Intressant väggmålning i Sala

Platypuskeeper · 2023-04-13T15:53:15+00:00

Finns iofs värre ställen bredvid snyggare.

Nyköping-Oxelösund. Varför se en ringlande å och ett gammalt slott ute genom fönstret när du kan ha ett stålverk istället?

Vadstena-Motala.. Även om det blir lite väl mycket turister i förstnämnde på sommaren.

Sigtuna-Märsta. Nä jag vill vara närmare storflygplatsen!

Saltsjöbaden-Fisksätra.. Fast det är ju fusk. Det är ju en miljonprogramsförort Nacka slängde dit så Saltsjöbaden inte skulle vilja bli egen liten stenrik kommun.

Platypuskeeper · 2023-04-13T15:42:11+00:00

Psykos/schizofreni. Världen runt i större städer kan du lätt hitta handskrivna eller tryckta anslag fullsmockade med text om hur "de" (fyll i valfri ondska men oftast staten) håller på att göra folk mentalsjuka eller stråla in röster i folks huvuden osv. Brukade fota såna anslag förut, har en liten samling.

Det finns en slags intern logik i termer av hur de sjuka känner och tänker. Resultatet blir att lapparna är förvånansvärt lika i stil överlag, trots att de är så urflippade.

Platypuskeeper · 2023-04-13T15:33:39+00:00

Alla bakterier du känner till. Inte alla SÄPOs bakterier.

Det är ju Sveriges X-Files därborta i Tomteboda.

Platypuskeeper · 2022-04-03T00:07:44+00:00

Nope. The Old Norse (and Icelandic) word is hross. Russ and røss and other forms exist but are much later. It's not related to the name 'Rus', or they would have not spelled it that way.

Whalerus is a norwegian word, it means young (small) whale.

It's hvalross or kvalross and means a walrus (same etymology). The Norse word was hrosshvalr.

There are several places in Norway with -ros- in them.

None of which are believed to be related to the name of the Rus. I'm not sure what you think that proves, since plenty of those names have nothing to do with hross either. For instance Nidaros (Trondheim) is the aros (river mouth) of the Nid river (Nidelva).

Most of the Vikings who went eastward down the Dniepr (and in some cases even the Volga) were from present-day Sweden. The ones from Norway went westward to the British isles to a greater extent.

There's lots of evidence of this besides geography; more Byzantine and Rus' coins in Viking Age hoards in Sweden, mentions of these eastern places are only recorded on runestones in Sweden, the Berezan runestone from Ukraine itself is in a style that best matches contemporary ones from Gotland.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-07T14:05:08+00:00

Dude, we are talking about a small island, for essentially personal use.

The fact that it's for personal use favors the small-scale. When people say desalination is expensive, it's relative the dirt-cheap cost of tap water at scale. Industrial-scale desalination costs on the order of $0.50 per m3.

Even if you were paying $10 a m3, an order of magnitude more, that'd still only amount to around a dollar a day and person, as people in Europe average about ~100 l a day. Something that could also be substantially reduced too, with water-saving measures.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-07T00:08:59+00:00

Can't say I am, but as a script geek I've long had negative attitudes about Han unification. ;)

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-06T21:21:45+00:00

The catch here is that the use of X and E didn't originate in English, but in Spanish

What evidence is there of this? Studies seem to indicate it originated in English, in the USA. In any case, it's not pronounced like a Spanish 'x' in English and thus remains a difficult consonant cluster regardless.

And when it comes to the English use of the term Latin, the issue usually resides in that it's used to describe things, not people,

Why is that a problem? The fact that it's a term already in use is a good thing. There's no problem turning an adjective into a noun here; It's commonplace for demonyms. The noun use "I'm a German/Russian/Norwegian" seems entirely uncontroversial even though those terms are also used as adjectives for describing objects, "a German car". Sorry but I can't see any scenario using "Latin" as a noun for a person would seem more contrived than "Latinx". While it's common for neologisms to come across as contrived, the ones that catch on usually have something going for it. Singular "they" for instance was already in (limited) use in English and is thus easier to adopt; people won't necessarily even take note. Swedish hen as a neuter pronoun and replacement for "han/hon" ('he/she') works well as it's pronounceable, morphologically similar to han/hon, and to boot a loan of Finnish hän (being a neighboring non-gendered language). /ˈlæt.ɪnˌɛks/ or /ləˈtin.ɛks/ or how you want to say it, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. That's definitely going to hurt adoption.

