Home » Open thread 6/20/23

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Open thread 6/20/23 — 48 Comments

  1. So Hunter copped a deal with the DOJ. Such privilege. Most people would be in deep you know what if they had the same charges against them. Anytime Old Joe calls for gun controls the Rep should slap him around with Hunters plea deal.

  2. its fascinating about those languages, I was seeing the sequel to the mummy, and the caption, read arabic language, obviously that was wrong, but how many ancient egyptian speaker are there left,

  3. The Coptic language is still used liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox Church, so pronunciation may not be lost.

  4. It’s good to be the entitled princeling son of the head of a decadent regime. It’s a tale as old as civilization itself. Granted, there may have been a brief 240ish year slight deviation from the historical norm of a tiered system of justice for the nobility and the peasantry, but we’ve reverted back to the norm now. Those with power are regarded as superior beings from a legal perspective.

  5. commodus according to cassius dio,was just such a sort, even if gladiator embellished,

  6. The First Con?

    OTOH, how he’s been able to avoid prosecution for years of taking international bribes and kickbacks worth tens of millions of dollars—probably a whole lot more, actually—I’ll never figure out….
    Absolutely amazing…
    Hey! Maybe he really IS “the smartest guy I know”…?

  7. Amazing how languages change and/or just disappear over time.
    I wonder how it was determined how these long gone languages actually sound like.

    Check out the origins of the Basque language – Euskara; it does not seem to be related to any other language , though it seems to have some common attributes to Armenian.

  8. @miguel:how many ancient egyptian speaker are there left

    That’s kind of like asking how many Old English speakers are left; there’s lots of people who speak English now, and it’s not the same as Old English, but the lineage of spoken English between that time and this has not been broken.

    Similarly with Ancient Egyptian, the modern version of it is called Coptic, and it’s used today in churches, like Latin is.

  9. I recall a sci fi book whose premise was that a Roman gladiator was, in some fashion, brought to the twentieth century.
    The first-person remarked that having a cool, aristocratic Latin teacher in a Brit college did not prepare him for hearing Latin sounding so Italian. Sounds like the piece got that right.

  10. My mom had a million years of Latin and French in high school and college, plus just living for years in California exposed her to a lot of Spanish. But the first time she heard Romanian she was floored because she could kind of understand it. She thought it was the closest to Latin of the Romance languages.

  11. Unless humans scatter to the stars or modern communication and travel breaks down, eventually there will be only a few major languages left. Isolation is what creates new languages .

  12. Hindi is an official language in India, but most states speak variants, all descended from Sanskrit. Most are mutually understandable.

    My father-in-law spoke Croatian, but could also understand other southern Slavic languages, Polish, and Russian.

  13. This is a sad but important little exposé.
    The GOP is Losing the Vote Fraud War

    This is your GOP headed by Ronna McDaniel. At the end, the author throws in a seemingly cogent shot at Trump.

    How many big cities probably have deeply corrupted elections? According to Kurt Schlicter, about six.

    In 2020, I lawyered after the election in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was one of a half-dozen critical cities in winnable states where we knew the Democrat machine would be working overtime to execute their election shenanigans.

    PS: I hate the usage of the word “shenanigans” in this context. Can we on the right stop underplaying the severity of these crimes?

  14. that link doesn’t work, i’m surprised schlichter doesn’t use stronger language,

  15. Speaking of ancient languages, I listened to some of the Trump interview with Bret Baier. His response to any tough question is childish schoolyard insults and taunts. This man is certainly not a great intellect. He is unable to give a cogent argument for his views. I do not for a second believe the leftist media’s push polls. Their only hope in 2024 is for Trump to win the republican nomination. I made a donation to Ron DeSantis.

  16. I’ve studied Old Akkadian. It’s a beautiful language with features that show why some linguists think Indo-European may have begun as an offshoot of the Afro-Asiatic languages. The replacement of Late Akkadian (called Babylonian) by Aramaic illustrates why Arabic replaced some local languages, but not others. The jump from Babylonian to Aramaic to Arabic is an easy one. From Iranian to Arabic big enough it didn’t happen. Arabic displaced Coptic only slowly, and they still speak Berber languages away from the coastal cities of the Maghreb.

