firespeaker.org

(21:11:05) firespeaker: you guys are so much better at git than me :-P

(21:11:22) firespeaker: I'm a dinosaur, from back in the days of cvs

(21:11:33) sushain: that reminds me of a kesha song

(06:07:50) spectie: firespeaker, lol, i got home drunk last night at around 1am, and i wake up now and i find a terminal open with a lexc file for karakalpak

(06:07:56) spectie: firespeaker, i don't remember writing it :|

(2011-10-14 16:41:03) Christopher: In Yoshkar-Ola there are ethnofuturist young people who record pop music CDs and put on stage productions in Mari, but I don't think their efforts reach the villages they came from.

(2011-10-14 16:41:30) Christopher: Essentially they are a small elite who live in a bubble while their language is dying across the republic.

(18:19:44) jonathan: we'll probably have 1TB flash drives in a couple years

(18:19:56) jonathan: but 1PB is still quite a ways off I think

(18:21:40) T. A. McLeay: hm maybe

(18:21:51) T. A. McLeay: what'd you do with so much storage anyway? :)

(18:22:52) jonathan: put star trek on it

(18:22:58) jonathan: and I mean all of it

(18:23:25) jonathan: well, maybe not Voyager

(17:59:56) kesuari: reading 19th century writing is fun

(18:00:02) kesuari: books were often basically blogs :)

(13:08:38) [me]: yeah, I know; GPG's on my list of things to get going

(13:08:56) [me]: I need to get gmail + IMAP working in balsa first though

(13:09:20) crculver: I didn't know Balsa was still around.

(13:09:47) crculver: But you can install the FireGPG extension for Firefox which would allow you to encrypt any text you enter on e.g. GMail's web interface.

(13:09:57) [me]: I don't use firefox

(13:10:09) crculver: What do you use then?

(13:10:15) [me]: galeon

(13:10:30) crculver: Wait, am I talking to you in 2003 through a wormhole?

(00:15:30) Michael: i don't know what wp is

(00:15:47) Michael: ohh

(00:15:50) Michael: wikipedia

(00:16:21) Michael: i was like, word perfect? why would anyone rely on that. it's so 199-never

(13:35:56) [me]: oh man teleportation would solve so many problems wouldn't it

(13:36:04) [me]: I'm only just starting to see the potential

(13:36:11) Michael: well it would probably create more problems than it would solve

(13:36:20) [me]: oh?

(13:37:33) Michael: well... obviously security would have to be completely rethought.. or i guess it would just be more like network security

(13:38:09) Michael: i mean, can you imagine? illegal immigration would turn into like a DoS attack

(02:17:23) Aaron B: i wish i was the sky god

(02:17:32) Aaron B: i'd get tenure real fast

(02:17:45) Aaron B: "it says here on your CV that you're the Sky God?"

(02:17:49) Aaron B: "yeah, that's correct"

(02:17:53) Aaron B: BAM

(02:17:57) Aaron B: Tenure

(22:29:10) [me]: I don't get why people are so scared of linux

(22:29:20) Rianna: it's hard for people who wanna game

(22:29:25) [me]: yeah

(22:29:28) [me]: but like, my parents?

(22:29:35) Rianna: and i dunno, people just don't grow up seeing linux

(22:29:40) [me]: yeah

(22:29:45) [me]: like my parents :-P

(02:48:09) [anon]: if there is one thing turks are good at (or used to be good at) it's incorporating elements into themselves as if they were always there.

(03:42:49) kesuari: nothing backs up like chiselling a great big stone

(03:43:57) kesuari: i sometimes reckon i should do that: go carving runes somewhere in the bush

(03:44:55) kesuari: not runes per se; i mean some form of phonetic alphabet that looks like runes and is similar enough to the latin alphabet or germanic runes to be decryptable

(03:45:17) kesuari: or maybe i'll do it a bit less phonetic just to give the future linguists a bit of fun

(03:45:43) kesuari: can't be too trivial or else i'll be the Orrm of the 21st century

(03:26:05) kesuari: in a thousand years, when english has divided into many languages and tehy've all had spelling reforms, they'll divise a "standardised spelling" for classical english

(03:26:52) kesuari: because the current spelling will been seen as "irregular" and "hard to read", "a poor guide to pronunciation" &c. they will probably also add diacritics so we can tell which vowels are long and which are short, which e's are silent and which are pronounced etc.

(03:27:09) kesuari: much like we do to old english

(03:27:33) kesuari: only, for a non-linguist of the 20th/21st centuries, it'll be hard to read because we don't expect it

(03:29:08) kesuari: and because no-one can seriously expect any of our recordings to last until then and because linguistics texts will largely have been lost to time as they weren't reproduced enough, people will have debates about quite how various aspects were pronounced

(03:30:10) kesuari: they'll reconstruct a language that includes the "bath/trap" split, f'instance

(03:30:24) kesuari: and have trouble reconciling it with the other germanic languagse

(03:32:45) kesuari: but, of course, english retained *þ and *w so it's obviously conservative: it must've been that german and even icelandic lost the original æ/ɑ distinction

(00:42:03) Derek: I found a way to explain language change to our students

(00:42:31) Derek: Languages start out cool and get less cool with time, unless the change involves gaining velars or uvulars

(22:39:59) [me]: like, Proto Turkic has very few colour words

...

