nemus-litterae-old.jpg (the park also includes more poems, which is pretty cool). Too bad we don't have such Latin poems in Porto, where I live now.

> But I would conclude that the textbox should only use capital letters

That would make sense, sure.

> Minuscules are not different letters, they are variant forms

Just like U and V, J and I in some varieties of Latin.

(The fact that Unicode encodes them differently doesn't mean anything: Unicode also encodes A and Ａ, fi and fi differently.)

> it hurts my eyes

Looks like almost all Latin texts hurt your eyes, then.

> they either should accept the original Roman spelling of Lvtetia

Lvtetia is not "the original Roman spelling".

The original Roman cursive spelling is: https://imageup.ru/img224/3989875/roman-coursive-example.png

The original Roman square capitals variant is like this: LV́TÉTIA (too lazy to make an image; I hope you have a serif typeface, it's closer enough)

The cursive eventually evolved into "lutetia"

The square capitals eventually into "LVTETIA"

Later, people decided to use both versions together, using letters like L, V, T, E in the beginning of sentences and names; and letters like l, u, t, e elsewhere.

What happened in mediaeval times is that people decided added lowercase v and uppercase U. So, Lvtetia is ahistorical: it should be Lutetia or LVTETIA or lutetia, since lowercase v is a later invention.

(Similar thing happened when Turkish people devised their Latin script: they divided I/i into I/ı and İ/i. Using Lvtetia is like using Lvtetıa, because Romans didn't put dots over their I's.)

> (edit: that said, when I search for "lugd" I do get search results for LVGDVNO, so maybe the search got improved?)

Yes, I think it has been improved. Thanks!

> U and J are not used in classical Latin, they’re mediaeval innovations

They were totally legit variants of V and I, especially in cursive. Cursive U/V was much closer to U than to V.

When cut in stone, V was easier to cut, and stone tends to be preserved better, so we see V more often. But at the same time, people would write U when writing.

What happened in mediaeval times is that people decided that U and V are two different letters. But both U and V existed long before that, they just were two forms of the same letter.

And since our lowercase letters are based on cursive forms, it makes much more sense to use u in the lowercase. Which is what modern sources that don't distinguish U and V do (e.g. Oxford Latin dictionary would not use "U" in uppercase and "v" in lowercase).

> Back when Lutetia was called Lutetia, it was written with V.

Well, it was also written with E and not e, and T and not t, but you seem to have no problem with that.

Lvtetia makes absolutely no sense. Lvᴛᴇᴛɪᴀ might be OK, it's at least consistent (albeit hard to type). But Lvtetia is a Frankenstein's monster: you freeze the evolution of V into u, but keep evolutions of other letters intact.

The program is fun, but I'd like it more if it spelled place names correctly.

I've tried building road from Lutetia to Olyssipo (which are totally correct spellings), and the program didn't accept it. The program wants me to type... "Lvteci" and "Olisipo".

Okay, Olisipo is a possible variant, but what in the world is Lvteci?

There is absolutely no reason to use "v" in "Lvteci". Before U/V were separate letters, sometimes V was used for uppercase, u for lowercase; sometimes v was used in the beginning and the end of the words. But "Lvteci" makes absolutely no sense.

At the very least the program should treat U/V and I/J as same letters when typing the names. Or maybe make the search field all-caps and replace u's with V's.

When EasyRPG Editor will be ready (that's a big "when", of course), it will feature improvements over the original RM2k3.

Most likely this will include other graphics sizes (Ghabry had already made an experimental branch for that) and plugin support (again, there used to be an experimental branch using Ruby by make-cheese already).

In fact, EasyRPG already includes some improvements (Unicode support, modern image formats, etc.), but it's difficult to use them because there is no editor supporting them (well, unless you count R48, but it's not user-friendly).

> Plej verŝajne, neniu el vi ĉi tie komprenos ĉi tiun mesaĝon

Vi ne estas tiom unika, kiom vi pensas ;)

You're not as unique as you think ;)

> Jes, mi jam pruvis, ke la lingvo povas esti uzita en teĥnikaj konceptoj.

Ĉiuj lingvoj povas esti uzataj por teĥnikaĵoj, ĉu ne? (Nu, eble krom toki pona)

All languages can be used for technical things, aren't they? (Well, maybe except tiki pona)

While this looks like something our government really could have done, it's interesting to note that Zerkalo.io could not verify that piece of news: https://news.zerkalo.io/life/14489.html

> I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.

I thought this was a funny joke. Then I read “IBM and the Holocaust”.

Snap server is closed-source (unless anything has changed?), so I believe this is more likely to be a nefarious intent to create a dependency on their service (which Canonical can monetize later) than a mere dysfunction

> Makes me wonder, though, is there enough space in unicode to just encode every possibly 16x16 bitmap?

Space is not an issue here. You can do with very few characters, just make them combine with each other, like ˩˥ is encoded as ˩+˥, flags are encoded as combinations of two letters, etc.

