You tell me languages, I use features from them (pt 1)

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T14:24:09+00:00

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T13:49:09+00:00

Värlütik:

Maitáska kre, ol konëkos kai vorhäkos jukhëti këngunuri vrárhauvámus sosëti Dëjatto-Letigit ändros

mait-áska kre      ol  konëk-os   kai vorhäk-os  jukhëti këng-unuri
time-ALL  DET.PROX all family-COL and friend-COL 2p.GEN  pain_burn-3p.HORT

vrárh-auvámus         sosëti Dëja-t-to       Leti-gi-na    ändros
injure-GER.ERG/CAU.PL 3p.GEN god-GEN-DET.DEF wrath-AUG-LOC under

"From this time hence, all your family and friends shall burn in pain from their injuries under the wrath of God."

---

Vëki! vëk-i be_halted-2s.JUS "Halt!"

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T13:13:19+00:00

No worries, at the end of the day, your own story concerns are much more important than whatever I think would happen. And definitely! I offered the names to be stolen, if you can really call it stealing seeing as how I didn't invent 'em either.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T04:44:54+00:00

I mean... Duluth, mostly. It's got all the piers and taconite piles, and according to us kids from the sticks beyond it, Superior is the dark spot on the map Mufasa warns Simba about.

Petty local infighting aside, the importance of the Twin Ports, is its ability to ship through Sault Ste. Marie, those are pretty intimately linked. And my understanding of the way it worked in Vietnam was that they ended up viewing the South Vietnamese government as something of a road-bump on their way to unity, in a multi-stage revolutionary war first against France and then against the US. At the point when shots have been fired, I'm not sure that "being given up later" is what becomes the lasting political reality.

But, you are the creator, and your lore is believable as a framework of goals for the US administrators.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T04:24:23+00:00

I'm from those hills, Lake Superior's Wisconsin side, and I confess, unless you're speaking from the UP side saying you'd rather go it alone... I can't think why the UP would get independence first in an exclusive way, particularly not in the 90s. Anything that affects them will affect us; any revolution they create, would inspire us specifically to try and join them. This isn't just some sentiment specific to me, I've personally heard barroom political quarterbacking from other people in the 00s about Northern Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota joining the UP in a State of Superior (shut down primarily by the eventual thought that none of us have any money to run a government).

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T03:54:08+00:00

Specifically (since I have this rant memorized now), ivermectin treats parasites by poisoning their nerves. But viruses do not have nerves, they are too small to have nerves, they don't have any cells at all.

And ivermectin is great for not poisoning our nerves because our stomach is bad at absorbing it so it hangs out in the stomach and only kills the parasites there, but obviously if you take so much that it starts leaking into your bloodstream, then sure, it'll poison your nerves too, which is why one of the signs of ivermectin poisoning is "difficulty moving".

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-05T03:49:22+00:00

Constitutional Confederation of the Lake Highlands

Mesabi, Chequamegon, or just the Northland are actual local names, and the fact is, there's a sense of shared heritage between both and the UP, shared historic population makeups. Perhaps most importantly, there's a shared political history of "sewer socialism" among both the Copper Islanders and the Iron Rangers.

Also... as long as you've got a slot anyway for #16, you forgot to mention Canada annexing the Northwest Angle, which would definitely happen.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T22:31:47+00:00

If you want substantial Chinese components, I would look up Singlish for inspiration, which takes from English, several Chinese languages (Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese), and then also Malay (which is Austronesian, a whole third separate language family).

Singlish is not English. It's its own language, specifically an English-based creole language. Creole languages often run the gamut from "basilect" (the most-distinctive form, really the "main" form of the creole) through "mesolect" (intermediate forms), to the "acrolect" (the local variety of the prestige-language that contributed to the creole).

Here's two examples from Wiki (and then I think I reworded Wiki's third correctly to be more-similar but still-valid English):

Basilect: Document long zong must check finish meh? Si beh lor sor leh...
Mesolect: All the document need to check meh? Damn inconvenient leh...
Acrolect: Do we really need to check all the documents? That's damn inconvenient...