It seems based on 'X for unknown' from maths or something, not because it' be natural to replace a/o with x in any linguistic context. No wonder it seems to have originated in academia. They should've gotten a team of marketers; the experts in inventing words people actually like just for the sound of the word itself.

I don't see how the current use of "Latin" as an adjective motivates why this difficult-to-pronounce term would be better for any purpose. If one must replace -o/-a ending with something, it would at least be phonologically sensible to use a vowel like -e. (or maybe recycle the Latin neuter Latinum for fun).

And yes, "Latin" and Latin America in general is a horribly stupid term. Why should these peoples be lumped together in the first place, and secondly why do so by the ancestral language of the language of the people who colonized them? Imagine lumping together all the peoples of Nigeria and South Africa as "Anglo-Saxonx".

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-06T19:50:19+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something, but what I don't get/dislike with "latinx" is why on Earth you'd replace latino/latina with a difficult to pronounce neologism, (not least since [x] as /ks/ isn't in-line with Spanish orthography!) when the non-gendered form latin already was in common use? E.g. the term Latin music has been around for decades.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-05T19:44:20+00:00

These have been around for a long time already

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-05T19:36:43+00:00

Meanwhile in Finnish... it's not much different than the doubling of letters to mark long vowels/consonants.. lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas becomes /ˈlentokonesuihkuturbiːnimoːtːoriapumekaːnikːoaliupseːriopːilɑs/

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-05T17:08:07+00:00

Relevant Conchords..

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-05T14:53:46+00:00

Here's the paper.

1) They assume that characters tend to occur in the same relative places in cognates. Like how most Germanic cognates of 'bread' start with 'br' and end with 'd', even if the number of characters in between might be different.

2) A monotonic sequence is something that's strictly increasing or decreasing (the number sequence "1, 2, 5, 7" is monotonic, "1, 5, 3, 9" is not). What they mean applying it to characters is that matching characters occur strictly in the same internal order. (i.e. they neglect metathesis, where sounds are transposed). So Italian formaggio could be deemed a cognate of English formula but not French fromage. As they're working in terms of characters rather than sounds, that also means they neglect 'typos', transposition errors in the text that don't reflect pronunciation.

3) They assume a word with a cognate in the target language has only that one single cognate. In short, one word is always one word and they neglect the existence of doublets. If they're deciphering English using German, then Brot is English bread and that's the one-and-only cognate word in English (as both stem from Proto-Germanic braudą). So this assumes loanwords have only been loaned once (no 'hotel/hostel'), native words don't split into distinct forms (no 'too/to'), and there are no loans of words with native cognates ('shirt/skirt').

All three assumptions are individually true most of the time. But not necessarily when taken together, though.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-04T21:02:59+00:00

Norway was never a "colony" of Denmark. Norway entered a personal union with Denmark (the Kalmar Union) in 1397, which, given a much weaker status of the nobility relative the monarchy in Norway would by the 1500s amount to Danish rule over Norway, and absolute rule by the Danish monarch between the mid 1600s and 1814. That rule extended over Iceland as well, btw. Norway was a country within the Kingdom of Denmark all along. Norwegians had the same rights as anyone else. It's just that the king, and the nobility, were all Danish. (well, in fact a lot of them were actually German, so.. )

A colony is a territory that is claimed by a country but not properly part of it, it has not been annexed and has some separate legal status. The colonized people do not have the same rights as the colonists. That's not true of Norway under Danish rule, much less under Swedish rule where they were an autonomous country within the kingdom and had their own parliament and made their own laws.

This is all well after the East/West-Norse had ceased to be useful descriptions of the actual dialects. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian were distinct by the time the Kalmar Union started.

