Nova Stilo: 5. Gender
For all the wonderful things Esperanto has shown to the world, its handling of gender is a complete mess. This is mostly due to conventions of the 19th Century (when Esperanto was created), but also by the underlying model, which is the German. In many languages, words themselves have a gender. This gender is not strictly related to function: In German, spoon, fork, and knife are masculine, feminine, and neutral respectively. Continue readingNova Stilo: 5. Table Words
One of the best inventions of Esperanto was the regularization of the “correlatives” into a table. Words like who, where, when are clearly related to this and that and how in some form. Esperanto puts these words into a table that makes it both easy to know what one of those words means when seeing it for the first time, and to figure out the word without learning it. Let us start with an example: “tio” means “that” as in “that thing over there. Continue readingNova Stilo: 7. Adverbs
In many languages, adverbs have two very different functions that put them in conflict with each other. One function is to be an adjective to verbs, from which they originally get their name. The other is to modify entire sentences or sentence parts. You can see the difference in the sentences, “He laughed happily” vs. “Happily, he laughed.” In the first case, it’s the laughing that is happy. In the second, it’s the circumstance. Continue readingNova Stilo: 8. Abbreviations
Nova’s general attitude towards language is, “If you can understand it without confusion, it’s probably right.” We have seen this in action when dropping the accusative, plural endings, and the preposition after an adverb. It’s more general than that and encompasses a series of shorthands and abbreviations throughout the language. The most visible and frequent example of it is the common form of the word, “and.” While the Esperanto version “kaj” is usually abbreviated with the first letter k, in Nova the last letter is used. Continue readingNova Stilo: 9. Additions
As we have seen in the article on correlatives, the basic idea in Nova is to take what is best about Esperanto and make it even better. Among the best ideas of Esperanto is its set of regular prefixes and suffixes the greatly simplify the vocabulary. Two really good examples of this are descendants and professions, respectively marked by the suffixes -id and -ist. In the case of the former, a plethora of words indicating the offspring of especially animals are replaced (in Esperanto) by the name of the animal with the suffix -id. Continue readingNova Stilo: Introducing Nova
Hello beautiful people and thanks for stopping by! This post is to introduce Nova, a new style of Esperanto that tries to address the most common criticisms to this most widespread of conlangs. If you know Esperanto or of it, you may know it has been spoken by millions of people (literally) for over a hundred years. It is a marvelous invention that stood the test of time, with a rich culture of writing and song, with a vibrant community of people the world over. Continue readingThreshold Chunking
The Problem How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file? This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Continue reading
Steamboat During the Bomb Cyclone
It was (and still is) an amazing snow season, one of those you can tell tall stories about to your grandkids surrounding the fireplace. But the crown of the worst storm of the many definitely goes to the one that dropped a blanket of white from Aspen to Chicago. It marked the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in Colorado, with some of the worst winter winds recorded. What a better day to do a road trip? Continue reading