Nesili and Hattili

Academia.edu has been sending me links to Bronze Age contact-languages, probably since showing interest in Hitto-Sumerian (with certain Akkado-Sumerian roots). Like this nine-year-old paper on Ugaritic-Hurrian, Hurro-Akkadian and Canaano-Akkadian.

This evidence serves to show how a foreigner would sound out another language phonetically. It also might illustrate the spread of languages across diplomatic and trade networks. How might languages accumulate loanwords in which direction?

The best paper in my opinion is still Petra Goedegebuure's 2008 paper on The Luwian substrate of Hattian. Many ancient languages are VSO (Semitic) or SOV. Among SOV were protoBaltic and Indo-Iranian (and German!); which all should point to Aryo-Baltic being SOV, and in those ancient times Mitannic Aryan. Italic and Anatolian also trended SOV suggesting this for the whole of protoIndoHittite.

It happens that paraSemitic Akkadian wasn't VSO; it was SOV or even OSV like Yoda. This is ascribed to Sumerian being SOV. The same has happened to fully-Semitic Amharic, following Cushitic as SOV. Apparently late Byzantine Greek returned to SOV not under Anatolian / Persian / Latin influence, as you'd think, but Turkish. (Boo!)

Once hattili was identified in the Hattusa archive, scholars have painstakingly identified its nouns and verbs based on bilinguals and whatever words in Hittite can be flagged as parallel. Goedegebuure p.146 notes that Melchert and Soysal in 2003-4 could count under thirty loanwords from Hattic into Hittite, total. The Hittites, who were ancestrally Nesians occupying Hattic cities like Hattus (and Sapinuwa and Nerik), fossilised Hattic, rather, into the civic rituals of Hattus and Nerik. It happens Hittites recorded that Hattus was, uh, cursed; by its conquerors, Pithana and Anitta. So those who were squatting in that city perhaps felt they needed to propitate its gods. The Kanesh-origin Anatolian Hittites didn't alter their own grammar to be more Hattic.

Oddly there's an exception to that: KBo 18.151. This is an Old Hittite ritual - and may even deserve to be called "Old Hittite" against nesili. Its grammar is atypical of Old Nesian. It looks more like Hattic should be. But were KBo 18.151 a mere translation, the archive should hold the original; and where translations do exist elsewhere, they're in pure Nesian. Soysal in 2000 argued that KBo 18.151 preserves the Anatolian Hittite dialect spoken around Hattusa by non-Nesians. After the conquest from Kanesh / Nesa, the "proper" language was imposed.

This works in reverse as well. If any Anatolian ever crept into Hattic ritual, the pious Hittites tried to purge such like modern Greeks refuse Turkish.

Hattic sentences for their part were caught, by the scribes, on the way between VSO and SOV. Goedegebuure notes that Hattic is a prefixing language. So the verb came first; Hattic was being forced into SOV. (Is Semitic prefixing? I suppose those taf'îl, mufa''al, and maf'ûl nouns, and the han- and al- definitive-articles; but those seem late, and we can point to suffixes, like Aramaic's emphatic-state. Although Aramaic had influence from late-stage Akkadian.)

All this should aid in telling the most vexing problem of Hattic: if it has any relation to other languages, as VSO not being IndoHittite nor Sumerian itself (nor Cushitic obviously). But it also is hardly Semitic. Causasian, Hurrian, Kaska...?

Space couscous

China was able to grow rice in its space station. Problem: what if there's no ... space. We're still working on inflatable habitats. Even tethered to large rocks or lava-caves, pressurised environments cost money.

Del Bianco et al. are researching dwarf crops in microgravity. At least to get started before available space comes online.

We Earthlings want this for efficient bases in the Arctic. Maybe down in caverns. But they seem serious about its space applications because that's Del Bianco's focus.

