I gave it a check. It's hard to take a lot of conclusions from a single word, but

• Quechua - kumar, khumara
• Rapa Nui - kuma porá
• Maori - kūmara, kūmera
• Hawaiian - ʻuala
• Tongan: kumala

This got to be at least two instances of borrowing, since either Rapa Nui picked another variant of the word to borrow or solved the issue with the ending consonant in a different way (by eliding it instead of adding a new vowel).

The Hawaiian cognate underwent /k/→/ʔ/ (spelled ʻ), so it's probably really old.

Based on that, if I had to take a guess: Polynesians contacted the Amerindians multiple times across the centuries, and it was kind of a big deal for Rapa Nui ones. Sadly a better analysis would need a bigger lexicon than a single word.

I do think that it was more than just a few small interactions, but I don't think that they happened in Rapa Nui island, or that they got the chance to develop an Amerindian minority there. I think that, instead, the Polynesians had small coastal settlements here in South America, used for trade.

So those 10% admixture would be like in your other hypothesis - mixed kids raised Polynesian.

The key is that what you said is true for the Polynesians, but not for the Amerindians - from the Polynesians' PoV the Amerindians were a big cluster of potential trading partners with exotic resources, but from the Amerindians' PoV it was just a small island in the middle of nowhere, that could be only safely reached by knowing how to navigate the oceans - and at least Andean Amerindians likely didn't know how to do it, as they were way more focused on land-based tech (terrace farming, road building, freeze-drying...).

I wonder if there was ever a minority NA population on the island alongside Polynesians

That's an interesting hypothesis and definitively worth checking, but I personally find unlikely that Rapa Nui had any sort of meaningful (in numbers) Native American minority - there's practically no material pressure to do so.

It's tempting to look for potential vocab exchange between Rapa Nui and (Quechua and Aymara). That could help dating the exchange with the Andes, as the lexicon stops following the lender's sound changes to follow the borrower's instead.

(Polynesian syllabic structure and small phonemic stock make this extra tricky though. For example, Classical Quechua /s ʂ h/ would probably end all merged into /h/, and you'd see multiple epenthetic vowels popping up.)

Even then I wouldn't be surprised if they contacted the folks up south, like the Mapuche. Specially as I don't expect the landing spot from a Rapa Nui → South America to be the best spot to start the opposite travel, due to sea currents.

Dependendo dos teus gostos, MATE. É um fork do GNOME 2, mantido por outro grupo de desenvolvedores. Muitos dizem ter uma interface antiquada, mas francamente: o MATE funciona bem, sem encher o saco. E sem a ladainha associada com o GNOME propriamente dito.

E sim, é altamente customizável. Inclusive há algum tempo atrás eu tava rodando um híbrido de MATE com o Xfce, e sabe que o djanho funcionou legal?

So moreso the German split happened around when Roma finally collapsed?

Roughly so. The date is mostly for reference though; you could argue that it happened even earlier, because even as far as 1 AD you already got some dialectal variation. To complicate it further, Standard German is slightly artificial, since it's the result of a written standard shared by speakers of different varieties. So we might as well argue that what's being dated is not the English-German split, but rather the split between English and those varieties that eventually formed German. (With then for example Dutch being the result of one of those varieties [Old Low Franconian] getting its own competing standard.)

But to the point: yes, Rome collapsing is a good reference, and directly tied to that.

Semantic drift always makes such a mess of cognates. One of my best examples of that is an etymological triplet in Portuguese:

• ⟨feitiço⟩ spell, witchcraft - inherited from Latin ⟨facticius⟩ artificial, made up
• ⟨factício⟩ artificial, made up - reborrowed from Latin ⟨facticius⟩
• ⟨fetiche⟩ fetish - borrowed from French ⟨fétiche⟩ fetish, in turn borrowed from Portuguese ⟨feitiço⟩

All three were originally the same word with the same meaning. Borrowing here, borrowing there, and now they're three different words with completely different meaning.

So here’s my point, assuming you’ve lasted this far. Modern German in fact split from modern English maybe around ~~800AD?

