/dev/chat

BTW, someone just told me yesterday that the Spanish economy isn't doing to well. Or maybe it's just the housing market. The conversation was about housing prices.

Braiam

@terdon spanish vocabulary is rich, thought

terdon

Unlike English which is WYRMBWYSOIMBSCDAU.

Thomas Ward

o.O

terdon

what you read might be what you say or it might be something completely different.

derobert

@terdon normally we just say English is a WTF language...

terdon

5:43 PM

@Braiam Indeed. So's English. So are most languages, for that matter.

@derobert That too.

Faheem Mitha

It's odd that such a idiosyncratic language has become an international standard.

And rough on people trying to learn it.

terdon

@FaheemMitha Apart from the obvious geopolitical and historical reasons, it is also a very easy language to learn to speak at a basic level.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Definitely a standard chosen for "political" not technical reasons.

terdon

Technical too. The basic English you need to order a beer or ask for directions is incredibly simple.

Plus, no gendered nouns, next to no conjugation.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Surely that is true of many languages.

How hard is it to order a beer or ask directions in Spanish?

Or German or French or Italian, for that matter.

terdon

5:46 PM

Much harder than in English.

3

A: Why did English become a universal language and when?

I am very surprised that none of the answers has mentioned the obvious: English is simple. Speaking English at the basic level needed to order a meal or direct a taxi is by far easier than any other language I know. Speaking English well is another matter entirely but the lingua franca does not r...

Faheem Mitha

@terdon That's a good answer. You've obviously given some thought to this.

derobert

I donno. From what little I remember of the German I took long ago, that kind of basic stuff wasn't that hard in German, either. Though you did have gendered nouns.

And you can figure out how to say a German word just from how it's spelled...

Faheem Mitha

Those wacky gendered nouns (isn't there a fancy name for that?) are present in Indian languages too. I never did understand the point of them. Presumably they're a historical artifact.

terdon

@derobert Yes, but German has declinations and gender and those make everything more complicated.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert And apparently you have a lot of freedom to rearrange German words in a sentence.

terdon

5:51 PM

@FaheemMitha I think (though I am absolutely not sure) that pretty much all PIE-derived languages have those.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Sure. But you don't need to in order to call a cab or order a beer.

terdon

I certainly don't know of any language other than English that lacks them.

@derobert Depends on whether you did one first or the other.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon PIE?

@derobert True.

terdon

Proto-Indo-European language

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the most widely spoken language family in the world. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is by far the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The vast majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to reconstruction of PIE or its daughter proto-languages (e.g. Proto-Germanic), and most of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction such as the comparative method were developed as a result. These methods...

derobert

@FaheemMitha proto-indo-european

Faheem Mitha

5:52 PM

@derobert Ah

terdon

Oh wow, the animated gifs onebox?

derobert

Apparently

Faheem Mitha

Well, India's languages fall in that group, I think.

terdon

Some of them anyway. No idea if all 12000435 of them do.

derobert

I wonder if anyone has actually studied this—seen how much time it takes to learn basic stuff in various languages. That'd give a good answer to which are actually easiest. Though of course you'd have to have participants with many linguistic backgrounds, would be a #@(# expensive study

terdon

5:54 PM

@derobert Yeah. And it's hard to be objective. For example, learning Spanish is far easier for a French speaker than an English one.

derobert

@terdon Right, that's why you'd need many linguistic backgrounds. (Maybe that's not the right term.)

Faheem Mitha

@derobert You'd need a group of statisticians to work overtime scrambling everything.

terdon

@derobert It probably is. I just managed to miss it.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Yeah.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to pay to collect this data—so I imagine it's never been done.

Maybe you could sort-of get the data from, e.g., testing progress of people who are already taking a foreign language class, and combining data from many countries... But that has so many potential biases in it, that I'm not sure you could really draw any conclusions

oh! Maybe the data exists from people testing different instructional techniques

Faheem Mitha

There are people who have an incentive to care about making languages easier to learn.

Or institutions.

derobert

6:00 PM

Right. So they test different ways of learning language X.

Faheem Mitha

But given the universal apathy regarding education, I doubt anyone bothers.

