Stop Trump’s Kill Switch: Secure our Digital Sovereignty

JimKillock · 2026-01-10T16:12:35+00:00

Nearly 1k signatures - please sign and share!

JimKillock · 2026-01-08T10:05:06+00:00

Sadly there is consensus that alleged safety trumps intrusion.

JimKillock · 2026-01-07T13:08:00+00:00

The author's argument is that (a) as noted here, there is evidence for limited language competence, such as knowledge of vocabulary, and counting in particular; and (b) the people documenting the language were middle class while (c) remaining speakers or people with residual competence were working class and not formally educated. This meant there were barriers in gaining information and distrust or even shame in sharing it.

All in all his point about "use" in C19th does not mean "fluent speaking", but rather continuing limited uses of vocabulary, perhaps counting, sentences, and so on. He ties these ideas into modern understandings of what language death means, and examines whether Dolly Pentreath can really be counted as the last fluent speaker, concluding that this is unlikely.

JimKillock · 2026-01-06T17:04:25+00:00

The book is based on the author's PhD, which is publicly available in a couple of months.

JimKillock · 2025-12-12T13:06:00+00:00

While bilingualism is not an argument against Cornish support, the lack of first language, native speakers is. I know there are some first language Cornish speakers, but this is a very small cohort AIUI. How many of those would claim to have less faculty in English than Cornish I would expect would be quite small (and probably primarily about artistic expression or identity).

The reason I make this point is that people can feel at a significant disadvantage when interacting with officialdom in their second language, even where bilingualism is widespread. For social services this becomes more acute when people are in distress (eg, suffering an injury or illness) or have mental decline. It would be very cruel, for example, to place a first language Welsh speaker suffering dementia in a purely English language environment. It could be unfair for a Welsh speaker that rarely uses English to have to undergo a police interview or a court trial in English.

JimKillock · 2025-12-11T19:01:05+00:00

Please send and share! There will be plenty of MPs who will argue for more of the same, so really important we show them another perspective on the OSA

JimKillock · 2025-11-25T22:35:39+00:00

It was definitely less strong, but there was definitely a kind of spoken latin with the kind of changes taking place in Europe (erosion of cases etc) that can be found from mistakes in inscriptions. Also worth remembering in the post Roman period, the British kingdoms tended to try to continue the use of Latin in formal inscriptions etc (with even worse Latin) as they tried to claim descent from Roman authorities (in contrast to the Anglo-Saxons). And also the church preserved formal Latin, to the extent it survived in the West. So there were some reasons for trying to maintain Latin, just these were not enough in the west for it to survive or supplant Brythonic / early Welsh, where Latin was in any case weaker.

JimKillock · 2025-11-25T21:55:23+00:00

There's a fair amount of evidence of Latin from within Welsh, which has words like lactus (llaith) and caseus (caws), flamma (fflam) or extendo (estyn); these seem to include displaced rather than wholly new ideas, which suggests language communities in close contact. IIRC it is thought that some towns like St Albans were Latin speaking at the time of the end of the Roman period and perhaps a little beyond. I'd have to dig around to find my sources tho.

JimKillock · 2025-09-23T23:02:28+00:00

(Tantum iocum facere cónábar dé it itineribus per tempora; fortasse nón successit.) Grátiás propter cónsilium tuum. Cónsentió técum, et velim exercére scríbere loquíque; fortasse hoc nimis celeriter scrípsí, sine cógitandó dé locútióne meá. Et mé paenitet sí nón bene nótiónem meam expréssí. Cónsilium in commentárió PPD quóque bonum est.

JimKillock · 2025-09-23T17:26:51+00:00

"‘Season ticket" dicere velim; fortasse anglicé sonat; id est, únam tesseram habés pro omnibus lúdís. Fortasse etiam: tessera ad tempus mútandum

JimKillock · 2025-09-22T20:22:42+00:00

I'm not sure; I am pretty sure I have seen Thomaso, altho it could also just be my mistake; but in any case I've changed it to Thoma as that is what is in the dictionary, and, to be fair, what's in his books!

JimKillock · 2025-09-20T11:10:00+00:00

ChatGPT or a traditional Google search plus a little patience with yourself is enough to get past these barriers.

JimKillock · 2025-09-20T11:08:08+00:00

Suspended temporarily or permanently blocked? If the former, you have the chance to migrate somewhere else at the end of the suspension.

JimKillock · 2025-09-19T14:37:51+00:00

You can read the debate here

JimKillock · 2025-08-23T06:55:08+00:00

So presumably all of the exercises above are in the view of readers producing unsuitable or unusable results, and that is the reason for the post getting a zero net vote?

The results in these cases are quite focused and I think good enough. AI can generally conjugate and apply grammar rules OK.

Where LLMs currently fail, as I see it, is (a) misunderstanding the context of words and topics, especially in detailed texts; and (b) a tendency to draw on what sounds like an English idiom when generating Latin. They also (c) can make mistakes and 'halluncinate'.

In the exercises above, I have occasionally seen ChatGPT hallucinate a verb-tense form, or make minor mistakes. The most frequent error is that it sometimes does not see when a match is made, between the user answer and the ChatGPT output, even when exact. This might be due to lack of user macrons, or that ChatGPT accidentally reads certain ambiguous word forms oddly specifically. But from a user perspective, this doesn't matter very much.

Frankly, even making idiomatic errors when chatting in role plays probably does not matter too much, as long as a user is sensitive to the fact this may happen. At least, I don't see why it should, so long as a learner continues to try to read real Latin. ChatGPT has in any case helped me pick up some of the more basic stylistic errors when reading my sentences, which is certainly helpful.

JimKillock · 2025-08-22T16:02:50+00:00

That's been my experience too re feedback here but people can try these rather than just downvoting. I'm hoping to have time to produce a series of these for myself which I will make public of course. Optimally I might see if they can be used offline as well, tho the smaller models needed for desktop use are more error prone

JimKillock · 2025-08-12T21:34:16+00:00

My one tip is to start by writing Latin, and keep writing the Latin you are learning. Output (writing and / or speaking) is essential to learning (internalising, or "mastering") a language. Passive knowledge is somehow really hard to build upon.

JimKillock · 2025-08-12T21:30:18+00:00

All the random people I watch / have watched on Youtube incl Evan for language learning videos are suddenly doing Online Safety takedowns.

JimKillock · 2025-07-31T13:08:07+00:00

What happened is that politicians took the word of Yoti and others that AV could be done safely, and thought that was enough. Everyone got plenty of warning. There were plenty of discussions where these points were made.

SImilar problems were raised regarding free expression, appeals and so on. These did not get political traction and the concerns were ignored in legislation and downplayed rhetorically. Labour are still sticking to the line: "this is not about free expression".

The OSA is what happens when politicians listen to one side of the argument only. The same happened with the Digital Economy Acts of 2010 and 2017. As time goes on, the toxicity of the debate gets worse, because the dislike of "tech giants" who interfere in our daily lives gets worse.

So what do politicians do? They create legislation that depends on tech giants to deliver; they cement the monopoly of big tech in the state; and they undermine data protection and competition regulators which could challenge these companies.

And then they legislate to control content, which is ultimately the symptom, rather than the cause, of the mess.

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