@newt @genmaicha
> dumbed down
Reformed and standardised 😏
@newt
Being straight I very much enjoy "pussification", thank you! 😊
@newt But you aren't a writing system — it's not you who's "getting drilled a pussy", a writing system is something you interact with, interacting with feminine should be more enjoyable for a straight guy, right? 😜
@genmaicha
@newt
> abominations like the French "-eaux" referring to just one single vowel
Poor Asian dudes, they must be really suffering being able to type their script in using a standard keyboard, not the one that is four times as big and has five more modifier keys 😱
Being able to use a more complex tool instead of a more simple one doesn't make you a "manly man", sometimes it just makes you waste less time fighting with that tool and leaves more room for actually doing something with it.
@genmaicha
@newt
If you can throw something out, but it still works and works well, this probably should be done — despite there always being those nostalgic for the good old days, they weren't personally living. Did you know that Roman Empire is now considered responsible for IQ drop by 2-3 points throughout Europe due to led poisoning? 🤓
As for languages using the cyrillic script — I don't think they become harder to write, they change with the script too, become more streamlined.
@genmaicha
My favourite fact about Rome is that it was the first city to reach 1mil population around 250-300AD. Do you know the next city after it to have reached 1mil? London around 1870s.
You entire argument btw is the same as NewSpeak in "1984". You can pretty much express yourself using just under 200 words in total. It just will be very boring.
@newt
> next city after it to have reached 1mil? London around 1870s
Well, deceases don't favour centralisation — makes a lot of sense! The number of people living in a city is a rather poor metric — Moscow has greater population than some European countries, but it's hardly the best city to live in.
But I'm not even disputing the role of Roman Empire, my pun was about boasting how great it was back in the day without taking everything into account.
@genmaicha
@newt
> It just will be very boring.
Minimalism department called, they want to reduce your funding 😏
Expressing more with less is an art of its own. And being less limited doesn't always mean being more expressive — remove the genre boundaries and you won't get another shining masterpiece, in absolute most cases you'd get something inconsistent and falling apart. Book written in the most complex language is not the be the highest form of art, it's the one no one read.
@genmaicha
You and I are clearly not even in the same mind space to argue, since this is an argument not about facts but about one's attitude towards facts. I view a language as a tool for my own expression and this tool needs to be versatile and expandable.
@newt
> a language that is incapable of expressing Ulysses is certainly a gimped one
Well, it seems English wasn't enough for Finnegan's Wake — he had to borrow from other languages 😂
@newt
And we aren't arguing much — just exchanging thoughts. I could've taken your side, it just won't be as fun. Like I said, I'm not even practicing what I preach here, I'm using «ё» — not only the letter, but these weird quotation marks too, these aren't present in any standard layouts, I have to use specialised ones to enter them — or compose-key incantations.
@newt
That is true for loanwords in most languages — in English these exceptions at least make some sense, probably due to being borrowed mostly from European languages using the same Latin alphabet — but even with Greek ones it still makes some sense: you see certain sequences of letters and you can guess where the word came from and how it's pronounced.
@newt
In Russian, due to being transliterated into a different alphabet, this shit at times doesn't make any sense at all, you pronounce it very differently from the way it's written: "it's an exception, you just have to remember it",— it's literally what they teach you in school!
In case with Japanese, I think it's just transliterated awkwardly, but then just read as if it would be written in kana: https://social.librem.one/@m0xee/113711955834045265
@newt
In Russian they also "steal", but manage to break the stolen in the process — the third way no one asked for 🤣
@newt
But we aren't even talking art here — most people aren't using the language to write Ulysses, they are doing stuff like "What's your name? Let's fuck!" or writing their stupid emails to the accounting department… sometimes it's both 🤔
Anyway, language is a tool — in most cases it's supposed to be utilitarian, you don't need a swiss army knife where normal one would do. If you want to write a book that won't "be boring", you can do what Joyce did or even make a language up!
@genmaicha