English spelling is really screwy. Even now, I regularly have to check spellings of words as I write.

derobert

But "well, we need him to work with our client in Spain" is a good reason to find the quickest way to learn basic Spanish. Not a good reason to ask "would it be quicker to learn Italian instead?"

But you might be able to compare the results for all those "quickest way to learn language X" studies...

Faheem Mitha

@derobert You think people research things like "find the quickest way to learn basic Spanish"?

derobert

@FaheemMitha I hope they do. I have no idea if they really do

Faheem Mitha

Is $8.99 reasonable for a kindle book?

It is amazon.com/dp/B00FPWA774

derobert

6:03 PM

@FaheemMitha Depends on the book. They vary in price from 99¢ up.

Faheem Mitha

Are there any good places to get epubs cheap for a large number of books?

derobert

Of course, if you just want to read it, I've found the local library lends a lot of Kindle books

terdon

@FaheemMitha That's because it's not English. English spelling was developed for a different language.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Not here, alas.

@terdon I don't follow.

derobert

@terdon English also seems to borrow words and keep both their spelling and (to some extent) their pronunciation.

terdon

6:05 PM

They're not strangely pronounced. They're strangely spelled. And every English word is strangely spelled, since English spelling was developed for a different language, and doesn't work very well on modern English. At all. Spelling English words correctly is such a rare phenomenon, in fact, that the National Spelling Bee is front-page news in the United States. Speakers of languages with reasonable orthographies like Finnish or German are always amazed at this. — John Lawler Jun 2 '13 at 16:24

@derobert That too, yes.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon What different language is he talking about?

Does he mean Latin?

terdon

@FaheemMitha English has evolved enormously over the past few hundred years, but hasn't changed its spelling along the way. Which is why you have words like colonel which has kept its French spelling but is pronounced kernel.

@FaheemMitha He means Old English, probably.

Or even Norman, I guess.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Ok

So the ancestors of Modern English.

Stephen Kitt

@terdon or lieutenant, or Milngavie

terdon

Yes.

@StephenKitt Yeah, there are loads.

And then you have things like the great vowel shift:

Faheem Mitha

6:09 PM

English spelling and pronunciation is amazingly irregular.

terdon

Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1600. Through the Great Vowel Shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation. English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling. == History of analysis == The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term. == Overall changes == The main difference betwe...

Faheem Mitha

Not to mention variant spellings/pronunciations.

terdon

@FaheemMitha It makes a lot more sense if you think of written English and spoken as essentially two different languages.

Faheem Mitha

I imagine it must be the stuff of nightmare for people from the Far East, for example.

terdon

For example, there was a time when the educated classes, the only ones who could write, were essentially French and the illiterate masses were the ones speaking English. That explains a lot of the weirdness.

Stephen Kitt

6:10 PM

@FaheemMitha even just for neighbouring Britons

for example, in English English, all vowels are diphthongs

but in Scottish English, short vowels aren't

terdon

@FaheemMitha Hang on, aren't you from the far East? How far is far?

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I was thinking of China and Japan, for example.

terdon

@FaheemMitha And according to wikipedia you're right:

Faheem Mitha

The Indian subcontinent is not conventionally considered "Far".

terdon

I wonder why they skipped India and whatever part of Russia that is.

Faheem Mitha

6:12 PM

Not that such qualifiers make much sense, of course.

Though Indians have plenty of trouble with English too. I get to listen to them butchering it regularly.

derobert

More interesting is that Australia isn't part of the Far East

Faheem Mitha

The product is commonly known as Indian English. They really should call it English Spam.

terdon

@derobert Or that half of new guinea is.

@FaheemMitha Oh, come on now, do the needful!

Stephen Kitt

@terdon isn't that half part of Indonesia?

Kusalananda

That's Polynesia nd Austalasia.

Faheem Mitha

6:13 PM

@terdon Absolutely not.

terdon

What? No! I looked it up!

@StephenKitt Ah, sorry, yes it is.

Kusalananda

(frantic web-browsing in the background)

terdon

Yeah, like I'll admit I don't know shit about geography!

Kusalananda

I lived in NZ for a couple of years.