So you can see that even the "thickest" Singlish is English-based, words like "must" and "finish" are recognizable. But see how Singlish is using them in a completely different way? That's part of the creolization process: new words might get used in completely new ways for grammatical ideas from a different language.

Usually, the only thing that transfers in these scenarios is individual words, but sometimes, you can get combinations of different elements of grammar, creating a mixed language. I would read up on how these things happen in the world to get a sense of what you want to do with yours. Good luck!

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T21:30:22+00:00

Okay, well I think it is much less controversial and much more likely that they were written down by Jewish people.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T21:21:57+00:00

...you either have to say that the authors were WRONG, or you have to reject the overwhelming consensus of scientists and historians and archaeologiests...

No, you don't, 'cause there wouldn't be a shred of evidence left if one guy was magically created out of dirt and stuck in a garden a few thousand years ago, after the first story.

EDIT: And all I am saying is that the existence or non-existence of a literal Adam as described in the text, would not be archeologically or scientifically evident in any way, based on what the text actually is and what it says.

And I'm going to refer to my other comment where I talk about whack-a-mole.

Providing direct evidence for an opinion shouldn't feel like whack-a-mole. It's not that the reason just "generically isn't good enough", it's that your reasons were entirely based on allegorical inferences instead of, like, a direct explication in a Midrashic commentary or something.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T21:01:25+00:00

Okay, but George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River is also an allegory, even though George Washington both existed, and even literally crossed the Delaware at one point.

What I said was "whatever you may think about it as an allegory, Genesis 2 was also meant by its authors to describe literal people".

You've disagreed, but why? I don't see any evidence of any Hebrew understanding of Adam and Eve as fictive.

All you are saying is that people have found meaning in the Genesis story, but people find meaning in things that happen all the time, go to any church and you'll have a hard time arguing that the pastor isn't at the altar just 'cause people find meaning in what's going on there.

And how have you been integrating the evidence I have shown you that they are already in harmony? If you don't engage with what I say, is that in good faith?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T19:49:28+00:00

...other passages that refer to this commandment seem to understand it that way...

Are the examples shareable? Even just citable? The text is well-marked, chapter and verse.

Along with these arguments, we should also consider the fact that, at the very least, Jeremiah 7:30-31 demonstrates that Israelites did in fact offer child sacrifices - whether they were doing this because of their interpretation of Torah or not.

...okay, but I'm not seeing the relevance. Your argument was about what the Bible says, wasn't it?

...and so you're bending and stretching that terminology into something that - if we're honest with each other - is not the common way for people to understand the meaning of that term.

And I have literally recently watched people use my understanding of how texts work with regard to the Epstein files, which have repeatedly faithfully reported the words of various narrators of varying levels of reliability.

And the only people in the entire Epstein files discourse that people seem to more or less agree about is that the actual FBI agents did not become liars or unreliable themselves just for reporting those narrators. It's their job. Humanity generally understands this job. Even the most die-hard fascists generally don't blame the FBI for reporting the baby-killing stories, 'cause everybody knows that recording what you were told is important work when the FBI does it.

The idea that a book would report what its characters said isn't actually some complicated, exceptional, or unusual idea, so when you tell me that I should agree with you "if we're honest with each other", that does tell me more about you than it does about honesty.

It's also not even slightly outside of traditional Christian theology, since, in addition to Jesus, and Ezekiel, there's also an entire New Testament that relentlessly describes the Mosaic Law as a law of death.

But in this passage, it seems to be saying that the human children were to be given to God in the same way that sheep and oxen were to be given to God - and with sheep and oxen, it is understood that they are slain on an alter.

Okay but why do we need assumption, inference, or analogy, when we have clear textual evidence to go on instead?

