Zompist Bboard Again

Looking at the main zompist.com page, I just stumbled across this pretty old piece:

http://zompist.com/spoke.html

If Europe had native Latin speakers in the Middle and Early Modern Ages, wouldn't that mean that, by the same logic, I'm a native English speaker? Were you raised bilingually in German and English? No, I started to learn English at 10. Which is probably not that much later than when medieval Europe...

Depends on the council (and public schools keep their own timetable) but I checked the website for my local council and their summer term ends on the 24th of July. (Half-term is on the 27th of this month and goes through to the 3rd.) Thank you. I had been wondering if people might be kept from voti...

If Europe had native Latin speakers in the Middle and Early Modern Ages, wouldn't that mean that, by the same logic, I'm a native English speaker?

And the election has been set for July 4th. (IMO it's one of the more questionable features of the British system that the Prime Minister gets to make a campaign speech in the same announcement in which he says when the election is.) Serious question: When do the summer vacations, err, I mean, holid...

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 6:12 am I seem to have mislaid some fairly important documents.

Update: Found 'em!

I seem to have mislaid some fairly important documents.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Mon May 20, 2024 4:19 pmFever.

Get better!

zompist, I mostly agree with your points here, but one small nitpick. This is a red herring, but the Nazis never won a majority. They had 33% in November 1932 (but Hitler was named chancellor anyway, as a result of negotiations with the conservatives). The election of March 1933 was not free, but ev...

Thank you!

What should, theoretically speaking, happen if an object that has a number of ants on it is brought to a different place, a place that is very far away - at least by ant standards - from the ants' original colony? Let's assume the ants are all workers, with no queens, drones, or larvae among them. W...

Observing horrible attitudes in someone you care about a lot must be really tough. Commiserations.

Can you even be precise about how many registers a language has? I would have thought whether a language has, say, three or four registers is a matter of interpretation.

Oh my. Sorry to hear that, doctor shark.

doctor shark wrote: ↑Fri May 17, 2024 12:03 pm Start date in Luxembourg got delayed to 15 August due to the slugs at the HR not getting me the documents I need to apply for the residence authorization! [insert snarling noises]

That's messed up. [joins in the snarling]

keenir wrote: ↑Fri May 17, 2024 7:38 amand comparisons to Latin just reinforced that, as I knew it was a liturgical language, but I also knew that, in most books that were written in Europe had at the very least their titles in Latin.

But Latin still had to be learned, often together with reading.

You often hear that from people who aren't exactly progressive luminaries on feminism or LGBT rights themselves. The phrase "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" proves to be more and more true. I was really thinking of conservatives. Not that left-leaning folks are entirely blameless,...

Does anyone know enough about the situation in Ireland to make an educated guess about how big the risk is that the far right actually gets somewhere in the next Irish election?

Wow, thank you for the work that went into that!

Thank you!