Zompist Bboard Again

A totally unrelated random musing: Have humans made more transistors, or more things which aren't transistors? I think transistors win out by a large margin. This took longer to find than I expected, but I think I have a candidate: viral particles in the Covid vaccines. First, let's look at the tra...

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...

These are just neutral and emotive restatements of the same thing. How so? (more precisely, how is superstratum influence the same thing as mindful borrowing with the intent to change one's native language in a specific direction?) What do you think superstratum influence is ? You're repeating a te...

We saw everything except the Louvre. The only thing we didn’t see was the Louvre. I agree that these sound good. So… yeah, maybe you’re right, and I’m overthinking these questionable edge cases. (It is something I tend to do when thinking about syntax.) Oh, you're not alone. Any sentence, or word, ...

People making naturalistic conlangs are, well, trying to be naturalistic. Often that means simulating natural changes. E.g. you take a word list, run it through some plausible sound changes, and see what havoc that does to your morphology. That in turn suggests changes to the syntax. All this is pr...

We didn’t see [only the Louvre]. ⇒ We only didn’t see the Louvre. Yet, the first sentence exists in surface structure with a completely different meaning! For you, that meaning is unambiguously different; for me it’s ambiguous, and can be the same under highly marked circumstances. But, apparently,...

Another point is that conlangs' grammars are created consciously and with clear intent, whereas natlangs' grammars just sort of evolve on their own. People making naturalistic conlangs are, well, trying to be naturalistic. Often that means simulating natural changes. E.g. you take a word list, run ...

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 ...

Other way around: what's happening in We only didn’t see the Louvre is Quantifier Hopping. We are planning to see only the Louvre. > We are planning to only see the Louvre. > We are only planning to see the Louvre. The trick is to note the semantics: what's limited is what we're seeing, i.e. the Lo...

Reviving this thread to mention an interesting observation about English quantifiers (discovered in the process of conlanging): 1. We only didn’t see the Louvre ⇒ It was only the Louvre that we didn’t see Under focalisation (I think this particular construction is clefting?), the quantifier seems t...

Right, makes sense! Is Elcaďináe a plausible option? Mmm, doesn't sound good. You could maybe get away with " soî Elcaďinî " (that is, eliding cimî ). Does Zaugu Mogemum work? I assume this is based on the place name Mogema. I don't like all the m's; I think Mogemen sounds better. Right -...

So from this, we could assume that having only one type of cone for normal daytime vision would be basically black and white vision but it would look different depending what the sensitivity peak and overall sensitivity curve for the single cone would be. Wavelengths outside the curve, no matter ho...

When do you guys think will AI be able to create fully fledged conlangs? I asked both Gemini and ChatGPT to create conlangs for me and while both were able to come up with a reasonably good list of sound changes, the overall result was not what I asked for (I asked for a descendant of Middle Englis...

I'll look at my notes but I'm afraid there's very little there. No worries ‒ you mentioned keyboardists ‒ I thought C.K. was a truckers’ magazine, am I missing something here? Heh, yeah... the initials stood for Contemporary Keyboard , later just Keyboard . Though this kind of silliness has been te...

Ah! You mentioned its name being related to the magazine but I don’t remember if there was more. What was it about keyboardists? I decided in the end that I won’t skip the next two days anyway ‒ perfect chance to lay out the modal system while we’ve got both a Verdurian- and a Kebreni-speaking musi...

Some quick reactions... There are two days until Ulian, and two more fameless small towns to spend my few remaining coins in – Zola and Cuendaya Kainei. I forget if I told you the metanarrative about the latter town, but it has a slight reputation for good keyboardists. Zevy – from Kebreni zeviḣ - l...

My main problem with the idea of time travel is that you wouldn't just have a few people trying to kill Hitler... ...you'd have hundreds, or thousands, or perhaps even millions of people trying to kill, or prevent the killing of, basically every major or minor historical figure. Time travel stories...

I think there’s a fundamental and very important difference: natural languages have evolved under the process of normal language transmission, whereas conlangs have not. Even collaborative conlangs have not undergone this process. It's true of most languages, but why is this fundamental or importan...

I also remember that I found out about this on a list of the most remote archipelagos on earth. What I don't remember is the usual name of the place, except that it starts with a K. I'm bad with names. It's only 7900 miles from the US, if you go straight down. (That is, it's one of the only bits of...

I’ll take that as my cue to take a left turn: to what extent is the repression/possibly genocide in Xinjiang/Uyghurstan an instance of settler colonialism? Like in Tibet, it’s systematic repression of an indigenous population that won’t cooperate with the CCP coupled with (that’s the important part...