Stephen Kitt

@Kusalananda that's what happens on Unix.SE chat (whereas on the main site it's frantic searching of the POSIX specs)

Kusalananda

6:15 PM

:-)

terdon

@Kusalananda Nice! I was considering moving there at some point. I still might. Seems like a gorgeous place (if a little boring)

Kusalananda

It's a wonderful country, full of contrasting and exciting nature.

People are nice too.

As is common on small island nations.

terdon

"small"?

Kusalananda

NZ is small, isn't it?

In terms of population.

<5 million

terdon

Oh, yes, OK. Not in terms of actual size though. I mean, not like Malta or other small island nations.

It's twice the size of Greece, for example :)

Kusalananda

6:19 PM

You drive across the width of the south island in a day.

terdon

Although half the size of Sweden.

NZ: 268,021 km2

Sweden: 450,295 km2

Stephen Kitt

@terdon similar population to Scotland, 3.5× the size

terdon

Greece: 131,957 km2

Kusalananda

Yes. We have two fern trees for every sheep ;-)

Stephen Kitt

@terdon but more of it's hospitable than Sweden ;-)

terdon

6:20 PM

@StephenKitt And half the population of London!

@StephenKitt Point.

Stephen Kitt

@terdon yup

Kusalananda

Probably right.

Linux people do so many strange things: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340607/how-to-unset-date

Stephen Kitt

s/Linux//

Kusalananda

@StephenKitt I stand corrected.

Eliah Kagan

Sometimes one wants to go back a decade or two and have a do-over.

Stephen Kitt

6:30 PM

@EliahKagan really going back to 1999 with Linux would be a shock to most people I think

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Do you look at the IGM forum regularly? I wasn't aware of its existence.

@StephenKitt How so? I was there in 1999.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Don't regularly look at it, but I've heard of them before

Found that chart via Google

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Ok. I did a search to see if they had covered demonetization. If they have, Google couldn't find it.

Thomas Ward

@terdon you have stuff coming over to your site now :P

derobert

@FaheemMitha Probably not. I mean, seems to have a mostly US and Europe focus

Faheem Mitha

6:34 PM

Seems like a good one to ask them. Was demonetization a bad idea, a really bad idea, an appalling idea, a terrible idea, or a really terrible idea?

@derobert Pah. Parochialism.

derobert

There is a thingy on the site to recommend questions :-P

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha the desktop was much less polished than it is now

(but that was true of all computers really)

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt There also wasn't a free browser.

Stephen Kitt

apart from NeXT computers

derobert

@FaheemMitha konqueror

Stephen Kitt

6:36 PM

@FaheemMitha lynx

Eliah Kagan

@StephenKitt Well I imagine that the computer would turn into a computer from that time. So you would have to load all the appropriate kernel modules for that hardware first. If you missed a modprobe command or two, it might not be in a usable state upon arrival in the past, and then you could have trouble returning to the present.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Not really a contender in 1999. IMO.

@StephenKitt Oh, please.

derobert

I mean, I used a Linux desktop in '99. Konqueror was a reasonable choice.

Stephen Kitt

@EliahKagan there's a film there somewhere ;-)

Faheem Mitha

@derobert I don't recall finding it so. Of course, it's been a while.

I used to use Netscape 4.77, which froze my computer periodically.

derobert

6:38 PM

And I forget when the first Mozilla milestones started coming out. Certainly a year later you could use Mozilla M16.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha yeah I still used Netscape as well

Faheem Mitha

@EliahKagan That sounds like a time travel saga. With puzzle bits.

I was quite happy when Mozilla came along.

terdon

I used one in 99 too. Wasn't netscape around then?

derobert

Yeah, Netscape was.

terdon

Was I using konqueror? I did at some point. Maybe it was then.

Stephen Kitt

6:39 PM

@terdon Netscape Navigator yes

Thomas Ward

lol Netscape Navigator

terdon

Ah, there you go.

Thomas Ward

I thought that died in 1998

terdon

@ThomasWard Hey, it was absolutely brilliant at the time!

That and NCSA mosaic.

Stephen Kitt

@ThomasWard Mozilla was founded in 1998 but the browser wasn't released for a while

derobert

6:40 PM

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… ... so 99 was a year before the first usable Mozilla milestones came out.

Thomas Ward

indeed

@terdon review migrations :P

terdon

Yeah, I think it must have been mosaic then.