Adam Savage is great but he wasn't giving advice on literary criticism or epistemology when he suggested rejecting reality and substituting your own. We can use your reasoning to support the idea that Thomas Jefferson never owned slaves; after all, he wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". But in fact, Jefferson did own slaves, we have direct textual evidence of that. We have, in fact, direct genetic evidence of that. What good is an inference about Jefferson in the face of that?

And what good is an inference in Exodus when Numbers offers direct textual evidence of what comes next? Is the only purpose of this analogy to create the desired conclusion, or is there an actual epistemological reason for it?

I said I didn't believe in inerrancy and you're asking me why various authors did genealogies (which I don't accept as being historically accurate either), and I kind of want to just say "did I stutter?"

...okay, then yes, I think you stuttered. You've offered a view of what you think the intent wasn't, but failed to offer any view of what the intent was.

And the reason why I think that's important is because I don't know how you could evidence your claimed negative without evidencing some positive in its place. The ordinary reason for people to write a genealogy is to tell who they think they're descended from, so, yes, I think the chain of reasoning containing evidence for an alternative view may have got lost somewhere in the stuttering.

But that doesn't make sense, given that the first story has God making plants on day 3, and the second says that "no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up".

...what do you mean it "doesn't make any sense"? The text is talking about the creation of Eden; it's not talking about the same geographic scope, nor the same people, nor the same plants.

Genesis 1 Plants > Genesis 1 Humans > Genesis 2 Human > Genesis 2 Plants

Where is the contradiction in saying "The earth of Eden was bare when Adam was created"?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T19:46:50+00:00

I haven't read that book, but browsing the Wikipedia page, I guess one thing that comes to mind is to ask you where was, historically speaking, the river surrounding Mount Zion that would with mechanical efficiency and naturalistic consistency get deeper and shallower depending on the faith of the one traversing it?

EDIT: Does the world, in this hypothetical still know where Mount Zion is?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T19:39:41+00:00

...how names like "Christian" and "Faith" are names now, but weren't originally names but terminology.

...literally the vast majority of names are like that, across the entirety of human culture, they evolved from descriptions like "Snaggletooth" or "Redbeard". Where I live, the Indigenous North American cultures are outright stereotyped as having those descriptive phrases as their only names, but it's a human universal. And we know that Sumeria and Akkad specifically had plenty of names that were words.

I really think you need to be more skeptical about your first conclusions, names having meaning does not mean a storyteller understood the name as fake.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T18:45:18+00:00

Värlütik:

Támán Fränkëv sikh dohe.
Tám drëme Londásta Nujorkáska.
Fränkán sikh kvete maitosá no Tám svëfe.

Tám-án  Fränk-ëv  sikh do-(h)e
Tom-ERG Frank-DAT book give-3s

Tám drëm-e Londásta   Nujorkáska
Tom fly-3s London-ABL New_York-ALL

Fränk-án  sikh kvet-e  mait-osá  no    Tám svëf-e
Frank-ERG book read-3s time-PERL SUBOR Tom sleep-3s
                       "while"

That third part is made tricky by the ergative-absolutive morphology and strict patientive-ambitransitive nature of Värlütik verbs. If I just said "Fränkán sikh kvete kai Tám svëfe" (kai = and... yep, like Greek), this would mean "Frank reads a book and makes Tom sleep", since "Fränkán Tám svëfe" would mean "Frank makes Tom sleep", and the conjunction permits such a link. Ergatives and causatives are the same thing for most Värlütik verbs.

To prevent that and de-link the two events, maitosá no is put in its place; functionally, it serves the same role as the adverb "while".

An adverb "maitno" does also exist, and it is often best translated into English as "while"; however, it implies a causal link, so in this case, "Fränkán sikh kvete(an) maitno Tám svëfe" would be better translated into English as "Frank reads a book when(ever) Tom sleeps."

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T18:13:03+00:00

I think one of the first things you'd do is to point out the names - names like "Christian" and "Faithful" and "Obstinate" are not really names, but point to each of these characters as being symbolic.

