demetrius

How would you even know it was replaced there? It's not like you can compare what the person was saying and what the person ended up writing.

In places where you do have access to both Cantonese speech and written text (e.g. movie subtitles), you can easily find such examples.

> The meaning of 睇 was defined as in 礼记·内则 like "睇，倾视也。"

The meanings change. Look at another word¹ from your example, 也 jaa⁵. 也 jaa⁵ used to be sentence-final marker roughly² corresponding to “to be” (XY也 ≈ X is Y), now it means “also” (我也唔知 = I also don't know).

Should we say that 也 jaa⁵ means “is” and not “also”? I don't think it it's useful.

Similarly, we shouldn't say 睇 tai² means “to look sideways”: it means “to watch, to read” in modern Cantonese. Just like 也 jaa⁵, it's meaning changed, and it’s OK. That’s how all languages work.

(BTW, neither Wikisource's nor Ctext.org's editions of 禮記·內則 even have this phrase. Could you give the link to the version of 禮記·內則 from which you're quoting this?)

> Why are making shit up to appropriate a Chinese word as some kind Cantonese excluse invention and misleading people.

I'm not saying it’s a Cantonese-only invention. I’m saying 睇 tai² is a standard Cantonese word for “to watch, to read”, and its cognate is not used in this sense in Standard Mandarin. Its cognate is sometimes used in other senses (I even gave an example of 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ in Mandarin), but it’s not a standard word for “to watch, to read” (that's 看 kan⁴ in Mandarin).

It's similar to saying that “pas” is a French word for negation³, and it’s not used in this sense in Portuguese. Does it mean meanings (notably, “step”) do not exist? They do! Portuguese does have a cognate of “pas”, “passo”, but it only means “step”, it’s not a negation word.

> More importantly, there does exist another type of written Chinese, simplified vs traditional

Simplified and Traditional is comparable to Roman and Fraktur in German. Mandarin and Cantonese is comparable to Luxembourgish and High German.

You can write Mandarin in both Simplified and Traditional. You can write Cantonese in both Simplified and Traditional script.

Similarly, you can write Luxembourgish with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur. You can write High German with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur.

The language and character forms are orthogonal. (Even though some forms have more letters than others. E.g. Fraktur distinguishes ſ/s, while Roman type usually doesn't. Likewile, Traditional distinguishes 繫/係, while Simplified doesn't.)

> Would you proceed to argue HK style writing is Cantonese and not Traditional?

As I've said, these things are orthogonal.

Let's look at example of Cologne:

Spoken language = Colognian, written language = High German, script = Roman type. (You can write Colognian, but most people translate their speech into High German when writing.)

Similarly, in Hong Kong: spoken language = Cantonese, written language = Mandarin, script = Traditional characters. (You can write Cantonese⁴, but most people translate their speech into Mandarin when writing.)

(There's also phenomenon of a mixed language with Cantonese pronunciation and Mandarin grammar and words, sometimes called “High Cantonese”. It can be compared to Russian izvod of Church Slavonic: combination of Russian pronunciation with Old Bulgarian grammar and words.)

> Or even further maybe Guangdong and Hongkong cantonese are > different "language" ?

Guangdong is big. Standard Cantonese, as spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, is clearly the same language.

But Hoisanese? Probably divergent enough to be considered a separate language.

_____

¹ Or morpheme. The usual caveats about “what is a word” apply.

² I say “roughly” because Classical Chinese had several words that can be translated “to be”. The pre-Classical phrase for “X is Y” was X誰Y也, where 誰 used to mean “is”, but later disappeared (except when it was extra-stressed to mean “only”), and 也 took the meaning of copula (it was originally a sentence-final marker fo continuous situations). Even in ancient Chinese the meanings were already changing!

³ Interestingly, the development of Classical Chinese meaning of 也 jaa⁵ “to be” (X誰Y → X誰Y[也] → X[誰]Y也) is similar to development of French meaning of pas “not” (X ne Y → X ne Y [pas] → X [ne] Y pas).

⁴ You can find some books in Written Cantonese here: https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/free-online-cantonese-liter...

Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak.

Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak.

> because the orthography movement failed in the 70s

It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”.

For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading.

They're just different words¹.

____

¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.

During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag.

These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus.

I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag.

_____________

¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time.

Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.

Which is... Pretty random? What is "very uncomfortable"? 'Switch to autumn/spring clothes' uncomfortable (<20ºC)? 'Switch to winter clothes' uncomfortable (≈0ºC)? 'Get a sweater below your winter clothes, and maybe double trousers, too' uncomfortable? (<-20ºC)

Celsius fits the mental model of normal human communication quite well if you use it.

> Celsius doesn’t give much benefit beyond the vague water will freeze around 0.

Which is a very major shift: rain turns into snow, roads get slippery, you should dry your hair extra-carefully (> 0ºC it's raining anyway, you'll get wet anyway, why bother; <0ºC it will turn to ice on your head, you definitely don't want that).

Water freezing is a VERY major weather shift.

With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.

I also kinda hate how suggestion algorithms are not customizable at all, and all your actions are input to them.

It adds a mental burden when choosing a song: choosing a song not just affects what I listen now, but what I will get suggested in the future.

A simple switch "don't feed my actions to algorithm" would have solved that, but of course the company doesn't want that. It wants all the data it can get.

"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).

"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.

