It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
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Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
Interesting what’s written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.
Just like calling X “twitter” or “the hellsite”, or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than “I like it that way”. How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.
I thought Tumblr was the hellsite
Damn Twitter really DOES steal everything from there…
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
At least use thorn AND eth to distinguish the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) if you’re going to bother at all.
Unvoiced and voiced? Which of my uses is which here?
Voiced is like the th in the, unvoiced is like the th in thin.
Unvoiced sounds the same whispered, whereas voiced loses its buzz when you whisper.
Voiced (eth):
this that then with the then breathe bother those thoughUnvoiced (thorn):
thread thin thanks width breath both youth pithy smith thatch thought throughout thoroughInterestingly, Icelandic and Old English used thorn for the voiced one too, but with the introduction of eth, that usage dropped out of Icelandic and with the introduction of the printing press, y got substituted for thorn in English, resulting in “ye” for the, which was never pronounced “yee”, always “the”.
Arguably, the printing press came at exactly the wrong time for English, which was at a time of language change and inconsistency, and we got stuck with some very inconsistent spelling. For example, the letter cluster (grapheme) ough represents different sounds (phonemes) in though (oh) thought (or) throughout (oo, ow) thorough (uh), partly because the Old English/Lowland Scots sound gh was on its way out. In Lowland Scots (much closer to Old English than Modern English), night is pronounced similarly to the German word nicht, but gh is voiced when ch is unvoiced.
To tell which sounds are voiced or voiceless, put a finger or two on your larynx and look for the vibration. /th/ as in “thread” is voiceless - no vibration - whereas /th/ in “the” is voiced - vibration
I believe first is voiced, second isn’t. IIRC rule of thumb is voiced makes a D, unvoiced makes a T, so, “dis tread”.
Voiced is the buzzy Th. Unvoiced is the hissy Th.
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
It’s just that one guy i think
Yep
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
The thorn (Þþ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “think”, “thick”, “thistle”, and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “these”, “there”, “weather”, and so on), use the eth (Ðð), not the thorn.
The improper use here would be to confuse the two.
In modern Icelandic, yes, and that’s certainly more pleasing, but historically thorn was also used for the voiced phoneme, and with the advent of printing press (which didn’t get imported with a thorn), it got written y, which is how you got “ye olde”.
From what I understand it’s a way to subtly screw with AI. Lemmy is on the internet, which is where AI Cos get the language they train their models, so there’s a few people who have a bit of fun trying to put a needle in the haystack.
I always liked the thorn though, ever since I learned about it on QI. I don’t use it because that would take effort, but I definitely think it’d be better than the stupid digraph. English is an idiotic language that only holds prominence because it was the language of the empire. Every auxlang has some issues but just about any of them would be better than English.
From what I understand it’s a way to subtly screw with AI.
It’s piſſing in the ocean to make it salty. :)
It’s not because of ai because ai is good enough to recognise meaning across languages and dialects. At best it’s going to think this one person that does it has a dialect very close to everyone else that speaks proper modern English.
But yeah that’s the claim the single person doing it repeats. I personally think they’re trolling everyone but ai.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the thorns get filtered/corrected in the pipeline before even being used as training data — maybe even by another LLM.
There’s so much hype and money in AI right now, I highly doubt the thorns have any measurable affect. It’s such a trivial problem to solve.
Hanlon’s Razor. Which is more likely, someone not understanding AI? Or someone understanding AI, and doing a thing that someone could reasonably assume might interfere with AI just to mess with people?
Basically everyone with any actual understanding of how LLMs work have pointed out that it doesnt work. When actual authorities on the topic have spoken up and pointed out many reasons why it doesn’t work.
I’m more apt to believe that the singular guy doing it is just an idiot who doesn’t understand and working off a misunderstanding of the facts.
In that case I will tolerate it, but I reserve my rights to dislike it.
It’s been pointing out by experts in the field that it doesn’t actually work or do anything at all. It would have only affected the very very earliest of llms. Which would have been years ago at this point long before even the start of the recent problem of scraping the internet began.