    Btw, Basque us unrelated to Armenian, which is an early offshoot of the Indo-European languages. Basque may be related to the North Caucasian languages (from which Armenian picked up areal features) and those in turn may be related to the Dene languages of North America (such as Navaho and Apache). Lots of controversy there. Basque is an astounding language, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as rumored. It’s really different from what we’re used to, but less different than, for example, Japanese.

  17. RE: Theories about UFOs as “Interdimensional”–

    In my last comment about the possible reasons for UFO crashes, I linked to a Wiki article about two different “Interdimensional” theories, positing that UFOs may not even be actual and permanent physical objects, but were projections, directed by some non-human entity, from some other likely coterminous dimension, or plane of existence.

    As I understand it, French scientist, inventor, and long time UFO investigator Jacques Valle, who has been collecting data and studying this issue for many decades now, believes that UFOs and the other “high strangeness” phenomena connected to them—things like the strange things that happen at “Skinwalker Ranch”–have a deliberately “absurd, ” often a “trickster” and teasing quality to them and are, in his estimation, designed to be a “control mechanism”–operating at the levels of myth and imagination–and designed to change our thinking–human consciousness–and to move our human civilization in some particular direction.

    The other theory is that of the late John Keel, who proposed his “Ultraterrestrial” theory, that a non-human entity or entities, existing on a higher dimension or plane of existence, has been and is behind each and every paranormal, metaphysical, mythological, supernatural, or occult event or appearance since the dawn of time—spirits, ghosts, gods and goddesses, vampires, monsters, the devil, fairies, demons, UFOs, etc.–and that these are all really some sort of “psychic” phenomena.

    Thus, thinking in “Flatland” terms here, we humans–as entities living in and limited to perceiving three dimensions–would necessarily see and interpret incursions into our three dimensional world from higher “Ultraterrestrial” dimensions as very bizarre and mysterious objects, very strange in appearance, and acting in very strange ways.

    The who and the “why” of these strange happenings, these are the big questions which may never be answered.

  18. Re: Basque language hardly related to any others

    Back when I was even fringier, the word I heard was that the Basques were the most closely descended people from the Atlanteans, thus their language was not part of the Indo-European tree.
    ______________________

    Hail Atlantis!

    –Donovan,, “Atlantis” GR 005/22 (Official Video)”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY0J6jX__k0

    ______________________

    Now let’s do Finno-Ugric.

  19. I wondered how much of the impression I got from those performances came from the sounds of the language and how much came from the voices of the performers. Specifically, could any of those languages sound as fierce and bone-breaking as the Old Norse if you picked the right speaker? I’m not sure, but it didn’t seem like the Ancient Mayan or Quechua could, though those cultures certainly had their share of fierce warriors. This could have influenced history if the Inca were scared of the brutish Spaniards, and the Spaniards weren’t at all frightened by the soft-spoken Incas.

    Japanese comes across very differently when spoken by a woman or by a man. What can sound very gentle in a Japanese woman’s voice often sounds harsh and brutal in a Japanese man’s voice. I’ve also noticed the tendency of Russian man to speak in very low-pitched voices and Russian women to speak in very high ones.

    Work has been done studying the influence of the Slavic languages on Romanian (and vice versa). It’s not surprising if there are features that make Romanian very different from other Romance languages. It’s similar with French and the Celtic and Germanic heritage. Italian and Spanish are closer to Latin (in spite of the many Arabic words in Spanish).

  20. I had a close friend in Peru whose first language was Quechua. She also spoke Spanish quite elegantly. There are plenty of people in the high Andes wh speak only Quechua.

