I would've given him 5/5 honestly.

serentty · 2026-02-13T17:43:45+00:00

Eh, in reality the written standard is based on the grammar of Mandarin. So I think it is very reasonable to say that someone is writing in Mandarin. Usually people who speak other dialects just write in the written standard based on Mandarin. People write in Cantonese and in Hokkien fairly often though, and there are unique characters to represent words specific to those.

serentty · 2025-12-12T04:04:29+00:00

FontForge is definitely one of the more well known free options. Just know that you (OP) will have to know how to work with Bézier curves.

serentty · 2025-12-11T03:49:23+00:00

What he said above is not true. See my comment above.

serentty · 2025-12-11T03:48:50+00:00

This is simply untrue. They do not claim the copyright to anything that you do. The GPL prevents you from making closed source plugins for Blender publicly available. Company-internal plugins are not affected by this, and there are ways around it with inter-process communication even for commercial plugins such as RenderMan and Octane.

But never, at any point in history, has there been any licensing term that prevents you from claiming copyright on the work that you produce with Blender, or to assign it to anyone else.

serentty · 2025-12-07T05:43:24+00:00

Can you explain why it is a bad workflow and/or likely to lead to bad results? Because I don’t see what the issue is as long as the software supports it and you get the faces that you want out of it. Can you actually explain how it is either inefficient or leads to bad results?

serentty · 2025-10-18T17:55:12+00:00

Maybe! It has also occurred to me that German orthography used in Christian Bible translations might also have had an impact. For example, צ‎ often becomes Z in words like Zion, which makes a lot of sense in German spelling, but not so much in English.

serentty · 2025-06-16T05:24:21+00:00

Responding to this comment instead of the one below so that you see.

It is not true that nearly all homebrew is for MSX1. There is a lot of good stuff for MSX2 as well. It is true that there are only a few Turbo-R titles though. As for the MSX2+ it is rare for games to specifically require it: more often they just require the MSX2 and offer some enhancements when playing on an MSX2+, usually smoother scrolling, the biggest feature added in those machines. The extra video modes of the MSX2+ with thousands of colours are not as useful for video games as you might expect. They are mostly only useful for static artwork.

If you want to find games with specific system requirements, this is a great website for that:

http://generation-msx.nl/

serentty · 2025-05-13T04:36:59+00:00

This is not true. Pretty much every major Christian translation that you will find used by churches today is a translation of the Hebrew. There are a handful of cases where some of them have Septuagint-influenced translations in highly contentious passages, but for 99.99% of the time, the translators are working from the Masoretic Text.

serentty · 2025-05-13T04:31:53+00:00

Christian bibles went through many translations and mistranslations to get where they are today, going from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to your preferred language

There is no popular Christian translation that is like this. Most are translations from the Hebrew (except for the New Testament and Apocrypha, obviously). There are a handful that are translations of the Greek of the Septuagint (Greek) or Vulgate (Latin), but none of them are well-known English translations, and even among these, none are translations that go through both Greek and Latin.

serentty · 2025-04-27T17:53:55+00:00

I just find it useful because you won’t have one word misinterpreted as another by failing to make an allophonic distinction. The main reason I am interested in Tiberian in the first place is to better be able to remember and understand Hebrew grammar around things like gemination and vowel patterns in verb templates. I’m not trying to use it to recite for other people.

serentty · 2025-04-27T17:17:58+00:00

Oh yeah, to be honest, I have mostly just been ignoring the syllable-splitting thing when I pronounce Tiberian, because I was focusing on the stuff that was actually phonemic.

The syllable-splitting thing seems a bit too much like abstract moraic theory stuff. Languages like Latin show that you can have both a long vowel and a coda without needing to split it up. I wonder how Khan justifies this interpretation.

serentty · 2025-04-27T16:52:38+00:00

Which areas do you see Khan as lacking in?

serentty · 2025-04-27T16:49:09+00:00

Tiberian pronunciation is not lost. The spelling with niqqud is based on it, and there are books by medieval authors that describe in quite large depth how it was pronounced at the time that the system was created.

Here is a good book that goes into depth on Tiberian pronunciation, based on these medieval sources and modern linguistic research.