Make it rain

The granola animists whom Trump so-unwisely allowed into his coalition have a long history of blaming THE CORPORATIONS for the weather. No less a "light" as Viganò pinned the west Carolina floods on cloud-seeding. Every now and again we also hear of contrails as "chemtrails". Nobody tell them about greenhouse gasses.

In a page straight from PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores, the American Thinkers have spoken so their representatives must Do Something. The EPA is going to release a report.

Augustus Doricko has been all over the Right's spaces to explain what it is his company "Rainmaker" does. In brief: taking irrigation to the skies. If he drains water from a humid front in South Texas, they get water and Central Texas gets... less water. If Central Texas was suffering a drought his detractors would have a point.

The chemical used is a silver iodine salt. This for life is inert - or even antibiotic. Remember Stan Jones? that blue guy who ran on the Libertarian ticket in Montana 2002?

This Administration's most-recent sop to its base of paranoiacs was to investigate Jeffery Epstein. Y'all know how that went. As for Doricko: I dunno. I fear Zeldin is going to make a scapegoat of him.

Personally I'd scapegoat the Austin fire-department which wouldn't move resources to Kerr County. Because Climate Denial, and Equity.

BB(5+)

Alan Turing posited the state-machine in 1936 and we, programmers, are still living in his world. Think of a state-machine as a flowchart; we'll define the "order" of the machine with how many circles are in it. Esther/Ling Fu and Sarah Pan have a succint summary (pdf); lately youtuber "Up and Atom" has a video.

Alonzo Church proved that Turing Machines (TM) are equivalent to algorithms. So "language" means "possible input": the set of strings that the machine accepts. Programmers know the "machine language" as the possible instructions the running CPU can understand; in turn your program is in a language, which all those layers of dot.NET hopefully interpret as making sense, down to the machine-language. Your enduser sends more strings to that running program; these are in the language you've told your enduser will work on your program.

Turing's machine comes with its own mathematic, rather metamathematic, quirks. Fu and Pan start with the "Acceptance Problem". Say there's a "language" which includes every TM as accepts an argument ω. Yay recursion! Turns out, that language is "undecidable". That seems... obvious; an infinite set of infinite possibilities. A subset of this language is those with all TM as halt on ω. There's the Halting Problem: that's undecidable too. Hence why any decent interpreter forces call-stacks upon our recursive functions. Which adds more circles to your flowchart.

I'm not here to prove the above. I'm cutting a lot out because (1) I'm rushing to the good bit and (2) you should read Fu and Pan.

So: not all flowcharts halt, and you can't tell if the flowchart halts ahead of time. What about the flowcharts that take too long before halting? That's the pathologic case of the "Busy Beaver". A halting flowchart of order 1 halts at the first step OBVIOUSLY. A two-circle 'chart, through the two-circle "maze", maxes stepcount at BB(2): six. They call that stepcount "state shift". BB(3)=21.

BB(4) and BB(5) proved... harder. It turned out that finding BB(n) was uncomputable if not undecidable: there's no equation or algorithm for "public ulong BB(int n) {...return??;}".

I wonder beyond a certain n, pathologic arbitrary-shift can be pseudocoded for inclusion as circles in the chart. Thus making that BB(n) infinite, if countably so. Looks like ZFC.

At the time of writing, Fu and Pan and everyone else knew BB(5)≥47176870, since someone wrote a function for that, but nobody knew if that was the highest-shift function for 5-order. Just last year, it was proven. This was shown, also, through a Turing Machine: by the "interactive theorem prover" Coq, which since everybody hates laughter is now in v.9 called "Rocq" (what would Alan think??).

BB(6) is at least 10^^15. Nobody ain't solving that until some major breakthrough in metamathematics is made, not even by "quantum".

The Goldbach Conjecture, per "code golf addict", has a 31-state halting TM since reduced to 27. The solution of BB(27) is, then, the limit to how long to wait before the Goldbach Conjecture will grind either to a solution or be nonhalting. The solution - if it exists - will be the proof that Goldbach was wrong. Riemann, meanwhile, over 2016-20 was sitting at BB(744).

