spyrja

It really wasn't a bad operating system. In fact it kind of blew its (lame) Win9X predecessors out of the water! I ran on Win2000 for years before finally switching to Linux. Of course Microsoft ended up going a different course with its newer "offerings" and I have nothing but pity for those who still have to use their products on a day-to-day basis.

Welp, looks like they're back up. Home page and notifications are loading just fine now.

Actually, the introduction of Old Norse in Britain began in the early 5th century and by the time of Beowulf, Old English was still more than 90% a Nordic language. The Norman invasion of 1066 changed that dramatically (as Old French became the "new" official language) and to this day Modern English could reasonably be considered mostly French, then Latin, and only in small part Nordic (although the most common words used are by majority derived from Old Norse counterparts.) Oddly enough, only a few Celtic words made it into the language.

When the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived in England around fall of Rome in the early 400s, the "official" language was Latin (as Britain had been a Roman colony since 43 AD) whereas locals spoke various Celtic dialects. The newcomers brought with them Scandinavian tongues and for the next 500 years or so Old English developed with minor changes (with sparse inclusions from Latin and Celtic influences). That all changed in 1066 with the Norman Invasion where Old Northern French became the new official language. (French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.) As far as Modern English is concerned, while only ~20% is based on Old Norse, those words form more than 80% of what is most commonly used on a day-to-day basis.

Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.

Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.

I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)

To be fair, the origins of "hello" go back much further than 600 years. Variations of it appear in Old Icelandic from almost 1000 years ago, and if you look at Old English texts from hundreds of years before that you will find greetings such as "Wes þū hāl!" (or roughly, "May you be well!"). In other words, all are based on salutations which have most likely been in use in one form or another for at least two millenia (if not longer).

Most LLM's these days tend to be strongly "left-leaning". (Grok being one of the few examples of one that leans "right".) Personally I'd prefer if they were trained without any political bias whatsoever, but of course that's easier said than done given that such lines of thought are present in so many datasets.

FWIW it's a fairly straightforward algorithm. In C++:

  bool balanced(const string& text, const string& open, const string& close) {
    size_t length = text.size(), brackets = open.size();
    assert(close.size() == brackets);
    stack<char> buffer;
    for (size_t index = 0; index < length; ++index) {
      char ch = text[index];
      for (size_t slot = 0; slot < brackets; ++slot) {
        if (ch == open[slot])
          buffer.push(ch);
        else if (ch == close[slot]) {
          if (buffer.empty() || buffer.top() != open[slot])
            return false;
          buffer.pop();
        }
      }
    }
    return buffer.empty();
  }

Next up: 64-bit booleans for the win!

And for the love of God, please don't do 0[src].

I couldn't get it to do much. Also noticed a subtle bug here:

  next = compile(read(buffer), cons("halt", NULL));

C doesn't guarantee the order in which arguments to a function are processed. Since 'cons' relies on 'read' being called first, the result is undefined behavior. (In fact I had to fix that before it would even "run" on my system.)

Or maybe we can know them equally well? The function f(x) = x(0^(sin(πx)^2)) for example "requires" infinities, but only returns integer values.