So, you can just have 256 characters for each bitmap dot and make them combine with each other. Or have 16 characters and make them combine (maybe using zero-width joiner).

I think the biggest problem is actually getting this thing into Unicode. Emoji got codified because some Japanese phone encodings included them. But it would be harder to justify arbitrary bitmaps.

Do you have an option of transferring the ownership to someone out of Russia? Maybe even find a co-author for the blog

I don't know what's the Mailchimp policy on this, but that's a path I would try. Of course, that would require a lot of correspondence with the support and finding an actual person outside of Russia whom you trust.

It's sad that Unicode doesn't include flags for dissolved countries. If it did, reversing an US flag would make a Soviet Union flag (code SU). This would make the text much more fun

> why was it ever acceptable to transliterate the Sanskrit into Chinese

I'd say it wasn't transliteration, it was just writing.

Sanskrit was written with local script throughout the world. Unlike some other languages, which have strong affinity for one script, Sanskrit can be written with lots of scripts (e.g. Burmese, Tibetan, etc.). So Chinese characters were probably perceived just as another way of writing, not as some kind of vulgarisation.

Sure, in the end the pronunciation drifted in unexpected ways. But I think it's not because people used Chinese characters, but because the knowledge of Sanskrit in China, Japan or Korea was not that widespread.

Hybernation.

> I was convinced that all these traps had been designed to keep outsiders out, and to allow people to show their level of education

While this is not the original reason, this is one of the reasons not to change things. For example, ‘distinguishing educated and ignorant people’ had been named a reason to keep Ѣ in the Russian alphabet (it was eventually removed after the revolution).

> Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering

I've started experiencing flickering in non-compositing window managers on Arch a few months ago (I mainly use Openbox, although I've tried dwm too) after some update. My solution was just to run `xcompmgr &` at the session startup.

I wonder why 'My native land' gets translated with flags for American Samoa and Somalia.

Except white horses. White horses are not horses at all (at least according to Gongsun Long)

> offline and some library has some version issue with your proprietary licensed language

How is this different from any proprietary book about a freely-licensed language?

If you're in a remote farm in Nebraska and you only have a copyrighted Esperanto textbook, you can't share it, even though Zamenhof's materials might be public domain.

I fail to see any problem with toki pona here.

Something similar can be argued about Delphi / Object Pascal. Borland's compiler is non-free, but the language can be used with FreePascal. I'm happily using FreePascal on my personal projects and haven't touched Delphi in more than a decade; it's a nice language and there's nothing wrong with it.

Sharing FreePascal is totally OK, just like sharing freely-licensed materials about toki pona.

> can I please have a logical language

Does Lojban fit the bill?

I believe Cyrillic а and Latin а are different because there already existed legacy encodings where а and а were considered different characters, so Unicode kept the distinction for backward-compatibility.

While there were no existing legacy encodings allowing to write Chinese and Japanese at the same time, so there was nothing to keep compatibility with.

Mono developers have been part of Microsoft for some time already.

And it's unlikely that Mono will become a viable alternative, since there's a conflict of interests: Microsoft wouldn't want you running arbitrary .NET applications on Linux, they want you to buy Windows.

Thanks for the explanation!

> Will all GTK3 apps port to GTK4 and libadwaita? Probably the GNOME ones will, but other apps might not

I have a question. Does it make sense to start new apps with GTK3? E.g. if I want my app to look at home in MATE/Xfce (which currently use GTK+3), and don't want to touch GNOME in any way, does it make sense to write it in GTK+3 (using GTK+2 HIG)?

> If you don't have a compositor don't use adwaita...

Can I? I haven't been following GTK+4, but GTK3 managed to break every theme except Adwaita, and the developers were pretty clear that having themes is not a priority for GTK+. There's also this website https://stopthemingmy.app/ which says 'don't theme apps, it breaks them' so it implies we're stuck with Adwaita.

Strangely enough, I feel Esperanto is more similar to smaller natural languages. My experience with Esperanto is similar to my experience with Belarusian.

Although my great-grandmother spoke Belarusian as her first language, this transmission was broken. My grandmother already spoke Russian to my mother, and we spoke Russian in my family. I learnt Belarusian in school and then started using it to express my Belarusian identity, to speak with a community of like-minded people.

I've learnt Esperanto when I emigrated. I wanted to find friends in my new country, my new city had an Esperanto community, and this was the reason I've learnt Esperanto. This worked for me :D

Like with Belarusian in Belarus, in Esperanto you don't talk everywhere. You have special times and places; outside them, you speak other languages.

Like with Belarusian, you have rather limited number of books available. So, if in Russian or English I mostly read fantasy, in Belarusian and Esperanto I read a much wider variety of genres, because there's just not enough books to commit to one or two genres.

So, while Esperanto didn't become an international competitor to English, it became a nice small homely language for speaking to friends. Not exactly what the Zamenhof envisioned, but still nice.

"I have a message that millions of Iranians are desperate for you to hear". That's why I've put it behind a paywall, so you can't read it.

Seems legit.