Amikke @Amikke@qoto.org

@enigmatico is that when you try to decide how much time and effort to commit to an open source project before you know how well it does relative to its multiple forks/alternatives?

@icedquinn Slime Rancher

maybe there's a mod

@fantazo @tkk13909 you don't switch to breathing from anything. But I over-exaggerated a bit, not pointless but unnecessary.

@tkk13909 same

@tkk13909 love the idea, know it will never catch on. Unless computer translation reaches the level of completely seamless translation, which happens to be the same moment when international languages become pointless.

@Coyote the whole point of an alphabet since its inception, as opposed to logogram systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, is to write down phonemes so that you don't have to wonder how to write something you hear or pronounce something you read. A unification of spoken and written language. English experienced some kind of devolution where they essentially went back to words being logograms, except using latin characters as components, that for historical reasons vaguely suggest the pronunciation. Worst of both worlds.

@puppygirlhornypost@transfem.social Steve Wilhite would've liked this

@Coyote accents and dialects develop over time, sure, but these are still small differences in certain words or in pronouncing the language overall, not wildly different pronunciations of the same sequences of letters depending on what sequences they're next to, where they are located within the word, what language did English take the word from, and the alignment of planets on March 15th 1386.

Neither Spanish nor French have the problem where an adult native speaker looks at how a word is written and isn't sure which one of multiple possible pronunciations to pick. It's a solved problem.

@icedquinn @Coyote tbh it would've probably failed anyway, the inertia of something like the alphabet is insane. Even in the case of something more immediately useful like a measurement system there's a certain English-speaking country that refuses to switch from medieval units like the rest of the world did, no chance of switching out the alphabet.

@Coyote it's a solved problem for most existing languages.

@icedquinn lol English hiragana. Nice, I had no idea this existed.

It's unfortunate that the #1 international language ended up being English. With its complete pronunciation anarchy it's impossible to tell someone over writing how to pronounce something, or in some cases even describe a sound, without digging up example words. And even that isn't foolproof since they fail at consistently pronouncing their own language and the same written word can have completely different pronunciation depending on accent.

Every single other European language I know of would be better. Yes, even French, they write 4x what they read, but at least they do it fairly consistently. No "ghoti" situations. No cases where an adult sees a written word and isn't sure how to pronounce it.

In some better timeline the US ended up speaking Spanish and a whole class of worldwide communication problems was avoided.

@VD15 beware, they don't remain stuck in the vacuum cleaner forever

@samwho linux keyboard layout for Polish has it under altgr+shift+T, I love it. Nice website tho, I'll bookmark it for when I'm on windows etc.