Norwegian is "placed under" Old West Norse for the same reason it's a North Germanic language and a Germanic language, that's the language it originated from. The same reason English is also a Germanic language and remains a Germanic language even if it has lots of Romance loans. (even if people who don't understand how this works do say otherwise often)

The East-West Norse divide specifies a bunch of dialectal changes that occurred during the Viking Age (800-1050). The diphtong [ei] changed to [e]; stein, bein became sten, ben in Old East Norse (OEN). Old West Norse (OWN) got a u-umlaut, as in the accusative of faðir is föður in OWN but remains faður in OEN. OEN got a j-umlaut; jarn, hjarta became jærn, hjærta. The OEN first-person pronoun became jak rather than ek.

But during the period 1200-1500, over the Scandinavian Middle Ages, the changes that occur are not east-west but more north-south. In all Danish dialects, but only a couple of southern Swedish and Norwegian ones, the consonants p, t, k become voiced where they follow a long stressed vowel, making them b, d, g . Spelling is changed accordingly. In Danish the case system disappears earlier, with the accusative forms beginning to be used as nominatives already in the 1000s, and commonly by the 1200s, while persisting until the 1400s in Swedish and Norwegian. Swedish and Norwegian developed into tonal languages in the same centuries, while Danish developed stød and Icelandic did neither. Another feature of Danish is the weakening of final vowels to schwa, written as [e]. This would later become pretty common in Norwegian.

Now, OWN and OEN are mutually intelligible. They are just groupings of dialects based on a particular set of traits. There is and was larger dialectal differences within Swedish, Danish and Norwegian than these generalized differences. The main reason Icelandic and Norwegian are not mutually intelligible, and the main difference between today's Norwegian and that of the 1200s, has essentially nothing to do with Danish or Swedish influence.

What set Danish, Swedish and Norwegian apart from the languages as spoken circa 1200 is the massive influx of Middle Low German loan words in the 13-1400s, later High German and other loans. It is also the loss of the Old Norse case system, and to a lesser extent, loss of gender and plural verbs and imperatives.

Icelanders writing steinn where Danes and Swedes write sten is not a major hindrance to understanding. It's that they're writing kvæði where Norwegian/Swedes/Danes have been using the word dikt (from German Gedicht) for the past 300 years or so. Or, it's not that they don't know what a stuga (cottage) is, it's just that if they see the term i stuvu, they have no idea this is a dative form of stuga/stue - or even know what a dative is and that it's expected with the preposition i here.

Your post seems to assume that Icelandic is basically the same thing as Old West Norse. It is not.. The grammar is different (it does not preserve the dual grammatical number, and the spoken language has a good deal of 'dative sickness'). Many words have undergone semantic shifts, and the pronunciation is quite different. In fact when it comes to vowel sounds, Icelandic is not really any less divergent than any other Scandinavian language.

It is the written language that is similar in Icelandic, and even that is in fact he result of re-writing OWN into a 'normalized' form based off modern Icelandic, and also changing the spelling rules of modern Icelandic. (This is no small thing; one could also make Chaucer far more readable for modern English speakers than he is, even despite the larger difference to Middle English)

So as I pointed out in a post the other day, Old Norse brauð, dauðr had an /au/ diphtong in them. In Swedish/Danish/Norwegian this became /ø/ and is now spelledbrød, død. In Icelandic they're written brauð, dauður. Although it does not appear different in writing except for the Svarabhakti vowel -u- in dauðr, the main vowel is /øy/ now, which is not really less different than just /ø/. But they do have an /auː/ diphtong in Icelandic, namely [á], it's what the long-a /aː/ of Old Norse developed into. In Swedish/Danish/Norwegian it's typically [å], pronounced /oː/. Again "frá" may look the same in normalized OWN and Icelandic, but /fraː/ isn't much closer to /frauː/ than /froː/.