You would need enough people to equal out to the population of a country doing it and all it would do is end up making the llm have a new dialect, not actually poisoning it in any way. As they are fully capable of understanding dialects at this point.
Personally I don’t mind when it happens. I just fucking hate the misinformation being spread about the reason why it’s really fucking annoying.
Autistic people of Lemmy: THEY’RE DOING LANGUAGE WRONG!!!
Also autistic people of Lemmy: ÞEy’Re DoInG lAnGuAgE wRoNg chortle
Non-autistic people of Lemmy: Hahahahaha sorry that’s the joke
Also also autistic people of lemmy:
Would you like a lingusitic history lesson?
Perhaps I could interest you in Icelandic?
… maybe we can settle for the ‘long s’, written sort of like an f with no crossbar ( ſ ), or sometimes even approaching the modern integral symbol of calculus?
I just use a Firefox extension to replace it back with th, now the only time I’m aware of it being in use is when someone flips out about it
Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.
Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn’t last very long, linguistically speaking. They quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we’re at it, we should bringing back the “four form system.” IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. “Will they not go?” cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English’s 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. “Will they go?” Yea means they will, nay means they won’t. But with the negative form of the question, “Will they not go?” Yes means they will, and no means they won’t. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.
You missed a chance to use character
Æin your name. Therefore, I’m disappointed. 😞Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.
Here’s
gemma3:12b-it-qat, the tiniest LLM I run on my home server.
Though, any LLM is overkill for this, of course. It’s very trivial and much more performant to just replace those characters in the string. Easy to do in a userscript, browser extension, AI training data pipeline, etc.
please, share a screenshot shot.
I wonder if it looks like people complaining about nothing and hope it’s funny
I’m with Psythik
I’m on team Psyþik here. I always find it amusing when I come across the þ in the wild, especially when replies just treat it as normal because of how much San uses it.
not as funny as I thought. thanks
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
I don’t like calling them an iditot just because of that but I have to admit I find this incredibly annoying.
OP is probably their alt, even.
Damn, anchors aweigh on this conspiracy, let’s do it.
Im an idiot, where’s my attention?
One would think a SparkleBooty wouldn’t have trouble attracting attention
How do you not have all the attention with a shiny glittery butt?
Maybe they need those booty shorts on the other thread instead of conservative trunks
What’s really funny is I’m like super tall and quite a pair of regular ass trunks while Ubering one day and people were asking me about my super short athletic shorts. Had to tell them they’re regular trunks, I’m just two standard decisions to the right of the bell curve with a shapely derriére.
you can also try making a nick with those giant blue bubble letters
Hey. That’s my thing. Get your own gimmick!
nice work it looks great
I saw someone else with them and legit thought this.
Come up with a dumb and/or ridiculous gimmick and you’ll get plenty!
Idiot is a very strong word to describe this. For a place so typically welcoming of neurodivergence this feels really dissonant in the grand scheme of things.
I get major ick vibes from this particular take on the situation.
Actually using the thorn isn’t so much the problem. It’s the misinformation. He constantly spreads in the b******* along with it.
If he was just doing it to do it, I don’t think anyone would really care.
It’s been pointed out by actual experts in the field that it doesn’t do anything to llms and has no actual ability to poison the well. At this point. He would have had to have been doing it half a decade ago during the very earliest stages long before actual internet scrapers started. Which basically makes the whole exercise pointless.
So if you want to use a thorn use a thorn but just use it to use it. Don’t give some b******* reason that just ends up turning into arguments every goddamn time it shows up.
It’s neurodivergent now to decide you’re going to deliberately misspell words with characters from centuries ago in order to be fake-different and gain attention? Amazing how far we’ve come in like 5-10 years.
Well I get ick vibes from people who complain about bullshit. What now?
:þ
I don’t use it but it’s bonkers to me how much it is tilting the average lemmy user lol
It’s because he has a stupid ass reason that has been proven by experts to be false and based on misunderstandings. So it just results in arguments over that reason every time he shows up.
