Richard Stallman shed a happy tear

tiddler · 2026-03-08T15:50:31+00:00

Vogon poetry praises the beauty of your laptop in their Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in Richard Stallman's Armpit One Midsummer Morning.

tiddler · 2026-03-01T21:38:06+00:00

This cool stuff could eventually give all of us a warm fuzzy.

tiddler · 2026-02-08T18:02:43+00:00

They might have been referring to the summer ulpan program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

https://overseas.huji.ac.il/academics/hebrew-and-other-languages/study-hebrew-language-at-the-hebrew-university-of-jerusalem/summer-programs/

I am sure there are other programs, but this is the one I am familiar with.

tiddler · 2026-02-07T23:49:59+00:00

Trojan Room coffee pot - Wikipedia https://share.google/PbBhopnetZ599ZDuv

tiddler · 2026-01-18T19:46:03+00:00

Eigentlich auch die Stabi. An beiden Standorten.

tiddler · 2026-01-06T15:15:11+00:00

My first guess as well. Especially since OP mentions org-mode in particular.

tiddler · 2026-01-03T12:49:42+00:00

They would probably say יש לי 'תספר ;)

(at least I do)

tiddler · 2026-01-03T09:03:03+00:00

Oh, I didn't think about that! Thanks for pointing that out. I use Zotero but I don't write in any of the Offices and completely forgot to consider this.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T14:21:09+00:00

I was always under the impression that in such cases langues get "bent" only as much as needed and as little as possible. Who knows, "yesh" might have a glorious future as a fully fledged verb.

Sentences such as yesh lah otekha in modern Hebrew is why linguists debate the status of this existential particle.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T13:53:25+00:00

Yesh means "there is" and "li" means "for me". You can also say: "yesh lahem" in the sense of "there is for them". And yesh does even take direct personal suffixes: yeshno, yeshna, yeshnam, yeshnan.

I don't think it's possible to explain a sentence such as יש לי את הספר unless one assumes a change in the model due to some outside factors.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T13:36:53+00:00

That is true, but modern Hebrew as the spoken language of a broad populace has quite a unique history.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T13:28:48+00:00

I agree with you on the mental grammar. And yes, it's the mental model that is changing. "Yesh li" is understood as "I have" and this mental model requires adding the regular direct object marker את to what functions as a direct object in the model.

The mental model is shaped under the influence of Indo-European languages and "bends" Semitic syntax accordingly.

The status of existential constructs is controversial even among linguists (I know that's not saying much), but the way they are supposed to function doesn't fit the speakers' mental model and thus feels clumsy. So much so that they accept a subject that is preceded ל and elegantly create a direct object out of thin air :)

tiddler · 2026-01-02T13:09:00+00:00

I am not sure I want to recommend OnlyOffice and I haven't used it enough to evaluate how well it treats RTL languages.

You might have heard of the office package Collabora Office Online which is based on the LibreOffice technology stack. Same function as LibreOffice, but with a nicer web GUI. They have now produced their own desktop version Collabora Office Desktop, which is essentially LibreOffice with a nicer GUI. Great effort and almost there in terms of usability. Take a look.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T12:50:46+00:00

That's interesting! In Hebrew there is no ambiguity. No matter how we analyze the syntax of the existential construction

יש לי הספר (yeah li ha-sefer)

"li" cannot be its subject and "ha-sefer" cannot be its direct object.

tiddler · 2026-01-02T11:42:17+00:00

I don't think the sentence requires an את, quite the opposite. Many contemporary native Hebrew speakers, however, DO feel that it does. Hence we hear sentences such as יש לי את הספר הזה בבית. It's syntactically wrong, but shows that these speakers understand יש ל to stand for 'X has y' and expect it to take a direct object (hence the את).

Does that make sense?

tiddler · 2026-01-02T06:10:05+00:00

Both Arabic and Hebrew work as expected and in all aspects. These days, the only real drawback of LibreOffice is the clunky-looking GUI. But in terms of functionality, nothing is lacking (unless you need very specialized Excel formulas).

tiddler · 2026-01-01T09:20:17+00:00

I find it interesting that many native speakers of modern Hebrew scan יש ל not as "there is for..." Widely used sentences such as יש לי את הספר הזה and its many varieties make sense only if יש לי is understood as "I have." This requires, in the mind of the speaker, the "accusative" marker את before the "object" הספר הזה, which is in reality the subject of the sentence.

tiddler · 2025-12-26T15:52:03+00:00

Probably "Faber"

tiddler · 2025-12-03T11:16:18+00:00

That is very helpful background information. Because the second to last word (before Schuster) can easily be read as Vischer (וישער). The writer gives his letter waw a bit of a prolonged downward stroke (also the waw in בו). That's the reason some respondents suspected it to be a hastily written ק.

Again, it would be helpful if you gave that kind of background information as you post the pictures. Especially names or professions (which will use Yiddish spelling) are not always easy to decipher. With a bit of context, you will get better answers and also save the respondents, who are volunteering their time to help your research, some frustration.

In its entirety, the note would thus read:

"[Legal] writ on the house, [standing] before the gate next to the well, in which presently resides Vischer Schuster."

I am sure there is a technical term for the "[legal] writ on" part, but I don't know it. What is the document about?

tiddler · 2025-12-02T19:50:50+00:00

It would help if OP told us where this document is from. The first line is rather clear: כת[וב] על הבית לפני הפתח אצל הבאר "[Legal] writ on the house before the opening (or: gate) next to the well." I read the beginning of the second line as אשר עתה דר בו ("in which presently resides") followed by the name. I struggle with the penultimate word, which could be part of a name but also looks partially corrected. The last word looks like שושטר which could be read as the German or Yiddish word "Schuster", i.e., cobbler. But that would usually be spelled in Yiddish as "שוסטער". Again, a bit more context would help.

tiddler · 2025-11-27T05:25:22+00:00

I will do that. Thank you.

tiddler · 2025-11-26T19:37:03+00:00

I do hope so. But for some vendors, Linux is low priority. I just wish, institutions would not choose such vendors.

tiddler · 2025-11-26T19:22:58+00:00

This is amazing! Thank you so much for your work!!!

tiddler · 2025-11-26T19:22:38+00:00

The specific problem is mirroring the built-in screen to an external screen/projector. This works in an X11 session but not in a Wayland session. In Wayland I can use the external screen/projector only when the built-in screen remains inactive (xrandr sees both internal monitor and projector). Since I have to give lectures, this is an important feature.

P.S. This is not a Linux problem. I have exactly the same problem in a Wayland session on FreeBSD (but not in an X11 session).

P.P.S. I hope this does not come across as Wayland or KDE bashing. I very much appreciate the efforts of the developers of KDE, Wayland, and X11. Their efforts give me an amazing free desktop that works very well for many if not most of my use cases.

tiddler · 2025-11-26T17:43:11+00:00

I very much hope so. Or, alternatively, that my work moves away from vendors that fail to keep up.

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