  21. Japanese comes across very differently when spoken by a woman or by a man. What can sound very gentle in a Japanese woman’s voice often sounds harsh and brutal in a Japanese man’s voice

    Abraxas:

    For me, likewise French. I can’t stand (Je deteste!) most male French speakers I hear. The gruff, yet oily, braggadocio. Hahn, hahn, hahn, hahn!

    Maybe I’ve just run into an atypical subsample. Maybe it’s male self-hate. 🙂

    Though I like this young guy, who seems to have taken over Johnny Hallyday’s spot as most popular male singer in France. Try this half-French/half-English song. It’s pretty pop, but grabs one.

    –Jean-Jacques Goldman, “Je te donne” (“I give you”) (2019)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfgtI6GvsDo

  22. William Barton @ 3:03 PM;

    Interesting article on Basque and Armenian here:

    https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190603-the-surprising-story-of-the-basque-language

    Snow on Pine @ 3:14 PM

    There are Billions of stars (our sun is a star) within the Milky Way galaxy; the galaxy in which earth, our sun and planets reside.
    And there also are Billions of galaxies.
    It’s hard to believe that “intelligent” life (this excludes democrats) exists only on earth.
    There is no reason to resort to crazy and bizarre explanations as to how or why “aliens” make their presence known.
    If UFOs do exist, there is no compelling reason why they should even attempt to communicate with humans. They would be so far advanced that they would look upon humans as we humans look upon ants or snails.
    There have been enough citings by military and commerical airline pilots, that IMHO, UFOs are real. I don’t think these pilots were looking at some psychic phenomena.

  23. “If UFOs do exist, there is no compelling reason why they should even attempt to communicate with humans. They would be so far advanced that they would look upon humans as we humans look upon ants or snails.”

    There are myrmecologists and malacologists. Some humans devote their entire lives to detailing the lifestyles of ants and snails. And, if we could communicate with ants and snails we surely would.

    Also, despite the vast chasm that may exist between humanity and an extraterrestrial race; humans are openly doing many things on planet Earth that exhibit enough advancement to warrant contact. If I saw a group of dogs or otters trying to build a hang-glider and I was able to communicate with them I’d help them out and give them advice. Just because my race has advanced to jet aircraft and liquid oxygen space travel, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate what they were trying to do.

    We humans go to great lengths to communicate with any species we can. We have very limited vocabularies with some; dogs, cats, birds… and that fosters great bonds with some humans and some of those animals. We have contests to see who can mimic bird calls.

    I can’t count the hours I have spent watching ants, bees, wasps, butterflies, snails, worms… If I was able to communicate with them in any manner I surely would.

  24. TommyJay @ 12:50pm,

    I am shocked! Do you mean to tell me that after failing to adequately lead a pro-active campaign against election fraud, Ronna McDaniels is failing in her 4th election cycle to adequately lead a pro-active campaign against election fraud?

    If only someone like Harmeet Dhillon, a brilliant attorney with a history of fighting court battles for election fairness, had been willing to head up the RNC.

  25. @neo:

    Thanks again for linking to an interesting topic. I’ve watched it before but it still tickles me to review.

    I’ve said before that I developed a set of languages for my stories. Several years ago I acquired a text->speech converter which you could plug various accents into. Very difficult to find one that will read and convert diacriticals.

    Anyway, I decided to ‘listen’ to my favorite gal Voös speaking Lingua Archae.

    I asked a Ukrainian friend of mine to give me her opinion (cold, no info). She listened a couple of times , then said she’d need to listen some more to figure out the dialect.

    Yoot! Mission accomplished.

  26. The Marxist critical pedagogy marched through the academy in three decades, but Obama’s ESSA (“Every Student Succeeds Act) in 2015 fast-tracked the Marxist radicalisation of school rooms.

    Part of the Act included admin reporting on “Non-academic competencies,” which required implementing Social Emotional Learning, which opened the path for the Trans Mad advocacy system under the guise of teaching SWJ. As well the takeover by political activism.

    This new 57m interview Ben Shapiro does for Daily Wire with James Lindsey is THE BEST INTRODUCTION to the Marxification of education.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV0XSPbo1CY

    THE BEST, the most concise and comprehensible. Check it out — SHARE IT.

