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14:47:19
loke
I guess that's one of the new words in Arabic people generally know. (there is no "u" in the word though)
14:52:18
loke
I do travel to Lebanon with some regularity, and even though pretty much everybody speaks French and English there, Arabic is sitll the official language, and it would be fun to know enough to order food at a restaurant at least. :-)
14:53:18
loke
I'm actually mostly looking to learn how to write it, because arabic calligraphy is amazing.
14:56:19
smokeink
there's also a guy on youtube that teaches them really well. I learned from a friend as well
14:59:23
TMA
the -u is sort of there and it isn't (in classical arabic 'twas there (unless in pause), but the dialects mostly lost it)
15:10:22
TMA
loke: no, sorry. It is absent from the egyptian and iraqi arabic, iirc. I do not know anything in particular about others. I know that it is the nominative case ending (the genitive being -i and accusative -a). The rules are somewhat complex, not as complex as sanskrit sandhi though
15:13:05
TMA
loke: please reevaluate sanskrit after you have acquanited yourself with arabic verbal conjugation. sanskrit is stock indoeuropean, therefore easy on us
15:18:24
smokeink
well French is also indoeuropean but I wouldn't say it's easier than Arabic . I wouldn't say it's harder either... If you want to learn a language, just do it; no language is easy to master.
15:21:37
loke
Also, by virtue of being a native Swedish speaker, I have no probelms with Norwegian and can get by in Danish.
15:22:01
loke
smokeink: Well, the language is pretty easy. But there are a _lot_ of words, many of them with seemingly the same meaning.
15:24:30
smokeink
I'm struggling to learn some Russian, I feel that Chinese was much easier to pick up
15:27:30
TMA
smokeink: indoeuropean languages are actively helping you (a speaker of an idoeuropean language), because there is the shared vocabulary that gets you up to speed and there are mostly no gotchas that get you completerly off-guard. other language families are more alien in that respect
15:29:43
TMA
smokeink: admittedly, the vocabulary help kicks in fully for the third (and further) language (it also helps when the second language is latin or ancient greek)
15:31:49
smokeink
but an even more important factor is the passion for the language, no matter how different it is from your mother tongue
15:34:35
smokeink
my mother tongue is Romanian, which is very similar to Russian, and I still have a difficult time learning it
15:35:21
smokeink
and I think the reason for that is because I'm not focusing on it as I did when I started learning Chinese for example
15:35:48
loke
smokeink: I'm not travelling to Russia anymore, so my incentive to learn it has been decreased.
15:40:32
smokeink
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2006/07/20/which-is-harder-japanese-or-chinese/ "I can’t help but get the feeling that Chinese is like the easiest language in the world. Of course, I’m still a complete beginner but from what I can tell, Chinese is just so much simpler than Japanese."
15:41:20
loke
In trying to get RTL text to play nicely with CLIM, I scovered that the function TEXT-SIZE returns a “direction” value. That's incredibly pointless, and clearly designed by someone who did not give any thought to such languages.
15:41:57
loke
I'm getting very close to unilaterally deciding to redesign some of these API's. Because they just don't work.
15:43:55
loke
I was think about that, and I concluded that there are very few people who are both qualified in the necessary topics, and at the same time crazy enough to actually spend time doing this. In fact, the number may actually be zero.
15:45:27
smokeink
the number is close to 0. As far as I'm concerned, I have the craziness , it's only that I 've never done big lisp projects before so I 'll have to do my homework before I'll be able to participate with some real work
15:47:07
loke
smokeink: The good thing about participating in Lisp projects is that all you have to do is to press M-. on the function you're interested in, make some changes, press C-c C-c and test it.
15:48:48
loke
smokeink: The hardest part with ibus is to integrate it in Lisp. You'll havet ot write a CFFI wrapper around it (like I did for fontconfig and harfbuzz)
15:49:14
loke
You don't have to do anything with CLIM when testing that, just write a small separate project and try to call out to the GNOME libraries.
1:21:35
smokeink
loke: for linux there are at least 3 popular IME frameworks: iBus, SCIM (Smart Common Input Method platform) and fcitx . All three of them are good and all three of them have their limitations/bugs
1:25:31
smokeink
that's for the graphics mode. For text console mode (framebuffer console actually) there's fbterm-ucimf which works well. There are a couple of others as well but I couldn't get them working. The console mode IME's are rarely used nowdays so we won't bother to integrate them with CLIM
1:27:00
smokeink
on Windows I'm not sure, it might be the case that the IMEs work by default when mcclim uses the native backend