A good reference date would be 450 or so, when the Jutes, Angles and Saxons invaded Britannia. It's what created the geographical barrier between Germanic speakers, that allowed English to diverge considerably more from continental varieties (Frisian, Dutch, German "dialects" [actually local languages]) than it could otherwise.

For the French borrowings it's complicated because they didn't enter the language only once as a "nice set", but across centuries. And they weren't from a single Gallo-Romance variety but two (Norman and French).

And often the very fact that they've been borrowed changes the meaning. A good example of that is French ⟨porc⟩ pig, pork; it can be used for both the animal and the meat, but once English borrowed it as ⟨pork⟩ it was mostly used for the meat only, with then the old word ⟨pig⟩ being specialised to the animal.

I've checked a few newspapers in Spanish (El Heraldo, El Deber*, Clarín), and the total number of votes seems rather consistent with what the article linked in the OP says. Based on that I think that the hypothesis in the P.P.S. (sloppy post-processing) is probably incorrect, as multiple independent sources wouldn't be likely to retrieve the info from the same intermediary.

IMO the simplest explanation is the implicit main hypothesis (someone makes up the percentages, then apply them to the total # of votes, then round them down to the nearest integer). As in: fraud. Fairly common in the Americas in general, not just in Venezuela, just a bit too blatant for the traditional modus operandi (that involves stuff like: finding bullshit reasons to not count some urns, your grand-grand-grandma coming back from the grave to vote on your candidate, etc.).

*El Deber lists the wrong percentage for Urrutia, 42,2% instead of 44,2%. This looks like a typo, given that the total number of votes (4.445.978) is consistent with the other sources.

The nearest that I've seen was calling those aphorisms "revised"; as in, you created a revised aphorism with cats, based on the one using hands.

That said, if you don't mind a neologism, what about "re-aphorism"? Etymologically "aphorism" comes from the verb ἀφορίζω / aphorízō I set off, I demarcate, I put a boundary; you're basically doing that boundary/demarcation again.

Also that's a cute kitty :3

An algorithm, among the many other things they ruin, is causing a rubbish article in RPS.

I believe the actual creature must have been more pleasant to look at.

Agreed - they were probably way cuter.

I don't know if that artistic rendition - with thick legs, flat arms, and odd hairs - is beautiful or ugly. Probably both.

This is specially interesting because, to my knowledge, we barely know about dinosaur species built their own niches, like this. At most we know how they adapted themselves to already existing ones.

could we incorporate artwork over the flag like it happened with the Australian flag?

My main idea is to deface the flag, so I'd ask people to not integrate the artwork. But if you do integrate the artwork I'd ask people to leave it alone and focus on the flag itself, so it would be safe.

Frankly, ditto. And it's icky for me specially when people conflate country with culture, like those people rather consistently do.

And... like, I get that we [people in general] get spammed by our governments with ideology, in order to ditch all available identities that we have at our disposal, and adopt the country-based identity that benefits the government. It's more often than not fuel for oppression.

Will you organise a Matrix chat for this?

Now I will - that's a great idea.

I'm planning to do so when the next Canvas is announced, in 2025, as people will be a bit more pumped up to join than now. (For now I'm mostly gauging interest on the idea.)

When I do it, do you want me to ping you?

Due to the purpose of my post, I am focusing solely on the larger flags in the Canvas, a fact that you "conveniently" skipped past. And, instead of trying to proselytise my views, unlike you, I'm trying to gather people with common grounds, even with different views.

So I'll let my rambling against flags in general to another opportunity, and focus solely on the Canvas.

The point of flag is, that they are (usually) easier [to] coordinate, draw and restore.

In other words: they're boring and unoriginal, and take space of things that actually take more effort and cooperation to pull out.

I suppose they [who?] will alway[s] start with the flag because it is our culture but also define a drawing zone.

Both points are red herrings and you likely know it.

I disagree with any form of va[n]dalism,

Cut off the bullshit.

If you were actually concerned about vandalism you wouldn't be defending country flags at all, given that they're the major source of vandalism (more than the void).