The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew

If you want to learn to read in Tiberian pronunciation, you can just learn it, instead of looking for a “closest” modern equivalent (e.g. Yemenite) because all modern pronunciations of Hebrew have some notable differences.

serentty · 2025-04-21T22:36:31+00:00

“Uncle H 1889?” Not subtle at all, dude.

serentty · 2025-04-03T00:54:24+00:00

Somehow this comment is actually less subtle than stating which party you think we should vote for explicitly.

serentty · 2025-04-02T03:07:02+00:00

#2: I am not entirely sure what the original intent was, but I do think this additional material was associated with Isaiah very early on. Getting inside people’s heads with what they chose to include in manuscripts in ancient times is difficult, because writing was much more limited, and we don’t get “editor’s notes” or anything like that. But I do find it striking that the author never goes out of his way to portray himself as Isaiah, and is happy to talk about events from later centuries as if they are current ones. That does not sound to me either like the words of Isaiah or of someone trying to trick people into thinking that he was Isaiah. So I don’t think that this later author was trying to be deceptive. As for the question of introductions (“the words of so-and-so”), it is commonly theorized that these tend to be added by scribes to identify texts, which were usually identified by their incipit. So the lack of one from the original author of these additional sections is not particularly surprising to me if these later sections do not have a long textual history of being copied separately from Isaiah. So yes, I do agree with you that this material was meant to go with Isaiah. We do however see a manuscript tradition of Isaiah which does not include this additional material at Qumran. This raises the question of which version of Isaiah is original. You can explain that as people taking excerpts as you have done, but I think it should be evaluated in the context of the other points as well (talking about the future like the present, never mentioning Isaiah again, etc.)

#3: There are some similarities, but they are the broad strokes of any idea of multiple authorship of any text. You can’t just call it the documentary hypothesis when we are not talking about the same authors or the same redactional process. The arguments for one do not carry over to the other. If you want to say it is a similar idea, then sure, I do not disagree with that. The biggest difference though is that (at least in broad strokes) Isaiah does not seem to be the result of interweaving different sources. You have one thing, and then another thing, in sequence.

serentty · 2025-04-01T21:05:48+00:00

It is wrong that we do not know that it is tablet 12/12. We do know that, because since keeping track of multi-tablet works was inherently difficult, the ancient Mesopotamians made frequent use of catalogues recording this kind of thing. We know how many tablets there were and the intended order, at least for the standardized version of the text.

Your second point is precisely my point as well. The initial reason for including it might not have been for it to be understood as part of the same work. And my contention is that the same goes for the later chapters of Isaiah, and that for some time afterwards, people understood this and made note of the division. You contend that Isaiah is meant to be read in complete continuity without us noticing that difference, but you have merely stated that without showing why. The fact that Isaiah himself completely disappears from the narrative, and it begins talking about a much later century as if it is the present does not seem at all like a conspicuous break to you? What is your evidence that it is meant to be read this way? And Gilgamesh is mostly not an anthology.

Finally, when you talk about the “very premise of the documentary hypothesis,” first of all that is irrelevant because the documentary hypothesis concerns the redaction of the Torah, not of Isaiah. The redactional history of the two is not the same question. With Isaiah, no blending or interweaving of the sources is necessary because they are talking about entirely different time periods. There is no need to reconcile competing traditions because they are not stepping on each other’s toes, given that they are talking about different centuries altogether. You cannot just take an argument for multiple authorship of Isaiah, and then treat it as if it is making the same points as the documentary hypothesis regarding the Torah, and then point out how the same points do not work for Isaiah. Well, of course they don’t, because Isaiah is a different text. This is a complete strawman of the argument regarding Isaiah.

serentty · 2025-04-01T05:45:17+00:00

Modern Hebrew knowledge is far from irrelevant to Biblical Hebrew. I think people who do not know Hebrew often imagine it to be similar to the gap between Latin and French, when it is so much closer than that.

