I think the only criterion is the presence of a person who was able to create an interesting and suitable problem for the target language and submitted it for inclusion in the IOL. :)
Also keep in mind that this is a link only to the sample problems. The actual problems by year had at least Old Indic and Sanskrit poetry: https://ioling.org/problems/by_year
Maybe also others I couldn't see. Also most probably (some/many? of) the national olympiads in linguistics for the participating countries in the IOL had some problems for Indo-Aryan languages at some level (local, regional, national) over the years. On this website we only see the problems for the international competition. I expect that at some point there will be more languages from more language families.
When you installed it, `make` changed your global .gitconfig file and added the respective Git aliases to it, so that Git would know what to do and not complain about invalid commands.
Side note, but I don't get the part about Škoda. They have been building cars literally since the onset of the 20th century and have been a well established producer for a long time before the 90s.
Or was there some kind of consumer boom for Škoda vehicles in the US/Canada/Australia/the UK, or wherever you are from, that I never heard of before?
Skoda were the subject of many terrible jokes in the 80s and 90s, thanks to poor reputation and reliability of earlier decades. They were so cheap, but far more basic, compared to the better known makes.
They started to get OK reliability in the 80s which meant they started to become popular as value for money motoring. They got pretty common on UK roads. Popular and reliable enough to become a common choice for private hire use. Which as many at the time noted, meant Skoda had the last laugh.
The price advantage faded after the VW takeover, but they remained popular as private hire cars.
See also my reply to the sibling, but in the country I come from they were well known maybe from some time between the 20s or 30s, and they were generally always regarded as a good quality brand. Usually not as prominent as others, but still decent nonetheless.
I didn't know that until the last decade or so they were seen as poor vehicles elsewhere, to the extent as to become the target of jokes. Thanks for the context – it definitely helps me understand better how this fits into OP's point.
Not sure how much of the joking was simply down to price as they were a lot cheaper than others, or how much was build quality vs reliability.
The context of the era helps too, no 70s and 80s mass market cars were without a weak point or six, and jokes on the back of those.
Eastern Bloc makes had poor consistency, technology, and sometimes reliability compared to others. Applied to Lada, Skoda, MZ motorcycles etc. Simple tech also meant simple to fix of course.
Italian makes were beautiful but rusty before even getting to the showroom, with just as poor a rep for reliability and build.
Japanese makes didn't rust, but they couldn't weld and used bolts made of soft cheese pretending to be steel.
British and French? No one knew, they were on strike. ;)
Outside the eastern block countries, Skoda was the punchline of jokes and generally considered one of the worst cars you could buy up until the mid-late 90's when they became the Volkswagen budget brand. It's really only since the early 2000's that Skoda became a brand people wouldn't be embarrassed on being seen in.
This explains it. I come from a former Eastern Bloc country and Škoda was well established here well before the former regime overtook power after a short occupation by the Red army. Also, they were definitely not unknown in (parts of) Germany from very early on, although I guess not as prominent as in countries who didn't build their own cars, for obvious reasons.
I never knew that until very recently they had such a bad reputation in other Western countries. Thanks for clearing this up for me!
Actually that's mostly the Lada that were the subject of many jokes, such as "how do you double the value of a Lada in 5 minutes? By filling up". "What's a Lada on the top of a hill? a miracle. several Lada on a hill? a weird place for a Lada factory. lots of Ladas on a hill? A landfill" etc.
Also, on an unrelated note, I would never ever suggest novice users to blindly just give `chmod +w` to random locations. This is only marginally better than the `chmod 777 <root-folder-name>` that used to be so spread out in many (e.g. PHP-related) tutorials a decade or two ago.
Agreed, though perhaps it is just a bad example. I could imagine a situation where a single line of advice could be useful outside the realm of filesystem security or disk usage.
A piece of information which I missed in the article: ‘yoghurt’ was an almost completely unknown word in Bulgaria until as soon as 2-3 decades ago. We call the substance „кисело млѣко“ (kiselo mlěko)[1] which literally means ‘sour milk’. Nowadays there are some products that are commercially available and are denoted as ‘yoghurt’ (Bulg. „йогурт“), but the word still seems somewhat unnatural for most Bulgarians and may not be completely understood by some people (e.g. older, from the countryside, etc).
