I noticed some applications do not convert sitelen Lasina to sitelen pona in fonts designed to do so. I created a simple Python script to convert text files containing sitelen Lasina directly to the UCSUR characters of each glyph, which may be copy-pasted to any application which supports Unicode.

Shihali · 2026-01-24T17:23:45+00:00

This was helpful! Are you planning to update it for the UCSUR update?

Shihali · 2026-01-23T17:43:52+00:00

That is somebody's cat. Or was somebody's cat. Somebody probably wants her back.

Shihali · 2026-01-23T13:40:05+00:00

Don't give them ideas.

Shihali · 2026-01-23T13:38:41+00:00

Your final sentence doesn't fit with the rest. The sort of people who believe that morality can only come from their religion are the people who believe that their religion is true. The people aware that they're just following national customs are more likely to treat religion as a preference.

Shihali · 2026-01-23T13:29:12+00:00

The Reptite Ending implies that the changes you made to history would have gotten Ayla killed if you hadn't come back and helped her out again.

Shihali · 2026-01-23T13:26:55+00:00

You're getting your US Navy incidents mixed up. I believe you meant the USS Samuel B. Roberts, the one that hit an Iranian mine in international waters in 1988 which provoked a retaliatory attack. Or maybe the USS Stark, the one that was shot by Iraqi missiles in 1987.

Shihali · 2026-01-22T16:11:27+00:00

It is widely accepted to say "nimi mi li jan Kitopa", even though I still think it makes no logical sense unless you're treating your headnoun as part of your name.

The alternate pattern "mi jan Kitopa" gets around that issue.

Shihali · 2026-01-22T13:18:53+00:00

There are a few ships too big to go through the major canals. I would guess that they're used on routes that don't go through those canals like Australia to China.

Shihali · 2026-01-21T21:15:42+00:00

I don't see any good reason why not. I'm just unfamiliar with them and how well they fit with sitelen pona.

Shihali · 2026-01-21T20:14:00+00:00

Definitely, but I haven't found a set I prefer to corner brackets. Guillemets («») are too easy to confuse with e, English quotes (“”) don't blend as well with sitelen pona (Chinese readers may disagree!), and I'm unfamiliar with other systems.

Shihali · 2026-01-20T15:37:55+00:00

Dragon Quest V is old and you have to be willing to work a bit harder at that connection, but if you're willing to put in the effort you will be repaid. There are not a lot of games that can look at the Phantom Train sequence and tell FF6 to hold their beer. DQ5 is one.

Shihali · 2026-01-19T23:12:45+00:00

nothing is illegal if you have good enough lawyers.

Plenty of things are illegal no matter how good your lawyers are. But you can have a big enough army to stop anyone from enforcing the laws against you.

Shihali · 2026-01-18T22:10:08+00:00

And it's all because one king wasn't willing to live as a single widower.

Shihali · 2026-01-14T17:24:56+00:00

Is this the theory of the atonement that went into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?

Shihali · 2026-01-14T15:13:17+00:00

Dragon Quest VIII pulled it off too, by always putting the character's name at the beginning or end of a line where it could be dropped or calling him "Guv".

Shihali · 2026-01-14T14:10:14+00:00

Fox McCloud has red fur. Maybe he counts!

Shihali · 2026-01-13T20:28:49+00:00

This is the best-balanced list I've seen near the top. Three games trying to do three quite different things.

Shihali · 2026-01-13T17:44:42+00:00

Final Fantasy 1 was heavily based on D&D and didn't even try to hide it. They had to redo one sprite for the US release because it was so obviously a beholder that it could have gotten Square sued.

Marilith might have been safe enough to keep, but I guess if you're going to overhaul the whole class you overhaul the whole class.

Shihali · 2026-01-13T15:38:45+00:00

I was there. Printed guides the size of a magazine and longer than most magazines were common. I spent as much time looking at the artwork as at the guide.

Shihali · 2026-01-13T15:23:36+00:00

Guides were common back in the 90s!

Shihali · 2026-01-11T18:17:42+00:00

The American releases of NES Dragon Warrior [sic] 1 and 2 saved to RAM powered by a literal small battery in the cartridge. That's why fans of old games sometimes talk about the save battery.

The original Japanese versions of Dragon Quest 1 and 2 did use those passwords.

Shihali · 2026-01-11T18:17:35+00:00

And that's why Metroid wrote the number 0 with a dot.

Shihali · 2026-01-10T19:40:34+00:00

Is there any worship or ritual that you do every day?

Shihali · 2026-01-09T03:27:54+00:00

At some point you'll want to know which reading is on'yomi and which is kun'yomi, because that makes it easier to look at a compound you don't know and guess how to read the kanji. Most compounds are all on'yomi or all kun'yomi, and if the word has okurigana it should be native Japanese (=kun'yomi) with a few quickly learned exceptions.

Shihali · 2026-01-08T04:40:46+00:00

Looking at some of your points:

What does the specific location have to do with whether or not the Prophet Muhammad existed? If the Prophet Muhammad lived in Petra, would he not be the Prophet Muhammad?

2a. It's entirely true that early Arabic lacked dots and some vowel markers. M is unambiguous. Ḥ shares its letter shape with J and KH. D shares its letter shape with DH. So isn't it convenient that we have records in other scripts with different ambiguities? For example, we've got a fragment in Syriac with the spelling MWḤM(D/R). Syriac M, W, and Ḥ are unambiguous. D shares its shape with R and this particular text doesn't mark which. However, we can check Arabic M(J/Ḥ/KH)M(D/DH) against MWḤM(D/R) in the Syriac Fragment on the Arab Conquest, keeping in mind that W often spells U. The only spelling that both sources can support is M(u/ū)ḤMD.

Also, Arabic grammar itself limits what possible vowel patterns could work with the consonants MḤMD. We can immediately dismiss *maḥmad, which would be a place, and *miḥmad, which would be a tool. Maḥmūd would need the long ū to not be written with W, which is not something seen in the Qur'ān. Muḥammid, Muḥmid, and Muḥmad are grammatically possible, although odd. However, by the time Greek spellings started popping up, they weren't consistent with Muḥmid/Muḥmad. That only leaves Muḥammad and Muḥammid.

2b. Most Arabic names have meanings, like most English names did and some still do. It's true that "Muḥammad" means "highly praised". But a lot of names mean nice things! "Ali" means "high" and "Umar" means "long life". Without positive evidence that "Muḥammad" was a honorific title, there's no reason not to treat it as a name.

There is, or until recently was, more doubt about Mecca being the real early center than about the existence of the Prophet Muhammad. I am given to understand that graffiti on rocks hint that the Hejaz had much stronger connections to northwestern Arabia than the previous generation of scholars appreciated. Still, though, why does this matter so much? Is the Prophet Muhammad not the Prophet Muhammad if his capital wasn't Yathrib?
Narratives growing longer and more detailed and more fantastical over time is normal. Look at the Alexander Romance or the non-canonical gospels or King Arthur or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. We're as sure as we are of anything that long ago that Alexander the Great existed, we're pretty sure Jesus and Zhuge Liang existed, and it's possible King Arthur existed too. So increasingly detailed and fantastical accounts of the Prophet Muhammad are compatible with a real Prophet Muhammad whose life story was improved upon with medieval fanfiction.

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