For me, the problem is not that it's terrible (it's not). It is that the the priorities of Gnome developers don't align with mine.

They want an evolving desktop, keeping up with new trends, ideas and hardware.

I want a stable desktop that doesn't change much between versions and doesn't lag on my eeePC.

I feel that it's the other way: Slackware is going away (it used to be a major important distributive, and not I hardly ever hear about it), while Gnome is a default environment in many distributives.

I have no reason to like Gnome (I switched away from it when Gnome 3 happened and haven't looked back), but for me it seems that it's pretty popular.

> If you really want a glass of water at a restaurant, always order that first. As you do this, look the server in the eyes and nod.

I don't understand it at all. Is is to make sure you get the water first, and not with the other dishes? Is it to test how the waiter would react, and whether you want to order other things?

Why that weird ritual with the eyes, what is it supposed to mean?

Your think they suck because they're not coloured? But black-and-white images are standard, that's how you'll be seeing them in dictionaries, textbooks and transcriptions.

Also, I think some hieratic texts use different inks, like red and black, and the transcription into hieroglyphs needs to convey this difference. If you use a coloured hieroglyphic font, it would be hard to transcribe these hieratic texts.

Or maybe author's native language is not English. :D UTF-8 does require twice as much bytes for Cyrillic, for example.

Besides, there's a lot of other operations that happen in modern OS that makes text editing more expensive. E.g. modern applications need to account for bidirectional text, so things like "determining the correspondence between a character on screen and in memory" suddenly require table lookups to determine if the character is RTL or LTR.

All languages and writing have built-in redundancy

In Egyptian, you can probably get away with writing the determiner in question + vertical stroke below it, to mean the determined thing. I guess Egyptians would understand you (that's how they wrote some common words like 'sun', with sun disk + | stroke). The vertical stroke is somewhat like putting spaces around the symbol in our writing system.

But usually that's not desirable because then you need to be extra-careful with drawing your dog or penis. And most writing wasn't carved in stone, it was a simplified hieratic style where a length of one stroke could be very important

So, some redundancy is useful. In Egyptian it usually means adding phonetic symbols before the image (imagine drawing a pen before a penis to show how the word sounds; then, you could have also drawn a duck before penis before the penis image to mean a different word that sounds like duck).

“Completely Open-Source? What’s the catch?

Yup. No catch. All Software and Hardware files can be found in the Engineering section and the Github page under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License”.

This is in the Frequent Questions section. (You need to click on the question to see the answer.)

The scientist got into hospital with mushroom positioning at 11th of August. https://charter97.org/ru/news/2023/8/31/561949/

The crash happened on the 19th of August. https://meduza.io/news/2023/08/19/roskosmos-pri-perehode-sta...

Both: https://charter97.org/ru/news/2023/8/31/561949/

They say that on 9th of August he went foraging, on 10th of August he ate the mushrooms and went from his dacha to Moscow, he felt bad on that day. In the morning of 11th of August he had ambulance called for him. He was in hospital until 30th of August when he died.

> It's very common for people to die of mushroom poisoning in Russia?

According to official stats https://www.rospotrebnadzor.ru/activities/recommendations/de... around 30 people die of mushroom poisoning in Russia every year. (And around 1000 suffer from such poisoning every year.)

According to the 2014 survey https://fom.ru/Obraz-zhizni/11711 , 75% Russians have ever went to pick up mushrooms, and 40% have done it in the last year before the survey. 8% personally know people who suffered from mushroom poisoning.

This corresponds to my expectations: I'm from a neighbouring country, Belarus, and basically almost everyone around me has been picking up mushrooms.

That's not just a culinary experience, but a way to relax: go to forest, disconnect from the world, unwind. (People also pick up blueberries and lingonberries for the same reasons.)

Oh, and my classmate died from mushroom poisoning.

I think it might be because of the OGL scandal (when WotC tried to use a loophole in the license text to turn an open license into a closed one).

At least that was my personal reason why I decided not to watch that movie, and not to buy anything from WotC anymore.

> Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter

Because... they're not supposed to?

To me, this sounds like "Why pen doesn't make us smarter" or "Why lamp doesn't make us smarter". Why was the author expecting it to make us smarter anyway? Where did they get that expectation?

> Seriously, are there really any unemployed? There are none

This is just blatantly false. There are more than enough unemployed in Belarus.

> Belarusian mentality is a peasant one, anyone who does not work hard can't be a member of society, so it just doesn't happen there.

No, it's not. You're wrong. I'm telling you this as a Belarusian.

This might be Łukašenka's mentality, but definitely not Belarusian. And the 2020 has shown clearly that Łukašenka does not represent us.

There are a lot of reasons why people might want to end up without having a house, e.g. domestic abuse, scams, poverty, etc. To really solve homelessness, you need to tackle these issues. You need safety nets, you need to ensure better living standards, etc.

What Łukašenka's regime does is it makes the homeless people disappear. It makes them invisible, in any way possible.

But by doing this, it just hides the symptoms and does nothing to address the underlying the problems.

> The idea of "parasite fee" was objected heavily but you see how brilliantly it worked.

It has not. The government had to basically scrap the idea, and ended up with doing that thing with different gas/water prices it's doing now.

Also, the protests against the so-called "parasite" fees were a major factor in the future protests: people saw the protest against the "parasite" fee succeeding, and this certainly motivated a lot of us to go to protest in 2020.

> Fear and coercion are necessary to maintain a healthy society

No.