News

News

by Alone Coder

Mr. Event has returned to ZX Spectrum with a new song.

Newart organized an interview with the creators of ATM-Turbo -
Dmitry Loktionov and Avtandil Dzhincharadze - at Yandex Museum.
The interview is being prepared for publication.

KOE made several updates to the official firmware of Pentagon
2.666LE. However, he could not repeat my record ( 57 MHz, but
with ZX-BUS failures).

I made another ATM2 on the board Terasic DE2-115, at 50 MHz.
Somehow I could not get 100 MHz on this Cyclone IV board. I am
doing something wrongly. I also could not run the SD-Card in
this project, although the card itself works in an example.

NedoOS core is updated to support long interrupt handlers. Some
points were shifted, but everything was recompiled.

Transman added MIDI music to Season of Sakura (as I guess, with
NS 's engine). He also released Robocop for NedoOS with sampled
sounds and videos.

LVD made shay (shut down AY) utility and ported several Z80
tests for NedoOS. Thanks to these tests, I fixed TV80, except
for some undocumented flags:
http://alonecoder.nedopc.com/p2666_fixdoc5_no5_59.zip

RGRTU-Film studio works again. Now one of my students from year
2013 teaches there game development.

As for me, I continue to write a Wolf 3D -like game.

During these months, I was mostly engaged in linguistics:

• the next changes and updates in already published book "Basic
  vocabulary of Proto-Balto-Slavic" (the current version is always
  on my website:
  http://alonecoder.nedopc.com/ling/PIE/index.html ).
• collected 151 Latin borrowings in Proto-Slavic (to date, only
  60 were published).
• together with M. S. Yastrebov-Pestritsky and D. A. Rusakov, I
  wrote a paper on Pannonic language of I-V centuries. This
  language mathes our views in Proto-Slavic of that period.
  However, the only known material is toponyms, personal names, 8
  to 11 words with indicated meanings, and 35 words with contexts.
• I did a report (from the name of our factory) on a conference
  in Ryazan Politechnical Institute about Planned Russian language
• a method for teaching Russian as a foreigh language. For this,
  I updated the adaptation of "Cat's House" by Pavel Shumil to the
  first level of Planned Russian (less than 400 morphemes to
  learn).
• I actively included Iranian data in the working table with
  Core Pro-Indo-European reconstruction (the same link), for which
  I have found a lot of dictionaries. Previously the table
  included a single Iranian column, that did not even cover all
  the Core PIE Swadesh list. But the Iranian languages are almost
  as diverse as Balto-Slavic languages. So I extracted Western and
  Eastern Iranian languages, and added a lot of data, so each of
  them separately covers all the list. The I divided even more and
  found: 1. well-documented Persian and Ossetian (separately) also
  kept all the PIE words of the Swadesh list, if count loosely. 2.
  Avestan language (very significant for reconstruction) contains
  a number of words that don't appear in Western Iranian,
  Ossetian, and Pamir languages. 3. Several unique Avestan words
  are kept in Sogdian-Yaghnobi, Ormuri, and Parachi, but each of
  these does not have a good dictionary! When I found that, I
  started to search for the speakers of these languages. The
  results were moderate, because the languages are dying and risk
  to disappear completely in the next generation. I found one
  Ormuri speaker in Pakistan. Together with him, we collect
  information for over 2 months - already 500 words, hundreds of
  examples, two texts and several audio recordings. Sadly he does
  not have a computer, so he cannot edit tables, he only can
  answer questions and make recordings. Other Ormuri speakers were
  not communicative.
• in the end it appeared that Yaghnobi, Ormuri, and Parachi kept
  the Avestan Swadesh words (in the same meanings) in 70% cases,
  and the other Iranian languages (I checked Tajik, Ossetian,
  Pashto, Yidgha-Munji, Wakhi, Shughni, Sariqoli, and Yazghulami)
• only in 50% cases. If we use Swadesh's quotient ( 14% changes
  in 1000 years), this means direct descendants in the first group
  and independent Iranian branches in the others. This means that
  Avestan has split from the main Iranian stem, not from some
  branch of it. This also explain the unique Avestan words.
• I made the same counts for Bactrian. It appeared that
  Yidgha-Munji matches the direct descendancy from written
  Bactrian (II-IV centuries), but Pashto has split off before the
  common era.
  From all this we can make many conclusions about the history of
  Iranian peoples. Unfortunately, I could not yet find how Pamir
  languages appeared, and Ossetian, too. Although I made a lot of
  work, contacted Ossetians and read books about them.

If anyone is interested in the dictionaries and other
literature, I can share them. I also keep contacts with a couple
of institutes.

Also, from the name of our factory, I participated in all-Russia
team chess tournament (I was third strongest at the factory,
according to the internal tournament, although I am playing
worse than 2 years ago). We got no place, but received 2000
roubles from the factory.