I am not a specialist, but the products that we in English call ‘yoghurt’, ‘soured milk’, ‘buttermilk’, ‘kefir’ are somewhat related and as far as I can understand from my cursory research now, the former two fall under the formerly shown term in Bulgarian, while the latter two are often referred to as „мътен“ (măten), „мътеница“/„матеница“ (mătenitsa/matenitsa), „бутаница“ (butanitsa) and a few other regional names. Kefir is also often just called that way if it was imported, e.g. from Russia or somewhere in the Caucausus–as is usually done with other things (sometimes also with foreign-origin yoghurt). ‘strained yogurt’ is „цедено кисело мляко“ (lit. the same), and there are also other milk products some of which I am not entirely sure how to explain since I don't know how exactly they are made, e.g. „катък“ (katăk–something like a milk-based spread; essentially the same name as ‘qatiq’ in many Turkic-speaking regions, but AFAIK the same name can refer to relatively/quite different things from place to place), „таратор“ (‘tarator’–a cold soup, similar to ‘ayran’ with some specific added ingredients to it), „сух таратор“ (lit. ‘dry tarator’, similar to Gr. tzatziki and Tur. cacık) and a number of others which people who are better aware of the Bulgarian culinary traditions would've probably mentioned here.
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Following is my completely wild guess, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find reliable sources to either prove or disprove it, so take from it whatever you want. Will be glad if somebody could chip in with more knowledge.
The Bulgarian term for yoghurt (as already said also not unknown in other South Slavic languages, but the single most–and virtually universally–used term in our language) seems closely related to the old Greek type of yoghurt «οξύγαλα», which literally means the same (‘sour milk’). It was not uncommon for Bulgarians to translate terms from Greek during Medieval times, but they just took the Turkish word for all new things that came during Ottoman times, with the most prominent examples that remain nowadays all being foods (e.g. various plants or cooked dishes). Romanian features similar ways to refer to yogurt (although ‘iaurt’ seems more common nowadays), but I don't know how many of them are just calques, regional variants, or what the origin of each is in particular. What is more, Albanian also has its own–although seemingly unrelated–words for yogurt, buttermilk and various other milk products. This leads me to think that ‘yoghurt’ was one of the things that was known on the Balkans long before the Ottoman conquest and the Slavic speakers back then knew it–or something essentially similar–quite well (in stark contrast to another beloved milk product made out of yogurt: „айран“, the name of which comes directly from the Turkish ‘ayran’).
P.S. As of now the Wikipedia article on the bacteria mentioned in the article[2] says the following: “Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus can be found naturally in the gastrointestinal tract of mammals living in Bulgaria, but one specific strain, Lactobacillus bulgaricus GLB44, is extracted from the leaves of the Galanthus nivalis (snowdrop flower) in Bulgaria as well. The bacterium is also grown artificially in many other countries.” It is yet to be given a proper citation, but this is the anecdotal information I have heard on numerous occasions circulated in Bulgaria as the source for the naming as opposed to the country of origin of the person who discovered it. I don't know which version–if any–is correct, though.
P.P.S. There are also other milk products in Bulgaria with traditional names:
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[1] Official writing nowadays is „кисело мляко“, but I have left the former spelling on purpose because this is etymologically more informative and makes a more visible connection to all Bulgarian dialects as well as to all modern South Slavic languages (also the ones from the western branch), where ‘kiselo mlijeko’ is also not unknown.
The Romanian equivalent for „кисело мляко“ is „lapte bătut” (buttermilk, this the name found on products in stores) or „lapte acru” (sour milk, regional, less commonly used) or „lapte prins” (bound milk, regional, even less commonly used; refers to sour milk becoming thicker than regular milk). The latter names are what your Romanian grandmother would call it, depending on the region. There is also „lapte covăsit” which is even less commonly used. It's derrived from the Ukrainian „квacити” which refers to the process of mixing a bit of „covăseală” (starter culture in the form of sour cream or sour milk) in regular milk in order to make sour milk. This name has been lately promoted by a dairy company in Covasna county because it sounds like its name.
