cedex12 (u/cedex12) - Readit News

cedex12 commented on Swiss spy chief exits after reports of row over CIA-linked firm reuters.com/world/europe/... · Posted by u/Lammy

polack · 5 years ago

No, it should be treated as software coming from any other country.

At this point it’s just silly to brand your security product as Swiss made in hopes of looking more legit. In a sense I see it negative, just like some companies brand their products with buzzwords such as AI and blockchain for no good reason other then to look cool. Makes me suspicious.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

I think to the swiss market, branding it as 100% swiss is both reasonable, and a positive point. So, not silly.

And for the international market, probably "swiss" is mostly to be understood as "not american/russian/chinese"

cedex12 commented on Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/benbreen

bradrn · 5 years ago

> I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"?

Yes.

> Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play?

At the time that quote was talking about? No, since at that time, proto-cuneiform (as they call it) would have been the only writing system in existence. Go forward a bit, though, and several forms of “phonetic writing” begin to appear frequently: rebuses (as in the quote), syllabic characters (e.g. [baʼugeš] was written BA-UG₇-GE, Edzard 2003), and characters for individual consonants (unattested in Sumerian, but Egyptian used them extensively).

> If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?

Exactly. (Even my earlier quote has examples of that.)

cedex12 · 5 years ago

Thanks a lot!

cedex12 commented on Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/benbreen

bradrn · 5 years ago

> I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language.

This is incorrect, though an easy mistake to make. Though the symbols for words had no relation to pronunciation in the very first logographic scripts, written language was always connected to spoken language. At the very least, written language always utilised the same grammar as the spoken language: the written form of a spoken sentence was formed by taking each spoken word (or morpheme, if you prefer) and writing down the corresponding symbol(s) in turn.

Also, you seem to think that the rebus principle was a rather late invention. In fact, all known logographic writing systems utilise this principle. (You could even make the case that any writing system which does not use the rebus principle is not a ‘true’ writing system, in the sense that it cannot represent all words.) Even the earliest proto-cuneiform Sumerian texts utilised rebuses to some extent (https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...):

> Phonetic writings generated via the rebus principle played a remarkably minor role in proto-cuneiform. More certain examples of phonetic writings include: the writing of the name of the moon god, Nanna, which is written URI₃+NA, where NA is the phonetic complement with the value na indicating that the graph URI₃ is to be pronounced nanna; PIRIG+NUNUZ, where the complement NUNUZ, has the value za, indicating that the composite graph has the phonetic value az(a); the aforementioned sign designating a reed, GI₄, pronounced gi, is used to express the homophonous verb gi “to return”; and the syllabic, that is phonetic, spellings of the city names Ša₃-bu and Gir₂-su (Englund 2009, pp. 9–10; Krebernik 2007, p. 43).

cedex12 · 5 years ago

Alright, thanks for the clear up!

I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play? If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?

cedex12 commented on Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/benbreen

bradrn · 5 years ago

> It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true?

I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?

> Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?

Hmm… not sure. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘formalise’, and even then this isn’t really an area I’ve looked into. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the presence of a writing system assists in the preservation of archaic forms (not that this affects the rate of language change, mind you).

> Any good reference on these questions?

For writing systems in general, a good place to start is Omniglot (https://www.omniglot.com/), but I can’t think of anything more relevant to your specific questions.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

>> It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true?

>I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?

I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language. By "subdued", I meant that (again, from what I understood), the Rébus principle is the first "interaction" between the spoken and written language, and the "acrophonic principle" goes a step further in a sense, so that the written language is not anymore an independent system, but a symbolic representation of the spoken language (sounds -> symbols).

This is quite counter-intuitive to me, hence my asking about it.

cedex12 commented on Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/benbreen

bradrn · 5 years ago

> Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound.

This is usually known as the ‘acrophonic principle’, and indeed, all alphabetic scripts — and most of the other ones as well — are descended from Proto-Sinaitic, the first script to utilise the acrophonic principle.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

Since you seem to know about this stuff:

* It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true? It would intuitively seem to me that a written language is easier to organize into clean rules and principles, contrasted to a spoken language. Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?

* Any good reference on these questions?

Thanks!

cedex12 commented on Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/benbreen

bradrn · 5 years ago

Not quite. Writing was independently invented about three or four times:

• Sumerian cuneiform was undisputedly the first writing system to be invented.

• Egyptian hieroglyphics was probably made with knowledge of cuneiform, but could have been an independent invention. All Western writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin etc.) are ultimately descended from hieroglyphics.

• All native writing systems of India, SE Asia and Oceania are descended from Brāhmī. I believe the current theory is that Brāhmī was descended from Aramaic script and hence also from hieroglyphics, but there are disputes.

• Chinese characters (hànzì) were an independent invention. Descended from them are Japanese hanja and kana, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, Sawndip and some others.

• The writing systems of Mesoamerica (most notably that for Mayan) are of course a completely independent invention.

And then of course there are Hangeul, Cherokee, CAS etc., which were scripts consciously designed under the influence of other scripts. These tend to have rather unique structures compared to other writing systems of the world.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

I think the parent is maybe referring to something else, that I also heard in a documentary: that all writing systems with a "reduced" alphabet descend from the same source. I guess the japanese case is a counterexample to this, but the idea was, iirc, that writing systems appeared at different places, and followed this pattern:

* At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to.

* These evolve to symbols.

* Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols. This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are.

* Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound. If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound. The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment.

It does sound a bit much. I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!

cedex12 commented on Burned House Horizon en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bur... · Posted by u/diodorus

mleonhard · 5 years ago

This is the first time I've heard the idea of using dung as a building material. Do you have a link to some information about it?

Mud walls often contain grass or other fibrous plants. Dung decomposes and crumbles. I expect that dung in walls will rot the plant fibers.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

start here maybe? https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01876848/document

cedex12 commented on Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about? · Posted by u/remolacha

Seb-C · 5 years ago

In French we used to have "le site du zéro". It was a very popular collaborative site with a ton of free courses for beginners in (mostly) programming.

Today it feels that it just became a somewhat bland and nothing-special corporate resource (OpenClassrooms), but it was once a vibrant community with it's own identity:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120309143317/http://www.siteduz...

On a completely different topic, https://www.jeuxvideo.com/ have long been (and still is) one of the most popular forums among young people in France.

cedex12 · 5 years ago

I feel like linuxfr.org also deserves a mention: had pretty thorough articles on lots of subject, as far as I could judge them (and knowledgeable members!).

cedex12 commented on Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/ArtWomb

cedex12 · 5 years ago

> Overall, HHS teams are more likely than professional teams to create truly creative game designs.

That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my opinion.