Zompist Bboard Again

It has a nice font, too.

But English is a long way from Arabic - Every Arabic word has a basic meaning, a second meaning which is the exact opposite of the first, a third meaning which refers to either a camel or horse, and a fourth meaning that is so obscene that you'll have to look it up for yourself. This is not too far...

To quote someone else: "Yesterday's Man for Tomorrow's Future!".

Man in Space wrote: ↑Thu Nov 09, 2023 5:46 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 5:19 pm

sasasha wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 4:13 pm And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

Wear a hard hat!

Is it…is it literal rock music

(drumroll)

Obstruent consonants: an endangered species?

Why is it called "reduplication", which implies three or four of something, and not just "duplication", which implies two, when the vast majority of instances of it involve something being (more or less) doubled? We must be told!

mocha wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 4:30 pm It will work in the next update of Project Alice!

Is this something I should know about?

And that's why I have great difficulty coming up with case endings. I have a lot of morphological, phonological, and aesthetic constraints. I know what you mean. It often feels like 90% of the problems in my conlangs arise from having such finicky requirements in those areas. Me too, plus a good de...

I recently found myself wondering: "historically, in a group of N people of the same birth gender from the same geographical area, how many shared their first names?". After a bit of searching I found this , which contains the rather remarkable statistic that in England and Wales around 18...

Here's Kate Bush's "Running up that Hill" in Early Middle English which some of you might enjoy. There are some other interesting covers there, too, such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in mediaeval Latin.

OK, "Semitic" was a stupid example . Please disregard it.

Here's a version you may not have seen; I don't know if it qualifies as "fantasy" or not.

I was wondering how languages without suffixing morphology, such as the Bantu and Semitic languages, form acronyms, if at all, given that there are only a limited number of initial consonants. Does anybody know?

Bear in mind that he has to avoid offending the most important people in any election campaign: the owners of the right-wing newspapers.

On the other hand, I'm sure you recall xkcd's warning about standards . Oh yes; I remember it very well from the time when I asked about harmonising the syntax of SCAs.. But I'm not trying to create a standard here, just wondering if there already is one, or anything like it. The answer seems to be...

Most IPA letters are variants of Latin letters, and could be ordered immediately following the basic Latin letters they are derived from. IPA letters which cannot easily be reduced to Latin letters that way, such as the glottal stop, may be placed at the end of the alphabet. This is what Pullum and...

I was thinking in general terms, not for a particular language. Unicode order isn't helpful, as WeepingElf points out, since it would be nice to have, for example, <ɛ> after <e> and before <f>. I know it's not that difficult to come up with such an ordering. The Phonetic Symbol Guide by Pullum and t...

Is there actually such a thing, which (to pick a totally random example of the top of my head) one might pass an argument to a string comparison function such as one would use in a sort? My researches so far seem to suggest "no", but perhaps one of you knows better.

Marxists have been predicting the collapse of communism for 175 years; with that track record, one should, as the Bayesians say, examine one's priors. You do mean "capitalism", of course? :D Yep. They look about the same on the page. :P And thus is Horseshoe Theory vindicated.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Oct 03, 2023 2:29 pmMarxists have been predicting the collapse of communism for 175 years; with that track record, one should, as the Bayesians say, examine one's priors.

You do mean "capitalism", of course?