Zompist Bboard Again

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...

So, to me, this suggests that there is a very substantial contingent of people who like to amplify accusations against Israel, but don’t seem to care much about other conflicts. And we must ask ourselves: why is this? You have a point, but this is also a bit disingenuous. 1) "Israel is no wors...

It's not that it is a Jewish ethnostate in and of itself but rather that it is a settler-colonial state where the settler part is going on right now , rather than being mostly well in the past (even though as commented, there have been abuses in, say, the US up to the very present, albeit on a far ...

/s/ is always weird phonotactically. Some say it's a vowel. You could (might? should?) treat the <i> in Mandarin <si zi ci shi zhi chi> (pinyin) as sibilant vowels. For sure, phonetically. Phonemically, like other aspects of Mandarin, it's a puzzle. By normal phonological principles I think we can ...

do we remember what a state is? it is generally understood to be the monopoly of violence over a territory: how about the other part? jewish here means an ethnicity [...] So, an ethnostate, a policy of the monopoly of violence being held by a certain ethnic group, presumably in its own interest, an...

sasasha wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 2:48 pm If a word with an accent in the root then takes an inflectional ending with stress, it’s the ending that takes the stress?

E.g. ränát > ränatán

Yep!

I think that the zionist's answer would be something like "but of course we need Israel to be a jewish, supremacist ethnostate for jews: (though they won't use those words, cause they're yay/boo words, but still) if muslims/arabs/palestinians/whatever had political equality then Israel would b...

This is precisely the situation I’ve been describing! The question is, why did that small percent difference even exist in the first place? (As I recall, people have actually calculated what the difference should have been to produce the amount of matter we see today. Wikipedia quotes it as being ‘...

Quick question ‒ does Caizu (the Karazi language still spoken in Caizura in 3480) survive through the modern era? And... Do you have any notes on it / plans to work it out, one day? That's a good question... modernism has a tendency to do what medieval kingdoms could never do: push the nomads out o...

I didn’t realise you D&Ded in K'aitan! That’s cool ‒ was it with the original group? Were you Verdurian characters travelling there (in which case, how did you go about crossing the Zone of Fire?), or did you make K'aitanese characters? Are there any notes about what you got up to? This was the...

Yes indeed it is ‒ “the huge map” of Eretald from 1981 ‒ not as huge, I guess, as the one from the college-room wall, but it is exceedingly detailed. I may be wrong in this, but I think it’s the earliest still-fully-canonical map of Eretald (at least which is accessible publicly?). I think you're r...

That’s not what the problem is. Essentially: we predict that the Big Bang should have produced an equal amount of matter and antimatter, in the past. The question is: given that initial state, why do we see more matter than antimatter today? If there was more antimatter, wouldn't it of blown up all...

Sure, happens all the time, if you're an elementary particle. In quantum mechanics, a particle can go back in time... we call it an antiparticle. Hang on, I thought that was exotic matter?? Tachyons (faster-than-light, but that itself still has a strange relationship with time) and whatnot. No, tac...

For those who haven't heard of it before, Neg-Raising or Neg-Hopping refers to the negative moving to the highest verb or auxiliary, as in I believe Klima has been not mentioned today. > I believe Klima hasn't been mentioned today. > I don't believe Klima has been mentioned today. It has to be unlea...

Sure, happens all the time, if you're an elementary particle. In quantum mechanics, a particle can go back in time... we call it an antiparticle. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Feynman_Diagram_of_Electron-Positron_Annihilation_v2.png E.g. in this Feynman diagram, space is the ho...