volumina-vetustiora

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Naxos, Greece. 2025.

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I NEED YOU. YOU CAN KEEP ME ON THIS EARTH. BE VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU.

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Why am there is alexandrian school of poetry?

I am be is are don't know

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is it time to dink wrater

oh you know i'm dinkin' like Patinkin over here

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the city by C. P. Cavafy

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you could just do anything back in ancient rome huh

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these are THE smeemiest pictures ever taken.

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Bertolt Brecht, Stories Of Mr Keuner

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In the context of that discussion about the failed language-teaching project that made up a rationalized English orthography, @morlock-holmes made the remark

Like, if I said, "We'll teach kids kids how to spell English words in the cyrillic alphabet until third grade and then transition them over," everybody would immediately go, "What? That's clearly a bad idea."

And, okay, this is not exactly on topic for that, but it's close enough that I can't resist the chance to bring up my favourite data-munging anecdote.

Once, infinitely long ago, I was doing a job that involved (among other things) ingesting data from the European Patent Office, which cobbles together extracts from a bunch of individual national patent offices, each with their own scheme. There's a sample here if for some reason you're curious.

Anyhow, the problem with this is that lots of these offices had their own idiosyncratic schemes for coding stuff, which made it hard to process. There was all kinds of weird shit going on but by far the best was Russia, whose data was, as best I can guess, transcribed phonetically into Cyrillic in an ad hoc way by a human, and then transliterated back into Roman characters by automated substitution, this being the only form accessible in the combined dataset. This yielded entries like, to grab a few from the public sample:

ROUZMAUNT: "Rosemount"

LONCHPOJNT TEKNOLODZHIZ: "LaunchPoint Technologies"

JUNAJTID TEKNOLODZHIZ KOPEHREJSHN: "United Technologies Corporation"

SAUTVEST VINDPAUEHR: "SouthWest Windpower"

DZHON MAKGUAJR: "John Macguire"

POL' LJAROSH: "Paul Laroche"

AJEHJCHAJ KORPOREJSHN: "Aichi Corporation" (maybe?)

SHAN'DUN CHZHUNTAJ N'JU EHNERDZHI GRUP: "Shandong Zhongtai New Energy Group"

Note the two distinct ways of writing "corporation"; there wasn't any consistency! Anyway the job was to try to link these with existing records that wrote the name normally, and nowadays AI would probably be a dab hand at that, but at the time I noodled around with it in a minimal way and then stopped when I noticed that Russia had actually not submitted any records to the database since 2014 anyway, for The Reasons.

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average New York has 0 living boys. Paul Simon is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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great stuff happening in the groupchat

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https://archiveofourown.org/works/67143841/chapters/173383333

If you have ever heard of taskmaster

holy shit

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Spurious Latin plurals are great fun if you're a specific flavour of nerd, but improperly constructed verb tenses are a game anyone can play. The past tense of "screenshot" is "screenshat".

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hi! could i request a little translation into latin? i feel like i should be able to figure this out, but i'm trying to express that something is for my friend and i'm struggling. i feel like it needs a preposition but i'm not sure what. thanks! (also, wonderful blog!)

thank you! :)

you could definitely just use the dative, so amico meo or amicae meae (masculine and feminine gender respectively)

if you want to say that you're sending it physically to them, you could use ad with the accusative (ad amicum meum / ad amicam meam)