Sour milk that you find in stores is usually a drinkable yoghurt that has more acidity than regular yoghurt. A good product would be a thick yoghurt drink with the consistence of a thick smoothie that's unevenly mixed and has a more acidic taste (much like ayran or kefir). Not to be confused with „iaurt de băut” (yoghurt drink) products which are a watered down variant of regular yoghurt with a boring, nondescript taste.
Thanks for the thorough explanation! I can't edit my answer above anymore, but I upvoted you.
This actually reminds me that there is also „lapte bătut“ in Bulgarian („бито мляко“, meaning is the same: ‘beaten milk’), and a similar trend for „iaurt de băut” („йогурт за пиене“, again the same ‘yoghurt drink’). I think it is the more literary variant of the „мътеница“-branch above since all those names for buttermilk there are from different regions.
I've seen that we have a lot of things, esp. foods or basic day-to-day phrases, that can literally be translated word for word and mean the same in Bulgarian–or South-Slavic in general–and Romanian, and often Albanian and/or Greek (and there are good historical reasons for that), so I was kind of surprised about how I interpreted the things I hastily found above. But thanks to you everything comes into place now. :)
I love that you used the old "yat" character that is missing from modern Bulgarian (since the reforms in 1940s if I recall correctly[0]). I see it on the coat of arms of the city of Sofia[1], though, and it makes me happy: Расте, но не старѣе (grows but doesn't age). Modern Bulgarian would be: Расте, но не старее.
Countless Bothans have fought and died over literal centuries to free Cyrillic from this godawful and pointless letter. You should both be ashamed of yourselves!
Yes, I plead guilty and am utterly ashamed of myself. My usage above was totally misleading when we consider the way people write nowadays. :)
In Bulgaria, the letter was first briefly removed in a reform between 1921 and 1923 and then removed by the new regime after the end of World War II. It was surrounded by controversy for a long time because in general there is one single way a word can be read in Standard Modern Bulgarian–save for the location of the stress–, which was not the case for this letter. In addition, prior to its official introduction after Bulgaria regained autonomy–and then independence–there were multiple ways to denote the sounds it used to stand for.
But for the sake of etymology I find it quite useful in a lot of places since it pops up in common but generally regular vowel changes across Slavic languages.
Yes, it was a БЗНС thing at first. There were three major reforms in the way Modern Standard Bulgarian is written:
0. no official codification (before 1899; basically everybody wrote as they pleased and there were some differences between various authors); at some point there was a mostly standard way to write in Bulgarian, though, which was introduced and used by the precursor of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and various other institutions; https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дриновски_правопис
3. last and so-far successful modernisation, since it wasn't succeeded by anything else yet (1945–nowadays). It was partly inspired from the previous attempt and partly by Lenin's reforms in Russian from 1918, and not from other Bulgarian or e.g. Serbian attempts, for whatever reason. https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Правописна_реформа_на_българск...
Yes, thanks. I edited my text above and removed all references to ‘oxidised’; also for Bulgarian since the words are related, but not the same: „кисел“ / «όξινο» (sour/acidic) vs „окислен“ / «οξειδωμένος» (oxidised). I don't know why I left them in the first place as they were quite confusing in that context.
https://gpodder.net allows you to synchronise various (partially/non-overlapping) podcast lists to multiple devices and easily add new podcasts you don't find on the service's website. So you can actually just set up compatible podcast clients on the devices of your parents and let them enjoy new episodes without even bothering them with the actual links and the whole process of subscribing to new feeds (unless when they explicitly want to do it either through the client or manually on the website).
I never touch the DDG settings, but I often search in about a dozen different languages, and I get great results. The rare times I try to find something in another search engine, including Google, I get worse (or not better at best) results there, even for quite obscure topics, so I guess everything is user-specific.
I am not even a regular Emacs user (sorry, on the Vim side for now), and I think Orgzly is a great note-taking app. Actually the best one I've tried so far. It's true! :)
Also keep in mind that this is a link only to the sample problems. The actual problems by year had at least Old Indic and Sanskrit poetry: https://ioling.org/problems/by_year
Maybe also others I couldn't see. Also most probably (some/many? of) the national olympiads in linguistics for the participating countries in the IOL had some problems for Indo-Aryan languages at some level (local, regional, national) over the years. On this website we only see the problems for the international competition. I expect that at some point there will be more languages from more language families.