If you're interested to hear what both Middle English and bits of French and other languages from the time sounded like, here's a reading of John Skelton's "Speke Parott" poem from 1521: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCckcTHWqKw
Quite interesting how - as a dutch speaker - you can hear English Germanic roots quite clearly. It almost sounds like a Dutch or German speaker is reading the "English" text phonetically without knowing pronunciation rules.
Especially "cage" and "beke" are pronounced like you'd do in Dutch nowadays, showing the large shift English 'a' and 'e' have undergone.
It seems googling for "what did middle english sound like" often comes up with a link to this video as the definitive example, but how do we know it was pronounced phonetically, or what the phonemes were?
It sounds lovely, and I would like to imagine it sounding like that - but I don't see how we can reconstruct its pronunciation reliably over 500 years later.
You might be surprised. Phonetics and historical linguistics are proper subjects of study, not quackery. I've heard teachers say that in England people used to pronounce Latin much like English until the specialists rescued much of the original pronunciation of Latin for the public. Today every Latin primer, especially the British and the American ones, insist that you read Latin in the reconstructed way.
WS Allen in his book, Vox Latina, actually explains how Latin might have been pronounced in the Roman period. Interestingly his theories have universal acceptance today.
You can't ever be 100% sure, but there's a variety of ways to get confidence that you're getting close.
Rhyming lines in poetry are a great way to constrain what the various phonemes were. The meter is also a great way to back out what sounds were silent and which were not. (Speaking of which I disagree with the video's choice to pronounce a lot of the final "-e"s in words; that's a trait of early Middle English that was already on its way out by the time of Chaucer and its pretty clear from certain rhyme choices that it's silent in a lot of Skelton's words: see how e.g. Skelton rhymes "Jerusalem" with "creme" and how everything is nice iambs, unless you start pronouncing "-e"s everywhere).
500 years is also within a time horizon where you can get pretty reliable internal reconstruction clues (examining inconsistencies in modern English and thinking about what common features might have led to those inconsistencies) to try to get a better grasp of the phonemic inventory of a language.
Spelling also is a great clue into what the phonemes of the language were (although this is complicated by digraphs and trigraphs).
Then you can use a variety of methods to try to get an idea of what the phonetic realizations of those phonemes were. In this poem in particular we have English words rhymed with foreign words which is a great clue. You can also compare different dialects of English to try to figure out what the original sound is of a word that has now fractured into many different pronunciations.
And of course you can examine what people of the time say about the pronunciation of their own language (this is how we e.g. are pretty confident in r being a trill or a tap, based on descriptions from both domestic and foreign speakers, see e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298566/why-and-w... for a great summary of some of the evidence).
All in all it's kind of like playing a game of Sudoku. Rhyming and other clues can set up a set of relationships among different sounds and what would seem like an otherwise sparse set of clues (a comment by some writer here, a common misspelling there, some translation here) can cause cascades of phonetic realizations of different phonemes that magnify the impact of those clues.
And the sanity check to make sure that all this makes sense is being able to provide reconstructed sounds that are consistent with new descriptions, rhyming patterns, and foreign transcriptions as new evidence rolls in over time.
I don't know any Old English but whenever I hear the first one (I'm a bit of a bardcore fan) I wonder if "hé is cumende for thé" is accurate or a bit of artistic license. I would have expected a sentence structure more like Early Modern English "he cometh" rather than Modern English "he is coming" (c.f. German which has "kommt" but definitely doesn't have "ist kommend"[1]). Did the copula + present participle form of the present tense already exist in OE?
[1] incidentally, one does sometimes hear things like "er ist am kommen" (lit. "he is at coming"). Is this a new development, and is it a borrowing from English?
This page links to a physically unremarkable Soviet slide rule used for calculating things like the volumetric flow rate in irrigation canals used in Uzbek SSR for growing cotton, their primary cash crop [1].
Unfortunately, there are no scales on it for "evaporation" and "shitty construction", or the Aral Sea[2] might still be there.
Was hoping a message like this would be more prominent here.
Although the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets come from the same area, they are discontinuous. However, the ordering being roughly the same, and following an earlier Egyptian ordering, is the big hint that they share at least inspirational descent from the same source.
Why that area of Lebanon? Byblos has been an Egyptian colony in that region for a very long time (~4600 years ago), ensuring continuous scribal presence. Scribes of that region are noted for intense multi-lingualism (as perusal of Ugaritic tablets is evidence of), so cross-pollination of scripts makes a lot of sense.
I haven't read through Goldwassers papers, but a lot of what they quote in the article seems to be unnecessary to explain the transmission of the abjad.
The orderings of the 27 consonants of the Ugaritic alphabet and of the 22 consonants of the Phoenician alphabet are identical, not just roughly the same.
The difference is just that 5 consonants are missing from the Phoenician alphabet in random places: between gamma and delta, between kappa and lambda, between mu and nu, between nu and xi, and between sigma and tau.
It is known with which other consonants the deleted consonants were merged. For example Ugaritic had "s" and unvoiced "th" like in "thin", while Phoenician pronounced both as "s" and kept only the sigma letter.
(I have used the names of the letters as used by the Greeks, as those are more familiar for most people)
The Ugaritic alphabet also used for certain purposes 3 supplementary signs, invented later, and which were added after the original 27 consonants.
If you define "containment" as "provable non-harm" then sure. But there are essentially no complex physical systems that we can put such computational bounds on. Since "harm" comes in some form of physical actuation, I would argue that we can only ever get to something like the sort of confidence we can have that a particular manufactured part would succeed under load. The map is not the territory, and any computation that does not include computing the whole universe is necessarily but a map.
A huge portion of the "Herbert never explain/explores X" issues that the author of this post has are addressed in the subsequent books... It's like going "Well, we're only going to watch A New Hope for this review of Star Wars, and Lucas never explains who Darth Vader is!"
Useful to keep in mind that wheels confined to toys was due some combination of a lack of animals that are good at pulling (llamas aren't great as that) and metal use being primarily confined to decorative purposes (so durable axles unlikely) :)
This immediately made me think of the C2 Wiki. It has a style similar to Taaalk in the sense that entries are often a mix of conversation and "exposition". It allows for that sort of linking by being a ("the") wiki. Perhaps that's a good model? A wiki where authors are visually marked as on Taaalk but otherwise all the accouterments of a wiki.
The not-quite-vaporware C2 followup implements some aspect of what you're describing via a sort of columnar layout.