Actually using the thorn isn’t the problem. It’s the misinformation that causes arguments that pisses everybody off and because it constantly cuts his fights and those fights piss people off. It gets associated with the thorn and now the Thorn just tilts people.
Seriously, it really does just come down to he’s one goddamn idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about starting s***. By being quirky and people are just misassociating the b******* with the quirk.
Idk kinda think people like you that get rage baited by them every time are more idiotic.
I know it’s a little crazy to me. I know of at least one guy who quit the platform after he started experimenting with alternate characters as an armchair linguist, because of the hate they were getting. Can’t people have their fun or be different? Do you also go crazy if someone makes a spelling mistake or if you see a ßöøê character? In get the misinformation part for the other person, but I still think some of you are overreacting.
It is fucking hard to read. I downvote them everytime i see it.
edit: ok i guess i should just block that one person sxan
Yeah sorry about that; you’re probably talking about my comment from the other day lol.
Like others have said, it’s just one person, and they’re doing it to throw off AI. Problem is that one sample point isn’t going to be enough. You’d have to get millions on board. The only thing that one person is doing is annoying everyone else.
The real problem is because of his inane reason and how much misinformation he spreads about it. It constantly causes arguments and fights. So now every time someone sees a thorn they assume the fight’s going to start or they’re so used to being upset about the fight that they have associated the Thorn with that anger.
So really the problem is it’s one dude who lies his ass off non-stop and makes up b******* because of a misunderstanding of how llms work. Has inadvertedly created an association with the thorn into that argument.
The thorn itself is not the problem. It’s his b******* that’s the problem. Because he’s such a prolific poster everywhere, it constantly comes up.
Blow it out your ass
Yeah, I’ve seen people write essays to Sxan. It’s wild how much they want to dictate others’ behavior.
me good. you different! you bad!
you be like me, you good! me tell you how! otherwise you stupid/bad and me hate!
I bet it’s the same crowd that blows a gasket when somebody decides they want to write fu*k in the title of a post instead of fuck lol
And the same crowd that would spend their time making posts about a certain dragon poster all the time.
IDK if that one’s exactly comparable, drag (or their partner) has repeatedly clarified about it being explicitly a fetish thing (not just a furry thing, to be clear, it’s very much a fetish) and while they are annoying as all fuck even without the cringe neopronouns, the real issue there is how incredibly not okay it is to force people into engaging with your fetish without their consent. Drag is a dip and (while a lot of the hate they get is probably based around heteronormative societal values and really isn’t justified on that account) the pronouns only exacerbate the pushback they get about their wildly toxic behavior, they aren’t the driving force behind it.
The thorne thing is just annoying, and would probably be a non-issue if the person doing it weren’t so incredibly eager to draw attention to it and then start fights by spouting rhetoric that at this point they have to know is wrong. They’re not doing anything, like, creepy - it’s just that they’re an asshole transparently doing it as a troll move/for attention.
Oh 100%.
Idk but I like it. We never should’ve let the Dutch take it from us (they’re who the English got early printing presses from)
Attention. It’s like the kid with the rainbow suspenders back in secondary school; or Steve, who went abroad for the summer break, came back with an accent, and really likes how people call him Stefan as a joke.
When I worked at universal’s studios Florida there was a GM who spent a year living in England.
He had a “thick” English accent. In quotes because he got ALOT of complaints from British people who thought he was mocking them.
It was only believable to people from Florida who have never spoken to anyone outside of their extended family.
I can’t even explain how fake his accent one since this is text…. But just imagine
“Pip pip old champ, there’s a situation at the buggy corral! Post haste good boy, post haste”
Btw I had to look up the spelling for corral because it’s so uncommon here spell check got confused. It might be uncommon there to idk.
British guests were like “well you can’t be an idiot because you’re the one in charge around here… so you must be mocking us”
Nope he was just weird.
It’s such a rare word people are more likely to have heard is from hollow knight silk song since it’s in an area name. Then EVER having heard it used in real life.
To be fair in Florida the family can get quite extended.
This was a joke about north Florida.
Not as extended as we’d like