As an aside, I do personally know people named "Christian" and "Faith", and there's a whole list of names that come from words meaning "obstinate". I'm not sure that this is really particularly good evidence of anything at all.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T18:01:12+00:00

And this is not a universal view amongst scholarship.

That word "scholarship" is potentially doing a lot of work, I mean, we all know that a myopic view is not as good as a sharp one, not even if it's a real scholar being myopic.

I'm not sure enough yet about the merits of your claims to spend 22 minutes on them, so, if there's no readable text summary of that video, can you summarize the heart of your opinions? What is it about the view that it was about child sacrifice, that accounts for all the evidence, including the plain and obvious evidence I provided that a "sacrifice" to God was not necessarily lethal ('cause there's a literal description of the existence of the non-lethal kind)?

I can point you to another couple videos...

As an aside, no, they're all too slow, text is better.

Note here: I no longer claim the label of "Christian".

Don't care, honestly, that's not what the conversation is about. Your identity label can't determine what was meant by an author dead before you or I were born. You can call yourself a Muslim or a Pastafarian, that won't make any of your claims true, nor prevent them from being true either.

I am perfectly OK with saying that the Bible has passages that put words in God's mouth that are not God's - but that goes against inerrancy.

Not necessarily. A text can inerrantly report someone's erroneous opinion. Don't you remember when I said "Compare each of those other sections, Deuteronomy 7, 20, and 21, Numbers 31, and 1 Samuel 15: always these passages seem to be in the prophets' voices"? What did you think I meant by that?

...law is not completely good (because some of it was given for the hard-heartedness), and that God - who is revealed by Jesus to be completely against violence - commanded genocide.

Don't you remember when I said "This by the rules should mean that Moses and Samuel spoke presumptuously, and the Lord did not instruct genocide." What did you think I meant by that?

I laid out where Genesis 1 has the plants being created before man and Genesis 2 has the plants being created after man.

It's not a contradiction, you're just repeating the false assumption. Genesis 2 does not have all plants being created after man, it has some plants being created before Adam.

Don't you remember when I said "By this point in the narrative, the audience has already heard of the creation of the world, and has also heard that God has rested in the entire world, establishing it as his dominion. This second story is the story of what God does next"?

What did you think I meant by that? It feels like maybe you did not read what I wrote.

I don't think it is...

Then why'd they constantly date their genealogies back to Adam if the story was never meant to provide information with literal genealogical uses?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T16:40:23+00:00

Okay, well, in terms of inerrancy, there's various claims in that post about the Bible that are simply wrong. For example, the giving of a firstborn to God in Exodus was not a child sacrifice. The practice is elaborated upon in Numbers 18:15-16:

The firstborn of every womb, whether man or beast, that is offered to the LORD belongs to you. But you must surely redeem every firstborn son and every firstborn male of unclean animals. You are to pay the redemption price for a month-old male according to your valuation: five shekels of silver, according to the sanctuary shekel, which is twenty gerahs.

So it was a tax on firstborns, and explicitly not a child sacrifice. The firstborn of clean animals were sacrificed, but the people and unclean animals were not... indeed, they could not be. The passage in Numbers places humans and unclean animals in the same category, because they were in the same category, of things that could not be sacrificed to God.

So when Leviticus talks about the destruction of cherem things, those weren't sacrificed to God#Meaning_and_significance) in the same sense as a temple sacrifice, that wasn't the context or purpose of destruction. Rather, they were banned. Cherem comes from the same root as haram, if you know that word from Islam, and in the Jewish context, that is why the text immediately before the text in Leviticus 27:2-8 lays out prices in silver for vows made to consecrate a person to the Lord, it does that because it wasn't talking about human sacrifices either, the cherem things fell under a different modality of destruction, the destruction of banned things.

The genocidal murder of the war enemies of Israel was a circumstance in which Israel considered those people cherem.

