[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


A Lisp hacker

148 2022-03-02 18:39

I enjoy speaking Latin to my dogs, but they never correct me when I make mistakes.

TACĒTE CANĒS / ESTE TACITĪ CANĒS (Be silent, dogs.)
TŪ ES CANIS NOSTER OPTIMVS AC PVLCHERRIMVS (Thou art our best and most handsome dog.)
TŪ ES CANIS NOSTRA FOEDISSIMA AC NIGERRIMA (Thou art our ugliest and blackest dog.)

I wanted to tell my dogs Look, black clouds. and told them VIDĒTE NŪBĒS ĀTRAE but minutes later realized this was wrong, and should be either VIDĒTE NŪBĒS ĀTRĀS or ECCE NŪBĒS ĀTRAE, either accusative or nominative; this hits on an interesting difference between English and Latin. We may say Look, he does so and so. or Look at him doing so and so. whereas Latin splits this into at least two different words instead of using a particle. I'm better off for having made the mistake. I believe my former alternation to be acceptable, but I know the latter is. It's fun for the basic mistakes to begin melting away as I progress to making more complex mistakes.

Here are two sentences that could be in a teenager's poetry:
NĒMŌ AMĀTVR Ā MĒ (No one is loved by me.)
NĒMINEM AMŌ (I love no one.)

In the shower, I realized the phrase By Jove invokes Jupiter, who has the most irregular name I've learned so far: IVPPITER (nominative) IOVIS (genetive). The Latin would be AB IOVE.

The word ``superfluous'' is likely related to SVPERESSE (to be extra), the opposite of DEESSE (to be missing).

I've also thought about translating the disgusting things being done to English, as an amusement; I believe this is one such correct contortion:
HOMŌ QVĪ PARERE POTEST (a woman / a person who is able to give birth)

Well, I used BONIOR in a sentence, only to later learn the proper form is MELIOR, and I'd told my dog BONISSIMVS before learning it's OPTIMVS. I figure these are the manner of mistakes a Roman child would make; oh well.

I've noticed I occasionally rewrite the text of my book when recalling it from memory: CERTVS NŌN SVM becomes INCERTVS SVM or RESPŌNSVM INCERTVM NŪLLVM RESPŌNSVM EST becomes RESPŌNSVM INCERTVM RESPŌNSVM NŌN EST, although I'm not entirely certain the latter transformation be correct, but it seems to be so. I'm glad to spend so much of my spare thought on mulling over Latin, remembering details and whatnot; we would ask What is thirty and eight? for the math problem, but the Latin is QVOT SVNT TRĪGINTĀ ET OCTŌ and the answer's not TRĪGINTĀ OCTŌ but DVODĒQVADRĀGINTĀ or literally two below forty; it took some minor effort for me to recall the form of this question offhand, since I was working from how we would say it in English to the Latin, but I recalled it perfectly. It required abandoning the English-to-Latin approach and going through my memory of Latin question words.

I already knew, but have noticed how much redundancy helps memory; remembering uses of words in various contexts helps me so greatly in recalling their declension and gender and whatnot; I recall a pronoun, or preceding preposition, affecting a word and recall that it's masculine, or neuter, or so on. I reviewed an earlier chapter, looking for a word or its lack, and realized I was sight-reading; it was such a great feeling, even though I've read the chapter several times before. I could fill posts with my Latin stories, so I won't.

I'm reasonably proud of my latest art: gopher://verisimilitudes.net/12022-02-13 http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-02-13

>>145

It's funny everyone dislikes this sort of thing, and yet everyone agrees to them.

They don't detract from the language, I used cruel somewhat jokingly, and are remnants of when only animate and inanimate had genders, apparently. Recalling the genetive plural form is very difficult however, and I've not learned the rule for it yet. Consider how the words EQVVS and EQVA are stallion and mare, sharing a base, but CANIS is masculine or feminine, with no mutation. There are the words COLLVM (neck) and COLLIS (hill).

Perhaps this is the crux of the cultural difference, but I will avoid conjecturing your motivations.

It may be. I do most of my thinking without the help of the machines, and mostly use them to enter and check my work. The MMC is built to help me notice things I otherwise wouldn't, and has helped. That's only for machine code hacking, however.

Being essential is different from being how we compute.

Yes, and it may be more natural to use a computer to its strengths, rather than pretending it be like a brain.

This is randomness you have to squeeze into a model.

Yes, but I should be able to get away mostly with many known patterns.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by composition of conjugation tables though.

There are the Latin tables, but there are ways to represent those tables with smaller tables, and ways to represent the other tables with tables of the tables. An example, if I ever finish one, will help.

>>146
This is neat, and works, but it doesn't also go in reverse. Still, it's neat, and similar to what I want to do in part of Elision, in storing the character tables.

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