What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes Reminder

After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.

As far as I know it hasn’t happened.

Speaker Johnson, please follow through!

24/7, to piss on your grave. Then there will be a latrine erected there so people can make, shall we say, more substantial commentary.

A Caution

Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.

State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,003.70
Silver $24.42
Platinum $941.00
Palladium $1,094.00
Rhodium $4,900.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $2,072.00
Silver $25.52
Platinum $944.00
Palladium $1026.00
Rhodium $4,800.00

This is a record high close for gold. It jumped up $35 on Friday. I do not know what the absolute high point was, earlier in the day, other than it was around $2,075. Many analysts expect a sustained push beyond $2,100. Meanwhile palladium’s slow decline continues. Silver is climbing (but nowhere near its 1980 high of roughly $50, even without adjusting for inflation). Platinum seems stable.

How We Know What Classical Latin Sounded Like

I stated earlier this week, as a side note to something else, that the Latin of Julius Caesar sounded a bit different from the Latin spoken by the Catholic Church (i.e., the one headquartered within Rome). We don’t know everything, exactly, but we do know a lot.

I got some pushback, and some arguments that demonstrated that some people simply don’t believe (or don’t understand the consequences of) the fact that languages change over time, especially when there are no audio recordings.

People are right to not simply take my word for it though, so I’ll bring some of the reasoning.

It at first seems a daunting task to reconstruct the sounds of a language when there were no audio recordings. (Well, I suppose if aliens have been watching us for millennia, there might be. Just the thought of that is enough to make historical linguists drool.)

Historical Linguistics (sometimes called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change over time. (It is a science, albeit a rather “soft” one, so I expect and hope Wolf will be filing this in the sidebar.) This means it’s concerned with how one language changes over time, and the process by which one widespread language splits into multiple languages.

A good, down-home example of the former is the changes that English has gone through since the Germanic invasions and settlement of Britain in (roughly) 500 CE. And the change is considerable. Our founding fathers’ writing patterns seem quaint but we usually have no trouble understanding them (except for those times we only think we understand them…fortunately those don’t arise much in the documents). Shakespeare is notably harder to deal with. The King James Bible translation was made in Shakespeare’s day, and deliberately had some archaic language in it for gravitas, and it gets more difficult. Not only old words, but sometimes a word we use today meant something different back then and we get tripped up. The moral of that story: over generations words can shift meanings. But there’s more. In the couple of centuries before Shakespeare, and even during Shakespeare’s day, we underwent something called the “Great Vowel Shift” where the sounds of the vowels all changed, over the span of less than a century. I…formerly pronounced like the i in machine, but with a little more duration (making it “long”), became pronounced like aye. (And we still call it “long I” even though it’s not actually long in duration.) Meet, meat, and the middle e in serene changed from sounding like today’s e in bet, or an Italian e, to sounding like I used to sound. The a in mate used to be a long-in-duration ah, and sounds…well like it sounds today…a combination of former e and i called a diphthong. These are vowels that are pronounced in the front of the mouth with the tongue at different heights, and they all shifted up one place once “i” became “eye.” Curiously this happened mostly to our “long” vowels. Instead of just being the same as the short vowels, only pronounced for twice as long, they shifted.

Other similar changes upward happened with o and u (which are pronounced in the back of the mouth.

If you’ve ever taken Spanish, you’ve noticed that a, e, i, o, and u are pronounced quite differently than in English, and you may have thought it a bit weird. It turns out Spanish is much closer to the original pronunciations; we’re the weird ones. We used to have more Spanish-like pronunciations (though we sometimes lengthened a vowel). Then we spent 1400-1700 bodging all this, and making our own spelling hard for us and completely incomprehensible for others.

And the International Phonetic Alphabet actually goes with the older usages. I like machine. e like the Italian e (which we don’t have any more and fake with the day diphthong), a like in father (and never like in day), u as in fool, and o sort-of as in vote. (Another diphthong used to fake a pure sound we don’t have any more.) The e in bet is actually a different sound represented in the IPA with ε. (Linguists usually write actual sound values like this: /i/ to distinguish them from some language’s letter I which might mean something totally different.)

So…sounds can change with time, too.

And languages can split. Most famous here is Latin, splitting into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and a whole host of other languages that don’t happen to share the names of countries. And within each of these, very distinctive dialects that are sometimes different enough that it’s debatable whether it’s the same language any more. It’s actually a gradient. The local language spoken in Marseille (as opposed to the Parisian French in the schools) isn’t terribly different from the tongue spoken in nearby parts of Italy…or the tongue spoken in northwestern Spain. They’re geographically close, but in all three places a faraway capital imposes a “standard” language, and those standard languages differ far more (especially French, which has undergone some serious pronunciation changes).

