Zompist Bboard Again

Does the investigation into Boris Johnson mean it's already decided that he'll be kicked out? If not, why isn't the process public? Context: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-45130532 Boris is too popular, and thus too valuable to the Conservatives, to actually be kicked out. Expect a slap on the...

The Indo-Aryan migration in Mitanni is associated with the spread of a material culture thought to be Proto-Armenian to Mitanni. I thought the ancestors of the Armenians were believed to still be living in Anatolia at the time the Mitanni were in their heyday. Nobody really knows anything about the...

In sequences of three words where the middle word can contract with either of the other two, is it known if there are any factors which govern which contraction is actually used? As an example, consider "you aren't" versus "you're not"; the first seems more natural to me, but th...

I don't think we know enough to say, yet. However, given that Indo-Aryan is attested in Syria a thousand years before it's attested in India, and given that IA-associated cultures are present in Syria and Turkey centuries before the first cultures commonly associated with IA in India appeared, I thi...

Speaking of regional accents, I recently finished binge-watching TNG, and I have a curiosity about a certain feature of Patrick Stewart's accent. He has a very prominent [æ] vowel in places where even as an American I'd expect [ɑ]. Anyone know if this is part of his native accent (Wikipedia says he...

There are three elements here: - having six limbs - having a centaurid limb plan (four legs, two arms) - having a centaur body shape (vertical trunk, horizontal torso) On the first: we shouldn't expect hexapody to be common. It's a terrible idea. Large six-limbed animals will be out-competed by four...

Partay and bizzay are intensified/ironic forms. But people don't ironically intensify tendencies that don't already exist... That's why I said it has leaked into slang - 'partay' is just a word with final /eI/, but it's a word with final /eI/ because it's imitating people saying 'party' with a lowe...

Pronouncing final /i/ as [e] is primarily a singing thing in NAE, not something in normal everyday speech. It's at least part of an American English stereotype, even if it's not true - something people do when putting on an american accent. It's also leaked out of that into slang, at least for the ...

Today I heard "YouTube" as a count noun meaning "video available on YouTube". (E.g. "There's a YouTube you can watch.") Interesting. I've only heard "a Youtube" to mean "a Youtube channel". I think I'd also be ok, though, with it meaning a youtube v...

I recently got given a book called "Sign Language": it's amusing signs sent in by readers of the Telegraph. They span a range, actually. Lots of giggles about "fart" being a word in other languages; some of the standard Chinese menu stuff. Some witty advertising, some culture cla...

... I'm not going to get into a sentence-by-sentence fight, but to point out a few things: - I didn't say Labour weren't bigoted; of course not caring about Jews doesn't preclude having negative opinions of them. The point was the lopsidedness of the effect: one side are much smaller but much more p...

The amusing thing in this case is that Labour doesn't actually care about Jews - they're an absolutely tiny share of the voting population anyway, and they all vote Tory anyway. [they don't, obviously. But 83% of them do. 14% vote Labour. This isn't a recent thing.] Indeed, while I don't think the p...

Well, the EU is a vast raft of agreements, many of which we really need. A No Deal would mean at least temporarily exiting those agreements (unless the EU blinks first) and perhaps then being able to renegotiate some of them afterwards. A hard brexit may take us out of the core political and economi...

You might enjoy Charlie Stross's predictions on what will happen in the likely case of a no-deal Brexit. Spoilers: nothing good. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-sinking-feeling.html#more There's also an article on May in this week's New Yorker : https://www.newyorker.com/ma...

Interestingly, the outcome in Mozerabic is "ht". Nobody knows what this means exactly*, and whether it's a different outcome, or an intermediate stage on the way to /jt/. *this is true of everything in Mozerabic. It turns out that recording an early romance language in the medium of a regi...

Hey, it's good to see you here! To enforce this, the Prime Minister had another cunning plan: calling all her ministers to Chequers, her house in the country (think: Camp David, but mediaeval), and demanded that they all agree to her plan. Why was this cunning? Well, she made clear that anyone who ...

Lots has been going on.* Most of it depressing/hilarious and of little importance. But there's a few concepts here that might be worth going over for outsiders and newcomers.... The big thing recently was the Prime Minister finally completing Brexit. After a year and a half, she devised a cunning pl...