Nova Stilo: 3. The Article

In the beginning, Esperanto had two articles. The definite article ’la’, which is still with us, and the indefinite article, for which Esperanto borrowed the word for ‘one,’ ‘unu.’ After a while, people started dropping the indefinite article entirely. When it was felt necessary or useful, one would use the word ‘iu,’ which means ‘some.’

That the definite article stayed has good reasons, because it helps identify something as specific instead of generic. Sadly, every language thinks of things that need to be identified slightly differently and we are left with an article whose use is, in practice, relatively random.

Nova Stilo: 4. The Plural

In Esperanto, substantives and adjectives agree on number and case. “Oni ŝatas grandajn bluajn ĉielojn” - “One likes big blue skies.” This allows moving adjectives from their substantives for poetic effect and makes it easier to see which substantive an adjective belongs to. The downside (as in the sentence above) is a series of words with similar (or identical) endings.

Worse than just a sound issue, though, Esperanto borrows this feature from languages that share it, like German and Russian. Other languages do not have concordance between substantive and adjective. The probably most notable one of these is English, in which adjectives do not inflect at all. Where Esperanto says, “la bela granda kato” and “la belaj grandaj katoj,” English uses “the big beautiful cat” and “the big beautiful cats.”

Nova Stilo: 5. Gender

For all the wonderful things Esperanto has shown to the world, its handling of gender is a complete mess. This is mostly due to conventions of the 19th Century (when Esperanto was created), but also by the underlying model, which is the German.

In many languages, words themselves have a gender. This gender is not strictly related to function: In German, spoon, fork, and knife are masculine, feminine, and neutral respectively. Esperanto doesn’t have any of that, as doesn’t English, which makes it much easier to learn those two languages.

Nova Stilo: 5. Table Words

One of the best inventions of Esperanto was the regularization of the “correlatives” into a table. Words like who, where, when are clearly related to this and that and how in some form. Esperanto puts these words into a table that makes it both easy to know what one of those words means when seeing it for the first time, and to figure out the word without learning it.

Let us start with an example: “tio” means “that” as in “that thing over there.” It is composed of three parts: the letter t-, the middle -i-, and the final -o. t- indicates specificity, the middle -i- indicates the word class (“a table word”) and the -o ending that it’s about a thing. Knowing that the ending -u refers to a person, we now know that the word “tiu” means “that person over there.” Similarly, knowing that the prefix ĉ- indicates universality, we can guess correctly that ĉio means “everything”. You probably inferred by now that ĉiu must mean “everyone!”

Nova Stilo: 7. Adverbs

In many languages, adverbs have two very different functions that put them in conflict with each other. One function is to be an adjective to verbs, from which they originally get their name. The other is to modify entire sentences or sentence parts. You can see the difference in the sentences, “He laughed happily” vs. “Happily, he laughed.” In the first case, it’s the laughing that is happy. In the second, it’s the circumstance. On the other hand, in other languages, the same word is used for proper adverbs and adjectives.

Nova Stilo: 8. Abbreviations

Nova’s general attitude towards language is, “If you can understand it without confusion, it’s probably right.” We have seen this in action when dropping the accusative, plural endings, and the preposition after an adverb. It’s more general than that and encompasses a series of shorthands and abbreviations throughout the language.

The most visible and frequent example of it is the common form of the word, “and.” While the Esperanto version “kaj” is usually abbreviated with the first letter k, in Nova the last letter is used. Since j is written y in Nova, “this and that” is “ĉi tio kaj tio” in Esperanto and “hio y tio” in Nova. Of course, while it’s just an abbreviation, y is also the word for and in Spanish, but that’s mostly a coincidence.

Nova Stilo: 9. Additions

As we have seen in the article on correlatives, the basic idea in Nova is to take what is best about Esperanto and make it even better. Among the best ideas of Esperanto is its set of regular prefixes and suffixes the greatly simplify the vocabulary. Two really good examples of this are descendants and professions, respectively marked by the suffixes -id and -ist.

In the case of the former, a plethora of words indicating the offspring of especially animals are replaced (in Esperanto) by the name of the animal with the suffix -id. A kitten is a katido, because a cat is a kato. You can guess that a ĉevalido is a foal, while a chick is a kokido. A puppy is a hundido, a calf a bovido and so on. This works also with animals whose offspring doesn’t have a special name in English. A spider crawling, whatever its real name, is an araneido in Esperanto.

Nova Stilo: Introducing Nova

Hello beautiful people and thanks for stopping by! This post is to introduce Nova, a new style of Esperanto that tries to address the most common criticisms to this most widespread of conlangs.

If you know Esperanto or of it, you may know it has been spoken by millions of people (literally) for over a hundred years. It is a marvelous invention that stood the test of time, with a rich culture of writing and song, with a vibrant community of people the world over.

Threshold Chunking

The Problem

How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file?

This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Recreating the key from fragments is automatic and requires no further password or other. If you can find $m$ fragments and know which index they each have, you can recreate the key in its entirety.

Steamboat During the Bomb Cyclone

It was (and still is) an amazing snow season, one of those you can tell tall stories about to your grandkids surrounding the fireplace. But the crown of the worst storm of the many definitely goes to the one that dropped a blanket of white from Aspen to Chicago. It marked the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in Colorado, with some of the worst winter winds recorded.

What a better day to do a road trip? I collected my friends in Vail Valley, from which you can drive directly to Steamboat without going over the famously finicky Rabbit’s Ear’s Pass, and we decided to have a good time in the blizzard. To be fair to us, it wasn’t exactly that we planned to be in a blizzard: we simply had heard there was a storm system coming, the season was ending, and we wanted to all go to Steamboat. Changing the day invariably meant the trip was going to fall apart, so Bomb Cyclone it was.