  27. TommyJay on vote fraud shenanigans. No. It’s “election graft.”

    Until election fraud protection becomes enshrined as crucial to achieving Civil Rights for all people, the focus on minimising of the crime of fraud will rule.

  28. Evolving USA

    Transgender people facing ‘existential fear’ in Florida look to California for acceptance

    It’s a big diverse country with its various regions becoming ever more self directed. A primary emerging difference among the states is the degree of free speech tolerance and how ‘safety’ is defined. Postmodernists often say they don’t feel ‘safe’ when divergent views are expressed, which makes them extremely intolerant of true diversity. The chart below is relevant.

    Melting Points

    Gold: 1945º
    Titanium: 3040º
    Tungsten: 6150º
    LGBQT+: Any opinion that’s not their own

  29. I binge read some of Lee Fang’s substack this past week-end and thought some here might find these posts interesting.
    None of them are a great surprise.

    https://www.leefang.com/p/after-mass-layoffs-silicon-valley
    After Mass Layoffs, Silicon Valley Renews Lobbying Biden to Lift Cap on Foreign Workers
    Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other tech giants use the H-1B visa program as a source of cheap labor, according to critics.

    https://www.leefang.com/p/billionaire-biden-donor-bankrolled
    Billionaire Biden Donor Bankrolled 2020 Election Social Media Censorship Effort
    Newly disclosed document confirms billionaire Pierre Omidyar financed the public-private partnership to censor election-related Twitter and Facebook posts.

    https://www.leefang.com/p/obamas-personal-investment-deals
    Obama’s Personal Investment Deals Mirror Tax Strategies He Once Criticized
    Exclusive details on how Obama’s business deals are designed to minimize tax liabilities.

  30. Hi Cornhead,

    Yeah, I agree.
    Unfortunately, the animation in this video, to me, is shaky enough, that the animated people in it, look kind of like twitchy robots, to me. 🙂

  31. No wonder those languages died out. They sound like complete gibberish!

    More seriously, I can’t believe how hard it is to understand spoken French. I take English for granted, of course, but I am aware that non-English speakers learning English wring their hands too.

    Duh-ya-wanna…?

    How in the world did humans manage to create languages and make them work?

  32. Hi huxley,

    Heh, heh! yeah.

    I have a friend who [joined a team, so they could learn French + Russian, for some international business jobs].

    My friend said to a co-worker, “Hey Charlie! How about you join us, and learn some Japanese?”,

    …and Charlie said: “No man, I just can’t figure it out! It all sounds like baby talk, to me.” 😀

  33. I looked ahead to Part 2. A surprising number of Eastern language speakers, such as Thai and Sri Lankan, claimed Sanskrit seemed familiar.

    I was wondering what the speakers were reciting. I didn’t notice the information anywhere. Part 2 featured a Jesus-looking character speaking Aramaic. A commenter posted:
    ___________________________________________

    Actually, it’s not Aramaic at all, but rather Hebrew, in which the first Biblical verses of the second chapter of the Book of Daniel – were originally written – and recited in the video. As a native Hebrew speaker like you, I could easily understand every word in the text, as an Ancient Hebrew text. Further, I can also read and understand Biblical Aramaic, but the text recited in the video is by no means Aramaic, but rather pure Ancient Hebrew.
    ___________________________________________

    Interesting.

  34. @huxley:
    “How in the world did humans manage to create languages and make them work?”

    Because humans are extremely adept at finding patterns.

  35. Well, it WOULD seem that you can only grunt for so long…before the conversation starts to lag…

  36. There was a theory that male and female hominids spoke different “languages” early on, with men using short utterances and gestures while hunting (so as to not spook the victim unnecessarily) while the woman (who had babies along) sang and made a racket to scare away predators as they gathered. The idea was, men invented words and women invented prosody, and the survivors of the Toba bottleneck in Africa combined the two as language.

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