tuomosipola

I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that Elsevier is a Dutch company had something to do with it.

Illa means "she". (Thesaurus linguae Latinae 7,1:349)

When I was the president of the society of Latin students, I got several emails asking for tattoo translations. I hope I got them right.

Finally. I migrated from the snap-cursed Ubuntu to Debian. I have been running Bookworm since last summer, and now I can stay in the stable distribution until I really need a new version of some software. Should not happen too soon.

Physical media second-hand market is surprisingly good nowadays. Use reputable sellers and buy discs rated "good" or below with caution.

I thought about buying Hoefler fonts because they have some extra features and e.g. engraved style but the licensing is just too much work for me. How do I know how many computer's I'll have or how many page views? I'm looking for a "pay money -> use font" type of deal.

Thankfully there are some quite nice SIL or OTF licenced fonts available.

BBC Radio 4 had a wonderful episode about Emilie du Châtelet just recently. [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rvnj

Interesting that there is a Createspace package! They seem to have taken the "inject weird PDF objects straight from LaTeX" route. The other route is the pdfx package, which I ended up using.

I have been struggling with this and finally got my class to produce possibly PDF/X-4 compatible printable file and PDF/A-2b compatible PDF file for archival purposes.

Maybe the next step is adding epub generation from the same LaTeX source.

A good paper dictionary usually has better usability than most Internet dictionaries. That being said, I tend to use Wiktionary quite a lot, but then usually use the sources it points to in order to verify the results.

Yes. Egyptian hieroglyphs have a full set of consonants, so you could write it that way. They just didn't because of historical spelling.

As you said Sumerian could be an example of totally "three step cue" system.

Same here. This whole discussion is funny and absurd. Finnish is really phonetic in its spelling (there are about three exceptions that come to my mind right now). There's also not that much historical baggage, so reforms have been possible.

We rote-learned French spelling at and early age and I can still read French.

English, on the other hand, has one of the most difficult alphabetic spelling systems. I have used English for tens of years and I still have problems pronouncing a word now and then. One of the problems being that English doesn't indicate stress (which native speakers automatically know).

I tried using Anki for learning Ancient Greek words. Didn't work for me. I need the context and then deciphering the meaning becomes a challenge, which will be rewarding. Going through piles of word-for-word cards is dull.

I guess the best way is to read as much as one can, which is obvious in hindsight. Easier said than done, though.

These multiformat outputs have come a long way in the last five years, and it's good to see them working. Thanks for the link! The automated approach works best for technical books, just as in your case. There are still some esoteric layout features that are very difficult to automate.

Self-published books often have horrible layouts and graphical design, all-around. Thankfully basic LaTeX styles are quite decent and do their job.

Casas's Data Science Live Book looks nice with its basic LaTeX style, I think.

There were these two British gentlemen coaching our doctoral programme summer meetup. I think their task was to make us better communicate our research. Probably quite hard because we were all from a STEM background and at least half of us Finns.

During a break, we were seated in a table of five and this British guy sits with us for a while and asks some generic questions, but soon leaves our table because he wants to meet the other students, too. Then one of the Finnish students next to me asks ironically: "So... was that supposed to be that famous small talk?", making many of us smirk.

My ISP broke their IPv4 gateway one weekend. Fortunately they have their IPv6 stuff working in parallel. I was surprised that only maybe half of the Internet is reachable via IPv6, and there was no pattern which sites worked and which didn't. There's still some work to be done before IPv6 is usable.

I recommend the Designer Notes podcast episode [1] where Sid Meier (yes, that Sid Meier) explains how this game was designed. And if you are interested, listen all of the four episodes where he is interviewed.

[1] https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-...

I have studied Latin at the university level and also some Greek, especially from the historical linguistic point of view.

I truly understand that the ancient pronunciation sounds bad to your ears! All those "mistakes" that you mentioned are exactly the ways that Greek pronunciation has changed over the thousands (!) of years. If you look closely, it is as if the writing system is made for the old language, which is the case. The modern pronunciation drifts further apart from what is written. Historical linguistics is quite interesting once you get into it.

I recommend the following books, although both quite technical in the linguistic sense:

Allen, Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek 3rd Edition (Cambridge University Press 1987)

Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, 2nd Edition (Wiley-Blackwell 2010)

I think the pronunciation is quite good. Not your classical Attic Greek pronunciation but it shouldn't be since the stele is from a later time and from Anatolia where people would have spoken a Ionic dialect originally.

One of those unexpected things that has been preserved from the ancient times. I actually learned to sing this, I think it's quite sad.

The 1951 film Quo Vadis features Peter Ustinov as emperor Nero singing a version of this in English with changed lyrics, Oh lambent flame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIswXv28GI

Weiss's book is full of this kind of stuff. Actually, the whole point of the book is to list. Apparently there will be a new edition this year.

Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Beech Stave Pr Inc (December 31, 2009).

http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm

Classical antiquity, along with Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment, form the foundation for the Western civilization. You could throw in others but those three are the big ones, I think. The Greeks and the Romans have had a huge influence on what we have become.

For those interested I would recommend J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003. It is more on the linguistic side with many examples in the old languages, but a really interesting book nonetheless.

It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction. You could have all the cool stuff but I think you also should provide the familiar Desktop metaphor elements. I already made a comment about the missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser, which decision destroys many people's workflows.

No type-ahead search in Nautilus. Ubuntu actually dropped their unofficial patches one version ago, Gnome developers years ago. I cannot fathom how Gnome 3 developers think this is a good idea. We have tried to file bug reports, discuss with them, explain the use case. Still nothing. Very frustrating for us users.

What a cool gift. I didn't know Knuth was into Sanskrit poetry. Nice to notice that people from STEM fields are interested in things like that. I'm always happy to see something related to ancient languages in HN.

Got me through the last crunch of my dissertation. One weekend with italo disco and liters of Earl Grey tea.

I, too, wash dishes right after use. No accumulating piles and it takes about 10 seconds to do that. Nowadays I actually have a dishwasher in my new apartment but I have used it zero times!

Perseus is priceless! They usually have a translation or two to help you and maybe a commentary thrown in. Their word tools have helped me a lot.

Would be interesting to hear any experiences. These researchers have background in Spark etc. so setting up might not be that difficult.