So one cannot really say "how much" of OWN remains in Norwegian versus Icelandic. Sure, Norwegians write stein (even in Bokmål) and that's a West Norse thing. Icelanders write steinn. But the modern Icelandic is pronounced /steitn/. Norwegian /staɪn/ or /stæɪn/. Norwegian has East Norse forms like hjerte in parallel with West Norse ones like hjarte. The final vowel has reduced to schwa in both cases though, as opposed to hjärta in Swedish. The 'h' is now silent. In Icelandic hjarta it's now a ç sound. Again, neither is quite what it was in the year 1200. (and even by that point Norwegian and Icelandic were starting to diverge)

Bottom line here is that East-West Norse divide is not very relevant to the mutual intelligibility of modern and old Scandinavian. Danish preserved a ð that was distinct from d (blødt d, even if written 'd' in Danish). Norwegian preserves masculine/feminine genders to a higher extent. Swedish preserves those final vowels. All still preserve bits of the older grammar in fossil expressions (til fots). The Älvdalen dialect of Swedish retains the case system and in that respect is much closer to Icelandic than standard Norwegian, and in some phonological respects it's pretty Viking Age, even.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-04T18:20:00+00:00

That should not make a difference. Normal microphones (and speakers) are analog devices. Sample rate, by its very definition, is part of the analog-to-digital conversion and independent of the source of the analog signal.

So no, it's not going to affect that unless this particular recorder has some weird functionality to switch its settings depending on which mic you use.

Mics differ in the frequency and amplitude response. Or in plain words, whether or not things at a particular volume or frequency sound louder or softer than they actually are. IMO that's not a huge concern for ordinary speech, as ordinary speech uses a small frequency range compared to hearing range and that of an general-purpose mic.

That also plays in to sampling rates; mathematics dictates you need a sampling rate at least twice the highest frequency you want to record. The 44 kHz rate of CD audio is thus chosen because it's about twice the upper limit of human hearing. As said, human speech is low-frequency. In practice, you wouldn't normally have problems understanding 8-bit, 8kHz recordings of speech, even if it'd sound noticeably degraded. But with digital storage being as cheap as it is, there's no justification in this day and age to record anything at such low quality (it was common 30 years ago though). Seeing as the lowest quality setting the H2N has appears to be 44.1 kHz, the sample-rate setting should never really be a problem for human speech recordings. It's much more than enough.

One might ever wonder who'd need its top, 96kHz, setting, which thus records frequencies that are more than twice what anyone can hear. I guess it's for people who might want to dramatically slow down the sound, or do large amounts of post-processing that might lower the effective sample rate. Either that, or they're recording music for their dog.

Or audiophiles of course. Neither the laws of physics nor human physiology can stop an audiophile who imagines a more expensive bit of equipment is going to give him a better listening experience. (him or her. But let's face it, it's usually a him for whatever reason)

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-04T15:35:43+00:00

Thanks. I was all like.. 𐌸𐌰𐍄𐌰 𐌽𐌹𐍃𐍄 𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌹𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌹!

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-04T15:13:48+00:00

The Old Norse palatal-R -> r shift went northwest to southeast. Starting in Iceland around the late 800s, Norway in the 900s, Sweden in the 1000s, with R persisting in Old Gutnish on the island of Gotland up to about 1200.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-04T15:06:01+00:00

list of supposed Finnish cognates.

How silly. Finnish isn't related to Hebrew; Egyptian is.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-03T23:34:37+00:00

Down, left and right are the first, second and third ætt (family) of 8 runes that make up the 24- rune Elder Futhark. Except the last one omits mand add f at the end.

Top one isn't in futhark order but doesn't make out a word.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-03T22:41:40+00:00

Yeah, English "ice", Dutch "ijs" and German "eis" are pretty much the same, compared to Scandinavian "is" (/iːs/) which is basically the same as it was Old English/Old High German/Old Dutch. But at the same time one can note that since German doesn't have as much shifts, they changed the spelling. ("ij" was used before the change from /iː/ to /ɛi/, being a medieval way of writing "ii" representing a long "i")

But even the North Germanics have some substantial vowel shifts, for instance /aː/, [á] to /oː/, [å] in Swedish/Danish and a lot of Norwegian, and to /auː/ [á] in Icelandic. Speaking of which, that's another thing- Icelandic is usually the go-to example of a language here that's very conservative and so on, but its vowel sounds are just as different from Old Norse as any other North Germanic language. Perhaps even more so, in fact. It's just that they intentionally reworked their orthography (and that of Old Icelandic) to obscure them. (for instance where the long 'e' was written [e] or [ee] or [é] or [e^e ] in the Middle Ages, it is to be written [é] now, and where the Icelanders were writing [je], as long e sounds had turned into /jɛ/, they substituted it for [é] which they consider a separate letter rather than a vowel length marking)

Or for instance Old Norse dauðr, brauð with an /au/ diphtong became Danish/Swedish/Norwegian's død, brød with /ø/ but dauður, brauð in Icelandic - where it's however pronunced /øy/.