Pick a timelapse of the canvas and see it by yourself.

but you may invit[e] them drawing their monument :)

Or alternatively I could tell them that their "monument" (pfffttt... holy fuck calling a dirty flag a "monument" is hilariously cringey) is taking off too much space, and gather other like-minded people to do it.

That is what I am doing here.

You're being at the very least disingenuous, if not worse, so I won't waste my time further with you.

Thank you, grant, and everyone who worked on this! I had fun.

I'd also like to thank the innumerable people who helped others out to complete their drawings - like The Dark Side of the Moon cover prism, or the Debian spiral.

I'm extra happy with how the Mander face and Megumin turned out. And yes, Megumin's feet kept me awake a whole night.

I think there should be size limits on flags. You can have national flags but these shouldn’t take up too much space.

I regret thinking about this a bit too late, but what if we* ganged up against the largest country flag in the canvas, whichever it is? We wouldn't even need to agree on what we should cover it with, as long as everyone places pixels over the same flag.

*"we" = anyone who doesn't want those big country flags.

I guess that those aren't seen often because they require the phonology and grammar to be already close to finished - or at least enough to know which constructions are used so often that get contracted.

That said I full agree with you, they're awesome when done right. They're when the conlang stops being a bunch of sketches in a book to become something living, at least in the mouths (or gestures) of imaginary speakers.

Since the phonology of my main conlang (Tarune) is finished, but the grammar is still heavily WIP, my only progress in this regard was creating a formal register vs. local pronunciations. Not quite what you're asking about, but close enough, so I'll share two examples here:

Hiatuses between words

In the formal register you're supposed to dissolve them with [h]. However, people in Central/Northern cities don't do this bother in quick speech. Example:

• Romanised: ⟨Sobeca ep Lorā⟩
• Phonemic: /su.bi.ca ip lu.ɾa:/
• Phonetic (formal): [sʊ˥.bɪ.cɐ hɪp lʊ˥.ɾä:]
• Phonetic (Central/Northern urban, quick speech): [so˥.be.cɐɪ̯p lo˥.ɾä:]
• Translation: "Sun and Moon"

And it's hard to represent in IPA, but Central speakers have a tendency to shorten the long vowels. They're still distinct from the short vowels, but in quick speech you're telling who's who by the quality, not by the quantity.

Rendering of voiced consonants

In the formal register, when a voiced consonant or consonant cluster is near a nasal vowel, you're "supposed" to nasalise it midway: a single consonant gets pre-/post-nasalised, and in a cluster only one consonant gets nasalised. In practice... well, only people in the coast do this in a natural way. The others either don't nasalise the consonant at all, or do it fully, like this:

• Romanised: ⟨Duamde⟩, ⟨ṭelsemd⟩
• Phonemic: /dwã.di/, /ʈil.sĩd/
• Phonetic (formal): [dw̃ɐ̃˥.n͜dɪ], [ʈɪl˥.z̃ɪ̃n͜d]
• Phonetic (C/N, informal but increasingly common): [dwɐ̃˥.ne], [ʈel˥.zẽn]
• Phonetic (Southern, #1): [nw̃ã˥.ni], [ʈil̃˥.z̃ĩn]
• Phonetic (Southern, #2): [nw̃ã˥.di], [ʈil̃˥.z̃ĩd]
• Translation: "Southern Wind", "45 days month/season"

So it's a lot like the Central/Northern speakers shifted the nasalisation to the right, while Southern speakers either spread it further or shift it left.

EDIT: ah, Southern backchannel ['u:˥˩ʔu]; typically spelled ⟨ōho⟩. This... interjection? has a weird story - it was initially used by cattle herders to direct their cattle. Eventually the usage spread towards humans too, to convey "are you following?"; and then as backchannel, to convey "I'm following it, go on".

Pigs are the original artist’s muse.

Well... that seems accurate, in the light of Ancient Greek slang. Like using χοῖρος/khoîros "pig" to refer to the vagina.

[Sorry. I couldn't resist being pedantic and vulgar at the same time.]