Tuesday, January 13

Blog

EKAPANCASHAM ASHTASHATAM

No, it's not the name of a scroll in the latest version of Nethack.* Ooh, 3.43, when did that come out? Must download...

Oh, yes. It means:

(eka 'one' + pancasham 'fiftieth') + (ashta 'eight' x shatam 'hundred') = '851'

(literally 'eight hundred of a fifty-first sort', following the translation formula in Whitney 1924: 180)

Not many blogs would use it as the title of a post. Not many blogs would have a post titled:
WHITE OVERLORD OF THE CONDIMENTS
either. Maybe "Damn You" Scrappleface.

Fewer blogs still would tell you:

Voiceless nasals were once more widespread in Asia: they used to exist in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai (e.g., Mandarin hei, Cantonese haak 'black' < Old Chinese *hm@k) but in some cases have left traces on the tones:

Thai maa [with rising tone] 'dog' < earlier Thai *hmaa (and still spelled h-m-aa in the Thai alphabet) - maa 'come' from earlier *maa with a regular *m has a mid tone (and is spelled m-aa without an h). The rising tone of maa 'dog' is a trace of the older *hm.

Rare in the blogging world is the informed discussion of the Law of Consonental Drift (also known as Grimm's Law, after the Brothers who discovered it**).

There are the requisite traumatic computer problems:

Here's how Coma earned its name. If left unattended for long periods, it will black out (good) ... and not wake up (bad). It enters a mode not in my manual - neither standby nor hibernation but a strange state in which the power mode light is on (it should either be blinking in standby or off in hibernation mode) yet the keyboard, touchpad, and even the power button (unless pressed down for several seconds) are unresponsive. The only ways to awaken Coma are to keep the power button pressed or lift it up and use a paper clip to press the reset button conveniently located at the BOTTOM of the machine! Brilliant design choice there.

As if this coma state weren't annoying enough, this laptop also has the worst power cord I've ever encountered on any product. Move Coma slightly, and the cord may fall off! Even the slightest nudge of the cord is sufficient to cut off power. And if I remember correctly - I'll have to test this again - the computer even shuts off if the cord is nudged/falls out and the battery is fully charged and installed! Never had that happen to me before. I was initially tempted to name Coma after the anole (often mistakenly called a 'chameleon'), a kind of lizard that used to live by the bushes beside my front steps. Coma's cord is like the anole's tail:

Like the tails of many lizards, that of the green anole is easily broken. The tail bears fracture planes in the bones-- weakened areas at which the tail can easily break if grasped. There’s good reason for this.* In the wild the broken tail tip wriggles animatedly for several seconds-- drawing the attention of a predator and allowing the anole to escape. The anole will regrow (regenerate) its tail, but it is never quite similar in appearance to the original.

*Why can one say/write "There's/There is good reason" without an article before the noun phrase "good reason" but not, say, "bad reason"? One can only say/write "There's/There is a bad reason" (Google has zero hits for that sentence). "Good reason" seems to be a fixed phrase.

There's History and Stuff
There was an Indo-Greek ruler named Plato who ruled about 2,100 years ago. Here's a list of other Indo-Greek rulers. Read all about the Indo-Greeks and later cultural mixes at Prabhu's coin site (which isn't just for numismatic freaks). The Indo-Scythian coin at the bottom of this page has an image of Zeus with the word "maharaja" 'great king'. What a combo! And check out Buddha - whose name is written as "buddo" (cf. Pali Buddho) in Greek letters on this Kushana diinaara coin. (The word diinaara is from Greek denarion.) Looking at all this reminded me of a question posed by some role-playing game (GURPS?) author: What if Indo-Greek culture had survived? What would a Hellindic world be like?
There's speculation:
I've never seen anyone use bloggin' in such a way before. Here, it seems to be an intransitive (objectless) verb meaning 'being written on a blog' rather than a transitive verb meaning 'write on a blog'. It's fascinating to watch the semantic extension of a term that didn't even exist not too long ago.
And there's the unending battle with the idiotarians:
Chomskyanism never goes that far. Although they are far more interested in fantasy (er, their deep structures) than reality, they never claim that surface structures do not exist in themselves. Their position is similar to, but not identical with, dualism:
[M]ind and matter exist independently of each other and have nothing at all in common (and that the mind is fundamentally inexplicable by scientific method, since it cannot be directly measured or even detected) ... But somehow interact.
Remember, Chomsky was first a linguist.

There's only one place on the web where all this is gathered into... Uh, one place. And that place is Amaravati: Abode of Amritas. Your host, Marc Miyake. If you're looking to stretch your blogroll a little, you'd be hard pressed to find a better direction to stretch it in than this.

Oh, and that last quote? He was quoting me!

* Foobie bletch! Andova begarin! Venzar borgavve!
** They also wrote some kids' books.

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