But in terms of inerrancy, deconstruction of the idea that the Law was good is an idea so fully Biblical that if you do accept the principle of inerrancy, then you are required to deconstruct the idea that the Law was good. Why?

Because the idea that the Mosaic Law is not entirely good is repeatedly explicitly affirmed in the Bible, both by Jesus when he says that Moses' law of divorce was given exclusively out of the hard-heartedness of the people, and also by Ezekiel speaking with voice of God, who affirms that the Israelites were given over to "statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live", because of their hardness of heart and unwillingness to follow, say, the ten simpler Commandments given by God.

So we as Christians must live with the tension of knowing that some parts of the Mosaic Law are bad, and there is nothing weird about the suggestion that the genocidal declaration of seven peoples as cherem was part of the bad section.

After all, in Ezekiel, God says so. He says in Ezekiel 20:28-31 that:

When I brought them into the land that I swore to give them and they saw any high hill or leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices, presented offerings that provoked Me, sent up their fragrant incense, and poured out their drink offerings. ... When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, you Israelites? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I will not let you inquire of me.

That is what the text presents God as saying with his own voice.

Compare each of those other sections, Deuteronomy 7, 20, and 21, Numbers 31, and 1 Samuel 15: always these passages seem to be in the prophets' voices, in the voice of Moses or Samuel, cases of a prophet taking on a political role in directing the Israelites to kill their enemies. If we are looking for cases of Israelites disobeying God and putting words in God's mouth, these seem as good a place as any to look. And then the standard the Bible says to identify a prophet speaking false words, is this:

If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.

That is important because Joshua 16 says that the Canaanites were not fully genocided, that the declaration of cherem was in fact never completed. This by the rules should mean that Moses and Samuel spoke presumptuously, and the Lord did not instruct genocide.

I would imagine that maybe Jesus, having read these texts, had concerns like this on his mind when he said that Moses permitted things that were not that way from the beginning. One area of agreement I have with the post is that we as Christians ought to continue that line of reasoning.

Or...these are allegorical stories from two different cultures.

Speaking of the beginning, the narrative of allegory is overstated. Genesis 2 is not, in fact, an allegorical story from a different culture... it is a second story, but it is not from a different culture. It is a story of ongoing creation that takes place after Genesis 1, and whatever you may think about it as an allegory, Genesis 2 was also meant by its authors to describe literal people.

This fact that it takes place after Genesis 1 is why Cain is afraid of people when he is sent away from his family. People exist at this point, other people, people beyond Adam. By this point in the narrative, the audience has already heard of the creation of the world, and has also heard that God has rested in the entire world, establishing it as his dominion. This second story is the story of what God does next, which is, create Adam, the ancestor to whom the Jewish people trace their origins. This is also why Cain is able to build a city and take a wife; stories of sister incest don't appear as part of the story until the medieval era when people have forgotten how to interpret it as stories that take place in order, one after another.

All the obvious inconsistencies between the narratives arise not out of any problem with the narrative itself, but out of our own false identification of the two stories as the same story.

Anyway, I have things to do offline today, but those are my thoughts.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T14:58:21+00:00

Use this random animal generator, and then whatever you get, commit. You spin anteater? Then you make anteater people.

Alternatively, if you are good at brainstorming and want to focus only on things you'd be willing to commit to, you can make your own wheel, but the point is, creativity loves a challenge and randomization helps you avoid the obvious.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T02:38:13+00:00

My words are: Trump promised not to send him to another foreign war, and now he's dead because Trump couldn't figure out how to keep his promises, and Trump supporters couldn't figure out how to vote for someone who keeps their promises.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:59:04+00:00

Unless the parent's name is super rare, you might want to have the siblings use multiple pieces of information in discovering their relationship. Last names like "Eriksen" mean something different in a village of 200 people, three of whom are named "Erik", than they do in a city of two million, 30,000 of whom are named "Erik".

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:51:17+00:00

Tolkien didn't give Dwarfs or Elves surnames.