(22:41:03) [me]: *sarg = yellow

(22:41:11) [me]: not sure where that's from, actually

(22:50:40) Derek: I went back in time and told them that word

(02:57:36) kesuari: if there’s a computer nearby, you could email yourself to it, and fix it now... :)

(02:58:36) kesuari: (one of these days, someone’s going to invent a device that can email solid objects instantly, and that joke won’t be funny anymore)

21:00:07 [Aaron]: can i just skip from now 'til when i have tenure?

05:23:50 [me]: (I'm rather fond of pre-revolution Russian. It's almost proto-eastern slavic)

05:24:29 [Tristan]: yeah, well just wait till the english languages break up, our spelling will be proto-english :)

05:39:41 [me]: how big's the file?

05:39:49 [Tristan]: 346 MB

05:40:07 [Tristan]: (my internet connection's really fast, so i replied before i got the question)

05:40:44 [Tristan]: or maybe this?:

(00:39:51) [Tristan]: 346 MB

(00:39:53) [me]: how big's the file?

(00:40:15) [Tristan]: (my internet connection's really fast, so i replied before i got the question)

05:41:12 [me]:

05:39:41 [me]: how big's the file?

05:39:49 [Tristan]: 346 MB

05:40:07 [Tristan]: (my internet connection's really fast, so i replied before i got the question)

05:41:32 [me]: *someone's* internet isn't as fast as it should be

05:41:40 [me]: probably fault of my stupid ethernet cord though

05:42:11 [Tristan]: probably

05:42:22 [Tristan]: yours must be slow, and mine fast, to make me able to reply before your question gets here

05:42:38 [me]: .. what?

05:42:44 [me]: oh, that actually makes some sense

05:42:47 [me]: scarily enough

05:43:12 [Tristan]: lol

05:43:18 [Tristan]: don't i normally?

05:44:14 [me]: in weird ways like that? Emphatically yes.

05:44:39 [Tristan]: no, i mean in normal ways, like that

05:44:50 [me]: that's what I mean

05:44:54 [me]: you just think it's normal

05:45:00 [me]: cause it's you

05:45:51 [Tristan]: actually, i was a bit scared it would be patent nonsense,

05:46:02 [Tristan]: but i thought i should try anyway

05:46:02 [Tristan]: and it worked :)

05:46:16 [me]: no, you see, it did make some sense

05:46:45 [Tristan]: yeah, that's what i mean

05:46:45 [Tristan]: i was scared it would be patent nonsense

05:46:45 [Tristan]: and it wasn't

05:46:58 [Tristan]: so my attempts at communication resulted in some communication

05:47:10 [Tristan]: which is what working communication should do

05:47:10 [Tristan]: so it worked :)

05:47:21 [me]: you mean you were afraid it would come across as such?

05:47:37 [me]: (and hey, give me some credit too, I understood your nonesense)

05:47:38 [Tristan]: i was afraid it would come across as patent nonsense, but that wasn't my objective

05:47:43 [Tristan]: i was trying to communicate :)

05:47:44 [me]: okay

05:47:46 [me]: yeah

05:47:49 [me]: well, you succeeded

05:47:51 [Tristan]: i wasn't meaning to deprive you of any

05:47:57 [me]: after I thought on it some..

05:48:00 [Tristan]: yeah, but only after much effort just now!

(21:46:21) [me]: (yes, linguistics is science—it's predictive)

(21:46:50) [Aladnsane]: Then tell me how my ancestors will say 'indifferent' 500 years from now.

04:15:26 qatharsis: The Orkhon script is pretty strange. "Runiform" yet also "hellenoid" letters interspersed with emoticons.

18:30:51 [oberon]: that does something totally whacky

18:30:52 [oberon]: the fuck?

18:31:00 [oberon]: The camel claimed that would work...

18:31:32 [me]: you using perl 6 already? ;-P

…

18:37:04 [oberon]: Excellent

18:37:08 [oberon]: And no, I'm not using Perl 6

18:37:13 [oberon]: because it DOESN'T FUCKING EXIST

18:38:14 [me]: well, it was one possibility for why what you were doing wasn't working

18:38:24 [me]: that you got Perl 6 from future.sourceforge.net

18:38:35 [me]: and were using that as your primary perl interpreter for some reason

[02:35] Aaron B: you finished your hw?

[02:35] Aaron B: you're all caught up?

[02:35] Aaron B: hold on, i need to look out my window

[02:35] Aaron B: nope, i don't see any pigs flying...

[02:35] Aaron B: maybe hell froze over?

Aaron B [04:07]: i like it my way. when you become reincarnated as me in your next life, you can change it ;)

me [04:07]: … wait

me [04:07] that can't happen

me [04:08] can it?

(20:26:16) Kesuari: i sometimes forget how far back america is

(05:05:12) Оберон: and don't forget to set your clock back!!!

(05:05:20) [me]: oh yeah. Aaron pointed that out earlier

(05:05:24) [me]: my computer did it automatically

(05:05:26) [me]: my alarm didn't

(05:05:29) Оберон: heh

(05:05:35) Оберон: My computer is my alarm

(05:05:37) Оберон: I win.

(07:02:07) Kesuari: meh. functionality ahead of pritiness

(07:02:14) [me]: sometimes

(07:02:47) Kesuari: yeah, today :)

(00:21:26) Kathryn: .ther'es no latin for homepage, you know

(00:23:02) [me]: I bet someone's standardised some of this stuff actually

(00:23:17) Kathryn: i'm sure they have

(00:23:33) Kathryn: but those words weren't in my dictionary, and i'd rather make stuff up

(00:23:58) Kathryn: it lets me pretend i'm creating something in a subject that's older than God