@ThomasWard link?

Faheem Mitha

Yes, for a while Linux users were living in the outer darkness. Using Netscape. Like animals.

terdon

Oh you bastard! You sent us a Kali question?

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha as were Windows users still then, IE wasn't all that popular yet

Thomas Ward

6:41 PM

@terdon and another question too :)

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt I thought they were all using Internet Explorer. Which presumably was better than Netscape.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha it came out in 1997 so yes, but Navigator was very popular

Thomas Ward

@terdon unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340614/… AND unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340614/…

Faheem Mitha

@ThomasWard oh

Thomas Ward

@terdon enjoy your evils :P

terdon

6:42 PM

@ThomasWard Please don't migrate crap though. That Kali one is awful. It has no usable information.

derobert

@StephenKitt No, IE was >60% by '99

Thomas Ward

Good point

Stephen Kitt

@derobert wow

Thomas Ward

@terdon feel free to reject, i'll burn it on AU

derobert

Usage share of web browsers

The usage share of web browsers is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser. Web browser usage share varies from region to region as well as through time. Depending on how "usage share" is defined, the results can vary greatly. In particular, page views versus unique visits will produce different results. == Accuracy == Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading. === Overestimation === Not all requests are generated by a user, as a user agent can make requests...

Stephen Kitt

6:42 PM

I'd forgotten it was that fast

terdon

@ThomasWard Pretty sure the community will close it.

Stephen Kitt

but yes everyone was predicting the demise of Navigator given how long Mozilla was taking to be released

terdon

Wow. I hadn't realized firefox was so far down these days.

Thomas Ward

@terdon you have a flag to handle

also gonna drag you to AU for your duties there, I'm too tired for this one flag

Faheem Mitha

Wow, does Chrome really have half of the browser market?

Thomas Ward

7:10 PM

probably

shirish

7:21 PM

can anybody tell/share why I'm getting close votes ? unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340619/…

derobert

@FaheemMitha yep

Faheem Mitha

7:49 PM

Damn, I'll have to find another browser to go use.

terdon

@shirish They were votes as unclear. Probably before your edit.

Nathan Osman

This might be worth a star or two:

“systemd is like Trump. We're stuck with it so we might as well make the best of it.”

Tweeted by ChattyCapybaras on January 26, 2017 at 10:07 PM

terdon

Heh

shirish

lol.

terdon

@NathanOsman who tweets those?

Nathan Osman

8:02 PM

tbot.stackexchange.com

terdon

That yours?

Nathan Osman

The account was created by Seth but I made the app.

terdon

@NathanOsman And how does it choose? Starred posts?

Nathan Osman

It doesn't.

One of us goes in and reviews the ones it has auto-selected.

Then we "queue" them for tweeting.

terdon

How does it select?

Nathan Osman

8:07 PM

The app tweets items in the queue once per day.

terdon

Random + stars?

Nathan Osman

@terdon Based on the number of stars and special "key words".

terdon

Like bacon, obviously.

Nathan Osman

It is configurable.

@terdon Yes :D

derobert

8:37 PM

@NathanOsman I'd wonder who sysvinit was then, except wondering that would support Godwin's Law.

Nathan Osman

Heh.

Braiam

@derobert suppose you have noticed meta.stackoverflow.com/q/342386/792066

derobert

@Braiam Goes to the top for me in Chromium

Braiam

@derobert yeah, it's only on Firefox 51

derobert

hah, yeah, it is... I hadn't tried editing on in Firefox. I mostly use Chromium for the SE stuff

Braiam

8:49 PM

I expect Chromium to follow the standard... someday

derobert

I did just have an odd thing happen though. The Chromium window... vanished. It wasn't iconified/minimized. The little desktop preview in the desktop switcher showed it. But it wasn't there.

Only got it back by killing chromium and re-launching it.

Alt-tab ignored it

Braiam

You browser was in another castle!

derobert

@Braiam Apparently.

Kusalananda

9:04 PM

@derobert Typical Alt-Tab behaviour, can't trust'em.

Oh, we're not talking politics any longer, are we?

derobert

@Kusalananda I hope not, or the Alt-Tab is going to be jerks drinking Tab cola.