Zompist Bboard Again

I spot a Nineteen-Eighty-Four reference in the words listed.

I have long been entertaining the notion that the impression that languages change faster in times of social upheaval than in times of social stability may be a mirage resulting from the conservatism of written norms which are only broken up and realigned with the spoken vernacular in times of soci...

Wikipedia is not an authoritative source here. :P David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language : "The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, but it does not acutally identify the boundary between Old and Middle English. It was a long...

Might the paper in question be Fenwick (2016) ? That's an interesting paper, thank you! Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author . Also interesting. The similarities between IE and Kartvelian may be due to Kartvelian also having been influe...

I fully concur with zompist here.

Right, begining of the Old English period , not language. It's not like the ol' Angles went to bed one night speaking Proto-Germanic and woke up the next morning speaking Old English. "English", "Old English" and "Proto-Germanic" are all labels we arbitrarily tack on a...

Getting a bit off-topic here, but a couple of interesting observations: One is that the Web is already filling up with AI-generated crap. When you feed an AI AI-generated stuff, quality goes way down. A metaphor I'd like to invoke here is the state of your water jar after you've been painting for a...

Indeed, substratum theories that don't even specify the substratum are cases of ignotum per ignotius and thus not particularly useful. What do you gain by saying, "Word X is from a substratum language, but we don't know which language"? Such a statement is not falsifiable and just a fancy ...

I feel sorry to hear that.

The points made in the back-and-forth between bradrn and Linguoboy illustrate fairly well why, while I absolutely don't support Israel, I'm not really interested in supporting the pro-Palestinian movement, either. No, I don't care if people think that that's the worst kind of bothsidism. When one s...

I have noticed an issue with Stifter's idea. The place names with the element *hal(l) do not all refer to sites where salt was produced by boiling brine, but also to salt mines (e.g. Hallstatt ). This doesn't strictly mean that Stifter was wrong (there may have been a sematic shift from 'crust formi...

This is not true I rarely ever agree with xxx, but they have a point there. Natural languages were created by human beings, after all, so you could interpret them as a form of collaborative conlangs. I think there’s a fundamental and very important difference: natural languages have evolved under t...

Mine too.

keenir wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2024 1:57 am Not really; yes, primates leaned into the development of color vision to better pick out ripe fruits...

Yep.

I like to call D&D "the MS Windows among the RPGs" - it is the market leader, and its design is inferior to many other RPGs as its advanced functionalities were added later to a primitive core and still don't work well.

I even seem to remember reading somewhere that D&D was initially marketed as a "wargame" and only latter called a "role-playing game". This is quite true: it started out as a table-top wargame, and the role-playing bits were shoehorned in later. I've replied to this where it...

Redirecting this discussion from the Venting Thread... I even seem to remember reading somewhere that D&D was initially marketed as a "wargame" and only latter called a "role-playing game". This is quite true: it started out as a table-top wargame, and the role-playing bits w...

Just that. RPG combat is boring, and I don't like stories where problems are solved with violence. Another way of putting this is that to most RPG aficionados, combat is about as central to roleplaying as scoring goals is to soccer. Trying to con my brother into doing an adventure with a bit more s...

I'd like to play tabletop role-playing games with some friends, and went to a RPG convention last weekend to meet some, but my experience there just confirmed what I have been feeling for long: most people who claim to play role-playing games really just play skirmish wargames, either abusing role-...

I'd like to play tabletop role-playing games with some friends, and went to a RPG convention last weekend to meet some, but my experience there just confirmed what I have been feeling for long: most people who claim to play role-playing games really just play skirmish wargames, either abusing role-p...