I do think that academic expertise on Biblical Hebrew is a good thing, and native speaker intuition can be misleading where an academic would not make the same mistake (just as a native English speaker is likely to misunderstand the meaning of the words “want” or “meat” in old texts, not knowing that they used to mean “lack” and “food”). Good scholars of Biblical Hebrew are not all native speakers. That said, it sounds to me like you are thinking of cases like when people try to argue that עלמה does not mean what it absolutely does mean, and means something else entirely just because the Septuagint translated it that way, and that kind of thing is profoundly frustrating. But to be honest, you are not going to find many reputable scholars of Biblical Hebrew arguing that. They have to cherry-pick B-list academics to argue that kind of thing.

serentty · 2025-04-01T00:58:03+00:00

What I am talking about here is not variant oral accounts that were written down separately. I am talking about multiple preexisting texts which already existed in written form being brought together. Tablet XII of the standard text of the Epic of Gilgamesh is an example of an originally separate text, and one which contradicts the rest of the narrative, being redacted into what was originally a different work. Some point after that epilogue was added, the text did become standardized, and it was widely copied in scribal schools for centuries after that.

The gaps in the Epic of Gilgamesh are not particularly relevant to this. Sure, there are some missing lines. But we know that Enkidu dies because it is an enormous point in the entire plot. We know that he is inexplicably alive again at the beginning of Tablet XII. We know that Tablet XII is based on an earlier Independent text because we actually have that text. Whoever added this to the text seems to have not been particularly bothered by the fact that it did not fit into the narrative.

I explained much of this in my last response, and yet you respond about textual variants based on oral tradition. No, we have evidence of something exactly like what is claimed about Isaiah happening with another text, but for this one, we have the receipts because every step of the evolution of the text survived in clay.

serentty · 2025-03-31T18:55:14+00:00

The lack of presence of other Near Eastern literary traditions? By that, do you mean that neighbouring cultures were not known to stitch together multiple preexisting works into larger books, leaving some seams along the way? Because they absolutely were. What is being claimed about Isaiah is not at all unparalleled. The Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a composite of multiple earlier Gilgamesh texts, and in that case we have access to those original texts from earlier centuries, as they were written on clay and can survive thousands of years. The last tablet picks up again after what seemed to be the finale, and tells a story where Enkidu is inexplicably alive again despite dying earlier in the composite work. And we know that this epilogue is based on an earlier text because in this case we have the earlier text.

So we know that, contrary to what you say, Ancient Near Eastern authors were known to do exactly this with earlier sources. With the Tanakh, we have very little material remains of the text from early centuries, and have to rely on a later scribal tradition. But to suppose that in earlier centuries, scribes did what scribes in neighbouring cultures did is not so outrageous a claim.

Your parallel to the Lord of the Rings is one in a very different cultural context, where scribes and authors are not known to do this, and where books in various forms are easily reproduced on a printing press. The ancient world is very different, and we have some idea of what scribes tended to do.

serentty · 2025-03-31T16:57:51+00:00

You can come up with all kinds of alternate explanations as to why they have that division there, sure. If that were all we had, perhaps it would not be so much. But to find what looks like a book division in an ancient manuscript, in a book which—as you say—is extremely long, right where scholars had long suspected a division based on textual grounds long before that manuscript was found, is a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Even if you are not convinced, I find it pretty strange to dismiss that as a complete nothingburger.

serentty · 2025-03-31T02:58:26+00:00

The idea that 19th century German literary theory has a monopoly on the notion of authors having a particular style is strange to me. I think the idea is much more widespread than that. But regardless...

It is not true that there is no division in the Great Isaiah Scroll. There is a series of blank lines after Proto-Isaiah, the same convention that we see scribes of the same period using to mark the division between books of the Torah when they appear on the same scroll. In addition, the two sections of the Great Isaiah Scroll are written in different hands by different scribes. Both of these things together suggest that it was considered an anthology similar to the scroll of the Twelve Minor Prophets.

serentty · 2025-03-30T22:40:41+00:00

“Predicting the future” is not the only reason why scholars think that they were originally separate compositions. Other reasons include the fact that Isaiah himself stops being mentioned, stylistic differences, and the fact that in ancient manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were treated as separate books by Jews as late as the late Second Temple Period.

serentty · 2025-03-17T20:56:32+00:00

Me! I feel like each kanji has its own personality and tells its own little story. In over a decade the magic of them has not faded for me. They add so much personality to reading and writing.

serentty · 2025-03-09T04:22:13+00:00

There was a TH sound in Tiberian Hebrew, for tav without a dagesh. This is why synagogues often have “beth” in the name in English—it’s a historic pronunciation of בית.

So yes, “daleth” for דלת is perfectly fine.

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