@Joonas: For a year now we have been able to peek into the homes of politicians, pundits & celebrities. Interesting how many are filmed in front of wall-to-wall bookshelves. Is this an attempt to claim intellectual credibility? Jokes abound about the fake book-spine things used in movie-sets. Thanks to Adam--I can't see politicians wanting to be filmed in their underpants--be amusing though. Hey, I'm not ready yet!
@tony It could contain an attempt at that, but I wouldn't ascribe it solely so. A bookshelf is interesting and neutral as a background, and the contents allow making some subtle remarks.
For me it's a question of how my usual working space is positioned and oriented. I happen to have a blank wall behind me due to the way my office is laid out. A bookshelf is just off the view.
@tony Anything is possible, although my initial assumption would be that people just often have bookshelves and bookcases in their office.
I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wanted to make sure that their home looked good behind them, though. It might be amusing to zoom in and see what books someone has if you want to creep, too.
That definitely can help. It also helps to have people to talk about what you are reading with. Feel free to make lots of questions on the site or here in chat. It helps keep me motivated, too!
I have to apologize for the comments you got. As I commented myself, the question left room for confusion (many do!), but requests for clarification can be made far more politely.
@JohhanSantana Excellent! It's good to have more beginner questions on the site. Most experienced users are quite fluent with the language, but the site is supposed to be a repository of useful knowledge to everyone interested in Latin. You can think of yourself as the student who asks questions during lectures and the silent majority benefits from the subsequent discussion.
@JoonasIlmavirta I was very pleased with the collective response I got. I had been away from SE for a while and it's good to see the ecosystem still thriving (I don't think this site was even part of the throng back then).
@SamparkSharma Defending yourself is perfectly fine. Usually the best solution is to state once that you find the other user's comments unfriendly or unconstructive and then disengage. It's all too easy to provoke a countercounterattack... But things seem to have settled now with that post.
@SamparkSharma It's pretty telling that when you have a question, you can pretty much trust that there will be an SE site for it. There are things I'd be happy to ask about but have no site yet, though, but the selection is impressive.
I would have done that in any tamer instance. But he was essentially threatening to clip my post against my wishes, without any passable reason for it.
Yes, having a viable site for every conversational topic used to be SE's billing back in the day (not sure if it still is).
So the present will always be numerically excelled.
@SamparkSharma Well, you can always flag it for moderator attention. We can intervene, and undo any malicious edits and other actions. But what matters most is that you don't feel threatened using our site.
@SamparkSharma Starting new sites is harder now than it used to be. With the current rules, I don't think the Latin site could really be initiated, but fortunately we made it before the change.
@JoonasIlmavirta Yes, i used to spend a lot of time on the Philosophy site and witnessed the moderators give up intermediacy as stock policy. But that was a much bigger site.
Oh yeah, there used to be a polling system in place to construct new sites, right?
@SamparkSharma The Latin moderators and community are trying to keep this site the nicest one on the network. That's a good guiding principle, and it does help that we're small.
@SamparkSharma Yeah. You can see a list of active users on the right. I couldn't even have pinged you if you weren't in. You might have clicked a link to this chat room; those links are scattered around the site.
@SamparkSharma Either. We have both idle chatter and discussions related to Latin.
@SamparkSharma The app still exists, but it may well have already disappeared from the stores. It works but it hasn't been updated for ages, so I'm not surprised if the stores have kicked it out.
@SamparkSharma Only the generic one: Classically there was only I for both the vowel and the consonant. And at all times in Latin's history I could stand for both. The variant J was mostly used for the consonant only, but that is not perfectly strict. Spelling iens with J or G would suggest a wrong pronunciation, and especially the one with G would be way off.
Yeah. There is also additional conflict here. Gens/Jens was loaned from Greek into pre-Christian Latin, which makes the ammendment much more difficult.
I was told earlier today (not on here) that almost all of modern academia now shrugs attempts to interfere with spellings, and chooses merely to stylise words to hint at the pronounciation.
Haphazardly using it for vowels (which seems to just defeat the purpose) almost seems like it could have been borne from a misunderstanding of the pronunciation, or that the pronunciation changed.
@Adam The thing that complicates these matters is that pronunciation was always regional. That impacts the local spelling conventions, in addition to sheer fashion.
@Adam I think we have some questions about the history of J. I don't think it was originally created to be a consonant, although it did acquire that sense.
@Adam Likely. A lot of misconceptions were kept plated in the Middle Ages (mostly of a minor nature), and entries from Vulgar Latin also disrupted concord (since scholars assumed some of those constructions had always existed and merely had their primordial surviving citation in the dusking years).
Anyway, the departure of modern academic tendencies to New Latin standards did provoke me. The attack on i as a frontal-letter was in part for aesthetical reasons, and I can dare to conceive of New Latin scholars who would have recommended we feign an intonation for the maintenance of that aesthetical standard.
For instance, they could have asked us to construe iens as hens (with continuous descension of voice).
There were men of that tendency during the period.
@Adam The whole mess around I + J (and U + V) is probably best understood as a matter of typography and lettershapes, not as a matter of spelling. We are nowadays so used to thinking in ASCII (or Unicode) codepoints, we tend to forget that what are and aren't distinct letters has historically not always been so clear cut.
In my own handwriting, upper-case I and J are almost indistuingishable.