In this case every local group’s language has slowly shifted, in slightly different directions, until they’re quite separate, and it’s hard to understand other languages (the further away, the worse), if it can be done at all.

Some languages change more than others; historical linguists love finding a language that is “conservative” meaning it hasn’t changed too much. The Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian) apparently haven’t changed much; neither has Icelandic (the other Scandinavian tongues have changed a lot more).

Okay…so there’s some examples.

Latin, of course, was originally spoken in Latium, the region around Rome in Italy.

Latium is now called “Lazio” which just goes to make the point about changes. This is one that in hindsight is no surprise. /t/ before /i/ tends to become /ts/ (spelled z in Italian). Why? Because people are lazy and start to slur their words, eventually the slur becomes normal. If the process were to continue, the /t/ might disappear entirely leaving just /si/. This has been seen under so many different occasions world wide that now if we have two related languages and one has /ti/ where the other has /tsi/ or even /si/ we know the second language is the one that changed.

Sometimes, though, you have just one language and since not all possible changes will actually happen (otherwise Latin would never have split up, just changed the same everywhere), it can be hard to figure out what the original sound was.

But with Latin we have multiple descendant languages. And we have something else; we have writings in other languages, trying to render Latin words.

For instance we have the Greek spellings of Latin words. And in this case, without fail, the Greeks rendered Latin “C” with Greek “Κ” (kappa). Kappa is never pronounced as anything other than /k/. Never /s/ and never /tʃ/ (our ch). Now one might say that the Greeks don’t have a /tʃ/ sound so they might have faked it with kappa, but that’s very doubtful. /tʃ/ is pronounced in the front of the mouth, /k/ in the back. The Greeks would have likely faked /tʃ/ with tau and sigma: τς or τσ, not with some sound from the back of the mouth. They don’t have a match for ʃ (sh) at all, but /s/ is pronounced in almost the same place.

Thus “vici” was pronounced with a hard /k/, as was Caesar, and Cicero. We also have Roman authors asking why on earth they don’t just get rid of the letter K since it’s pronounced just like C. (It’s a part of the Latin alphabet but rarely used; kalends is probably the most common Latin word I see with that K. Kyrie is borrowed from the Greek.)

OK, so now onto the other bone of contention, the V.

We again have Greeks rendering Roman words with the v in them, and again without failure, it’s never with the letter the Greeks use for v (more on that below). For example Valerius (a commonly used name) is rendered in Greek as Ουαλεριος (Oualerios). The Greeks didn’t (and still don’t) have /w/, but /Ου/ was pronounced /u/ and that’s very, very close, in a diphthong it is basically a /w/. We can tell when V changed from /w/ to /v/ though, because later Greek inscriptions rendered ‘Valerius’ as Βαλεριος, starting with the Greek letter beta.

Beta (Β, β) has been pronounced like /v/ not /b/, since about 200 BCE and is still /v/ today. (If Greeks want to spell the /b/ sound today, they use μπ.) /b/ and /v/, note, are both pronounced in the front of the mouth, one is a stop and the other is a fricative. If you pronounce the sounds and pay attention to what your mouth and lips are doing, you’ll see what I mean.

And this is why Cyrillic В is a /v/; Cyrillic was based on Greek in the 9th century, well after that shift happened. Cyrus and Methodius were aware of the old pronunciation, so /b/ is represented with a variant shape, Б, right before В in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Now as to the point of why Eccesiastical (Church) Latin sounds so much like Italian today (used as an argument for it not having changed at all), the reason it sounds so much like Italian, is because it is largely Italians who have been using it. The Church is based in Rome; they’re surrounded by Italians, most of the staff are Italians, and in fact even today 49 out of 241 cardinals are Italians. As Italian changed into its present form, the “frozen” Latin from the early centuries of the Church changed its pronunciation (the one thing not preserved in writing) to match. Grammar and vocubulary (as spelled) did not change, because it was preserved in writing.

Bonus video:

An American, fluent in Latin, using the classical pronunciation (wenee, weedi, weeky) in Rome. You can see it’s a bit of a struggle but they eventually get it.

And again at the Colosseum. I haven’t watched this one like I have the others, but if he’s really asking where the Flavian Amphitheater is, they’re entitled to ask him if he’s fricking blind. (The Flavian Amphitheater is what the Romans called the Colosseum.):

A more open experiment: I believe in this case he actually asked the Romans to try the experiment of speaking in Latin. Some things are easy, some things they couldn’t get:

And going to the Vatican. This time he used the Ecclesiastical pronunciation (vennee, veedee, veechee) which is how they’re used to it. Still, few people there claimed fluency:

OK with that out of the way it’s time to discuss asshoes.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!