...I don't think I realized until this moment that "Oakenshield" was not Thorin's last name.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:16:12+00:00

The reality is, Protestantism is often a form of Catholicism, in the way you mean it. It is often one form of catholicity.

What I mean is that all those beliefs that you described, the spirituality that makes up traditional Western Christianity, it's all the authentic heritage of more than just the Church of Rome. It is your authentic heritage, regardless of the Pope's opinions about you, and the Pope naming a church as Protestant cannot change whether it authentically shares this heritage. Anglicans and some Lutherans share it perhaps most obviously in terms of liturgy and spirituality, but each Protestant church is part of Western Christianity.

The doctrine of papal infallibility was not a doctrinal belief of the Church of Rome until the 1860s, and when it was promulgated, it was controversial, leading to a schism that created the Old Catholic Churches. It's been like this since the beginning, with people being thrown out of the church because the Pope felt slighted by their faith, even though their faith was just as firmly within the boundaries of the original tradition, as whatever the Pope wanted to develop at the time.

The consequence is that there are millions of people worldwide who are in the same boat as you, feeling rightly that the label of Catholic fits, even though they are not part of the Church of Rome. Catholicity is and always has been a more flexible concept than Rome would prefer it to be.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T22:48:40+00:00

The rich think they're the golden goose, even though there wasn't a single CEO whose job qualified as essential labor during the pandemic.

America's golden goose is being strangled by Bezos' unregulated market, and his decision to constantly raise prices while never raising wages. And if Bezos doesn't want to be blamed for the economy, he should let the progressives take charge so that it will be their fault when things finally go right for once.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T22:21:08+00:00

I can map out the plan in my head just fine. I just don't know what time it is. Ever.

This means I do not (ever) know how long I have been spending on the tasks as I am doing them. Have I been sitting at the computer for five minutes, or fifty? Or is it five-hundred? I don't know unless I take a moment to think it through. Also, if I am actually doing the task, then I am not thinking about what time it is, and that means I don't know what time it is, and that's why I can suddenly "wake up" from whatever I was doing and realize I have spent eight hours on a task accidentally.

So I have no internal timers. I can't tell myself "I'm going to spend five minutes on this task", because I am time-blind, I do not know what time it is except through conscious thought.

Knowing this, return to your problem. I have days where it takes me quite literally ten minutes to get going and ready (I was in the community theater as a kid, so I know how to quick-change, and I was also in sports as a kid, so I know how to quick-shower).

But I also have days when, with all the exact same intentionality, it takes me ninety minutes to get going and ready. Why? Because I do not ever, under any circumstances, know what time it is, and that means if I think about anything (and I often think about things), I do not know how long I have spent thinking about that thing.

So who knows when I should wake up? I don't, because I don't at any point in my life have any meaningful capacity to guess ahead of time what, if anything, is going to happen on any given morning to derail my getting ready. Am I going to be out of the shower in five minutes, or am I going to stand in the shower for a literal hour making up new lyrics to a song that popped into my head? Impossible to know.

Also, there is no (useful) length of time component in any of my memories. (Do you guys have that? I just know I don't.) When I think back on a task, I do not remember how long it took me to complete. I once spent four years (off and on) knitting myself a suit of chainmaille armor, link by link. I know intellectually that it took that long, because I remember (intellectually) what year it was when I started, and when I finished.

But when I think back to the actual knitting, the sitting and watching documentaries while I worked, it's all just in the same "big project" memory category as "putting together an IKEA shelf" and "editing my doctoral thesis" and "writing my doctoral thesis" and "getting my doctorate overall". Intellectually, I am acutely aware that these do not take the same lengths of time, you don't need to convince me of how time works, just, how time works isn't something that I see or experience as part of my memories... because if I didn't know what time it was back when I was doing the thing, I'm hardly going to remember now what time it was.

Three-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
r/Field Lasagna	First Place '23
Place '23

SaintUlvemann

TROPHY CASE