Wololo

"pizza is a flat bread with toppings baked on"?

let me guess: you define a man as a featherless biped, don't you plato?

no, we need the taxonomical model. food evolves and adapts and descends. it fills niches that cause it to diverge from its ancestors and converge with other, unrelated species. unlike most animals, food is capable of horizontal gene transfer, making taxonomical divisions less linear.

(nodding)

"Including the University of Notre Dame"

It's Spiders Georg! I've translated it into Angkorian Khmer, the language of Cambodia from 802-1351 AD. Because I like doing stuff like that ;)

You read the black consonants first, then the blue consonants, than the purple vowels. If there's no written vowel, use an 'a'. Magenta is punctuation - a dingbat marking the start, periods, and then a stronger period that tells you the paragraph/section is finished.

Here's what it says!

The original:

reallyreallytrying Jan 8, 2013 “average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Transliterated into Latin characters:

1935¹ śaka, ekādaśi roc mārggaśira, 'aṅgāravāra, nu rilirilitroyiṅ kathā: Neḥh ’ālakṣaṇa kathā: ’nak cya pīṅ pi pratisaṃvatsara, toy vyat vakra saṃkhyā. ’Nak cya pīṅ śūnya pratisaṃvatsara. Nau ru Jaṃrau Pīṅ, ’nau guhā cya daśasahasra pratidina, ga te krau daṃnuk ta caṅvāt ti mān ban dāṃ ta kāñ.

More detail under the cut!

Thank you!

I'm interested in cultural history and I love the First Millenium AD/Early Medieval period. I got really into Heian Japanese fashion, and then was looking at other cultures that existed around the world during the same period. Sometimes it was the fashion that grabbed me. Sometimes the architecture. And sometimes it was the script or language. Angkor has all three!

I find the script (characters used to write) to be gorgeous, and the grammar is similar enough to English that I can wrap my head around it. (Very little inflection!) I am endlessly fascinated by how people take scripts that do NOT work for their language, and smash them with hammers until they do - the way the Irish use Latin to communicate consonantal sounds, how English uses it to communicate vowel sounds, how Angkorian Khmer uses Braḥmi to communicate consonant clusters, etc.

There's a large enough surviving corpus (enough things with writing on them), and enough of it's online (even if the scan quality can be unbelievably bad) that I can really sink my teeth into it. There are enough grammars from India during the same period that we've got a good understanding of how Sanskrit/Pali works, and studying the differences between Indian and Khmer Sanskrit/Pali is really, really neat! Plus, Angkorian Khmer works COMPLETELY differently, so seeing how they incorporated all the Sanskrit loanwords into non-Sanskrit texts is even MORE interesting!

But mostly, I love the curves. I love how the characters stack. I love how the 'e' diacritic comes before the main letter and I always forget to leave space for it and then want to have a tantrum. I love that the last black character on that text I wrote becomes a spiral later on in history. Becomes half as wide, loses all those weird bits that look like diacritics but aren't, and just becomes a spiral.