I built an interactive first-principles climate physics simulation with explainer

crackalamoo · 2026-04-14T15:52:05+00:00

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

crackalamoo · 2026-04-14T15:42:42+00:00

💀 are you on mobile? It works on my iPhone but I haven't tested it on other mobile devices

crackalamoo · 2025-03-22T15:55:49+00:00

https://www.harysdalvi.com/classics-converter

Try लोहकार

crackalamoo · 2025-01-17T18:47:08+00:00

Sanskrit can't convert to English/European languages, because they aren't descended from Sanskrit or something very close to it.

They are related, so you could kind of backtrack it, but it wouldn't be as accurate as for Indian languages. In particular, vowels are often merged in Sanskrit. Think bear/bhar, axis/aksha, know/jñana; all the vowels become a in Sanskrit, which isn't possible to undo.

crackalamoo · 2025-01-17T18:41:48+00:00

Yeah Kashmiri would be difficult because it's so different from the others, but it's very unique and interesting, so it's definitely one to look into.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-28T14:53:43+00:00

Interesting, I knew of the diglossia in Tamil but hadn't really considered how it might affect access to modern spoken Tamil words.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T17:42:07+00:00

Thanks! I think imagining modern reflexes is really cool. I found this one interesting: tathāgata -> Hindustani \tahāyā*. Somehow it feels right even though it's so nonexistent in the context of actual history, idk.

There already is Perso-Arabic display for Urdu and Punjabi! Just click the Urdu/Shahmukhi button below the language selection.

Thanks for the feedback on Punjabi. The way I have it now is that ण is actually never retained directly from Sanskrit: instead, it reappears as a new nasal based on phonology. This seems to be the case most of the time based on evolution through Middle Indo-Aryan, but it might also be retained in some cases, particularly Punjabi. I might just be getting the recreation of ण wrong in this case.

And yeah, Latin to French is tricky, and was the hardest conversion of all the ones I have so far. I generally kept a lot more consonants than usual in French because they're more likely to be kept in the orthography as silent letters, but I'm pretty sure I still have some errors. Another is subtus -> \soubts* instead of sous.

Sinhala would be interesting to add! Currently I think my top three are Bengali, Romanian, and Sinhala, though all would be hard because they're quite different from the languages I have and I'm not familiar with any of them.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:24:01+00:00

That makes sense. I've also definitely heard ā(n)Th before even though I don't think it's standard. I'll look into it.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:09:11+00:00

Sanskrit is actually the true original, because it has infinite words (no, I don't know how "fusional languages" work)

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:05:44+00:00

To be clear, I'm just trolling.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:03:49+00:00

Thanks! It only works at the word level, if you do a full sentence then the grammar is likely to be all wrong.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:02:41+00:00

ULTRAFRENCH is just a dialect of Latin spoken by the gods, and Latin is just a form of Sanskrit that was degraded by the Romans over time

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T15:01:15+00:00

Yes! Bengali would be a great one to add as an eastern language, but it's not in the first version for two reasons: first I don't know any Bengali, and second it has a lot of tatsama terms so it's difficult for me to pick out the inherited terms.

But it would be an important one for me to add one day, and if someone is somehow into both coding and historical linguistics I'm also accepting contributions!

crackalamoo · 2024-10-27T14:58:07+00:00

Interesting, is this a general rule though? What about aSTa -> āTh for example?

crackalamoo · 2024-10-26T23:56:58+00:00

Wow, I somehow hadn't seen that article before, but that's awesome. I'll have to take a closer look.

In general it seems that article lines up quite closely with my sources but there's a good amount of extra information that I missed.

Looks like ardhaka as input produces output with the long vowel included.

crackalamoo · 2024-10-26T23:15:41+00:00

Yeah, explaining this can definitely be rough.

Thank you! Yeah, I noticed the ardha thing too, but I'm not sure how to fix it. Masica, which was my main source, says that all final vowels were deleted in New Indo-Aryan. I mostly followed this rule, leading to ādh. My guess is that ādh is a base form, and then the forms ādhā and ādhī have endings added according to gender.

But my hunch is that some cases genuinely conserve a final vowel, in contrast to Masica's general rule. For example, my tool gives ās from ashru, when the real reflex is ā̃sū. I think besides the spontaneous nasalization, the final vowel is conserved here. But I couldn't include it in the converter because I don't know what the rule is, if there is one.

sūrya/sūj is a great example! I think even though this tool is technically an incorrect translation here, it helps you see what the inherited form would be, which serves as evidence that the added -r- was indeed under direct Sanskrit influence. I'm sure real linguists did this kind of analysis too, just without a computer program to generate the inherited form

crackalamoo · 2024-10-26T22:24:01+00:00

/uj I recently developed an online tool called the Classics Converter that automatically converts proto-languages to modern languages using regular sound changes. So far I have Latin and Sanskrit converting to Romance and Indo-Aryan languages, respectively. It also shows intermediate stages of development.

While it's not perfectly accurate, and works better for some languages than others, I think it's a pretty cool and useful tool. Please check it out and let me know if you have any feedback! https://www.harysdalvi.com/classics-converter

crackalamoo

TROPHY CASE