DRACO slain

DARPA at least isn't doing nuclear-propulsion anymore, having been halted for awhile. They believe that propulsion can be done chemically for the immediate missions they want to do; with aid from Hall Thrusters between LEO and MEO. DRACO was always kind of drastic for Earth-orbit tugs.

I don't know how this affects General Atomics. For long-reaching probes, nuclear-electric is fine. And fusion is coming.

Precision metal in spaaace

Today may as well be space day. Let's start with this piece from late last month: University of Florida bending metal.

The idea is to keep sending cargo in small packages, absent a working Starship as we are. Contrary to the fools at Issues and Insights, I recognise that SpaceX actually is able to reuse a rocket and a capsule. And they're still working the problem. Meanwhile LEO astronomers cannot count on Starship so, here we are.

Once in orbit, or maybe on some regolith-bearing rubble pile, the metal can be re-formed into the shape the astronomer wants. Obviating some need for Starship.

This metal-bending project is also DARPA, in need of some Ws since dropping their DRACO drive. They got use of the Marshall facilities to test in low-pressure.

Tarmod

I thought last Thursday was going to be slow but boy howdy, did a lot show up in my feed. First was Cardoza, "understanding Islam from the light of earliest Jewish Christianity". Before mine eyes had finished rolling, Paleojudaica delivered: Haggai Olshanetsky's "Zenobia", she of Palmyra = Tadmur. Christians remember this queen as a Jewish queen in alliance with Paul of Samosota, forerunner of the archeretic Arius and his emperors. Jews remember her as a persecutor, and refused converts from "Tarmod".

Jews of whatever denomination had inhabited Tadmur before the Arab Kingdom erupted in it. Several late Latin histories note young Gordian's death in Circesium, after Herodian quits; and his tomb. This burial was in scope for Eutropius and for John the Deacon's Epitome De Caesaribus. Here the Historia Augusta would inscribe the imperial cenotaph: in Greek, Latin, Persian, Jewish, and Egyptian. The HA / Eutropius / Epitome synopsis lately is considered Victor. Olshanetsky vouches for the HA plus, thus: Jewish names served in the XX Palmyrenorum legion, stationed at Dura-Europus.

So I cannot dismiss the existence of a "Jewish Christianity" in the Arab/Aramaic interface to which political adventurers might appeal. (I got yo' "understanding Islam" RIGHT HERE, Bozo.)

The Jews outside her anti-imperium might have sniffed her out even at the time. The Tadmuris were converting to Judaism under a "persecutrix". Olshanetsky must conclude that she was a heretic. Christians wouldn't accept Paul; Jews - from the Sasanian Iraq - couldn't accept Zenobia. "Tarmod" itself reads like a reversal of "Tadmur", as nonSemites write a word. And, in postZenobic text, the metonym stuck: יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ

I suspect these texts against Zenobia and her "Tarmod" arose when Paul's doctrine was dominant in that Roman Empire of the first Constantines.

Palmyrene Judaism has been termed "Hellenistic", by Jews and by their Protestant sympathisers; inasmuch as their text was not the Talmud. Olshanetsky dislikes the term. If I may - the Iraqis may have distrusted Palymra as Hellenist at the time. Zenobia was no amica of Rome; but her late husband had professed to be, and inflicted more damage to Iraq than to the Roman provinces (whence, after all, he was extracting rents). The Palmyrene coinage identified even more with Rome than with Greece. It's not like Semites cared, any more than Westerners cared about the Parthian / Persian distinction.

Later Iraqi Jews could see the Constantines reviving the Tadmur doctrine in a Christian dress. Their Father was monarchical; the Son was simply of some other substance, human and inferior. Their Talmud, compiled from the later 300s to the 600s, moved to a blanket ban on "Tarmod", a herem by any other name. By extension: to any "Jews" who got that way under the Constantines. Constantinople agreed fully, as John Chrysostom blasted what we'd call a "LARP" of Judaism.