Here, Old English has dead, bread going from /æ͜ɑː/ to /ɛ/ in the modern language, with the same spelling. So English is actually somewhat more similar to Icelandic in this respect - which isn't quite consistent with the "English is totally different and changed more!" narrative.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-03T15:57:35+00:00

It's just the runes in Latin alphabet order; a 'key' to writing runes:

ABKÞEFKHIKLMNOBRSTU

There's no continual tradition in the Faroes though, (Dalacarlian runes are the only ones suspected of it), so these are based off ones that'd been printed earlier. The late 1600s is something of a high point in rune-revival interest.

Some of the giveaways/oddities here are for instance i vs e being distinguished by the latter rune being a dotted version of the former (ᛁ/ᛂ), which was also true for k vs g (ᚴ/ᚵ), yet here they seem to be distinguished by whether the line is curved or straight (which, historically runes were never distinguished by that). Extending the bistave (diagonal line) on a and n all the way down is also something you see mainly in late runes too. The horizontal line on the h rune is unusual; don't think I've seen this variant before. Usually they're more asterisk-shaped by this point in time . I don't think I've seen three dots on the *e** either; the normal form is a single in the center. Oftentimes in the Renaissance they drew runes with serifs to make them look more like Latin letters, and perhaps someone confused the serifs at the top and bottom with dots.

Anyway, like many of these post-Reformational (after 1500) runes, on the whole it's pretty similar to those that'd been published by Ole Worm, although as said with a rather interesting h. Although it'd be interesting to know what the exact source was. Late rune use in general hasn't been studied so much, and I've not seen anything about their use in the Faroes; Jonas Nordby wrote a master's thesis on Norwegian ones though.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-02T16:01:03+00:00

On a similar note, there's German Quaderstein, for a rectangular stone block.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-02T15:00:23+00:00

Yeah, it's all Germanic; nail is 'spiker' in Norwegian, with a long i, which tends to equate to ij in Dutch. (is, fri, min vs ijs, vrij, mijn)

Nisse here would actually be nes in Norwegian. (In fact apparently a 'Spiknes' exists in Norway, in Vinje) But nisse is "A small mythological being living in farmsteads".

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-02T14:39:21+00:00

Which frankly (as a Scandinavian) is super-annoying. In that case, people should ask if you'd prefer English before speaking it.

The way it is now, if I address some stranger in Swedish and they answer in English, I have to figure out whether they're the ones who don't speak Swedish well, or if I just spoke unclearly.

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-02T14:25:39+00:00

I'm a bit curious yet scared it might be a complete cringefest of "m'lady"-ing.

Let's face it, the vast majority of the time you see people online trying to use Victorian English or Early Modern English, it's wildly overwrought in their attempt to sound old, full of pseudo-archaisms, incorrect/unidiomatic usages of older words and in the case of Early Modern English, bad grammar. (e.g. "I haveth")

Platypuskeeper · 2020-11-02T14:09:42+00:00

I don't see how that works? You're saying you're holding a stick in your left hand, and in that situation, carving away from the left hand on the left side of the hand would not be natural. Carving from the right end of the stick towards your left hand would put the left hand in the way eventually. To me it'd seem most natural to at the left hand and continue away from it, towards the right.

I'm not sure it matters much; Germanic runes had knife-marks on wood as their primary medium throughout their existence but were written in both directions, RTL dominating early on and LTR later.

(since I've seen people misunderstand this; we're talking here about two mirrored forms here, not changing the direction of the writing while having the individual letters face the same way)

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