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Day: April 29, 2017
Why is Wikipedia in Ancient Greek and Simple French still rejected in spite of both having a strong support base?
The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though […]
Why do most modern Persian books and sites use the Naskh font instead of the traditional Nastaʿlīq font?
Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on: The Death of the Urdu Script – ali eteraz – Medium Nastaʿlīq script – Wikipedia If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both. If you’re writing online in 2017, and you […]
Which programming paradigm is the most similar to human speech?
Well, let’s think this through. I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state […]
What were Noam Chomsky’s views on Panini’s Ashtadhyayi?
Complimentary, but not deep. The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of […]
How did the Greeks represent fractions?
Ptolemy, at least, expressed them somewhat clumsily, by adding reciprocals. There were dedicated symbols for half: [math]unicode{x10175}, unicode{x10176}[/math], two thirds: [math]unicode{x10177}[/math], and three quarters: [math]unicode{x10178}.[/math] Outside of those, fractions were expressed by using double prime for reciprocals, ″. So Ptolemy used ιβ″ = 1/12 a lot for geographical coordinates; and he would also use expressions […]
How can this Rilke translation be improved?
So you seek to translate: Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinausUnter den großen Himmel treten. “I would like to step out of my heart,And go walking beneath the enormous sky.” I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂 ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνεινὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν I am so, so not going […]