Zompist Bboard Again

Officer accidentally fired gun while clearing Columbia building seizure — NYPD

Politics aside, suddenly running into that word ‘seizure’ at the end nearly gave me one… (no, it’s not that kind of seizure!)

My current proposal is assigning accent regularly like many stress systems but declaring by fiat that it will surface as pitch. Developing interesting rules has proven difficult, however, since the principles involved keep resulting in contradictions. I initially planned on something like the Latin...

but grammars tend to converge anyway, because this is less obvious to the speakers themselves. Iirc there's an African(?) city where two languages are spoken that have almost no shared vocabulary, but almost identical grammar. Can't recall which city, unfortunately, and a quick google doesn't show ...

No, because that's not how language contact works. Vocabulary is in most situations the easiest thing to change. I'm going to disagree by proxy. I've read that there's two situations in which languages might influence each other. The first is contact where speakers of language A have contact with s...

How many millions of Israelis need to participate in protests before you stop saying things like this? I, personally, have called out this behaviour many times in this thread alone, and more elsewhere on the Internet. Perhaps I should just keep on repeating that Zionism is not Netanyahu-ism , in th...

Anyone ever wondered (in conlanging terms) what English might have looked like if the Norman conquest had exerted more influence on English phonology and grammar but less on vocabulary? No, because that's not how language contact works. Vocabulary is in most situations the easiest thing to change. ...

Meanwhile , in Sydney, texts from a teenager who carried out a terror stabbing a couple of weeks ago have revealed that who he really wanted to attack was ‘a bunch of Jews’ (though the person he eventually ended up stabbing was an Assyrian Orthodox bishop). The texts explicitly link this desire to ...

Thank you for clarifying. I should point out, though, that the term ‘intifada’ is generally associated with violent resistance to Israel. (I feel like I see this kind of ambiguity a lot… pro-Palestinian people using terms which are widely associated with violence, then claiming that no, actually , ...

So calling for resistance to oppression is "antisemitic" when the oppressors happen to be Jewish? ‘Burn Tel Aviv’ and ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’… those are ‘calling to resistance to oppression’? I was referring specifically to "encouraging children to call for 'intifada' [i.e. ...

The points made in the back-and-forth between bradrn and Linguoboy illustrate fairly well why, while I absolutely don't support Israel, I'm not really interested in supporting the pro-Palestinian movement, either. No, I don't care if people think that that's the worst kind of bothsidism. When one s...

I don't really know enough about programming to follow this, but - wasn't the original point of zeptoforth to go back to the basics with a bare metal rather than higher level language? I will admit to having the same query. To me, the attraction of Forths generally is their low-level–ness — I don’t...

Australia has quite an interesting ‘superannuation’ system to solve this particular problem. Essentially, each superannuation provider is a private investment fund, independent from the government (but well-regulated). It is mandatory for a certain amount of your income to be directed into your chos...

you see, in most protests there are different people with different thinking. seems like most attendants, and the organizers and leaders or whatever, are not there out of antisemitism. that's what the jew guy there is saying, this isn't an antisemitic protest, even though we have some cunts (heheh)...

On the other hand , you get students chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, or the protest organiser who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. (And we all know who they mean by ‘Zionists’: the linked article makes it quite clear that they mean ‘anyone who is identifiably Jewish’.) Even in my own ...

[…] many explicitly tie the violence there to violence being perpetuated elsewhere (e.g. "From Palestine to the Philippines, Stop the US War Machine!", "From Gaza, to Congo, to Sudan, to Kashmir, to Haiti, to Tigray, NONE of us are free till we're ALL free.") This is quite inter...

It's hard not to take these arguments as disingenuous when Israel and Palestine are so much more obviously connected to the rest of the developed world than whatever failed state is tearing itself to shreds this week. Why Israel? Because my government just voted to spend $26 billion of my tax dolla...

I have noticed that at least here /l/-coloring manifests itself in part as blocking vowel fronting, as seen below: too : [ˈtʲʷʰy(ː)] tool : [ˈtʲʷʰu(ː)ʊ̯] toe : [ˈtʰɵ̞(ː)] toll : [ˈtʰo̞(ː)ʊ̯] I have this too (though obviously the precise phonetics are different). But I tend to interpret it as, not b...

Maybe time travel is more like going by train. You have to build tracks and stations before you can go somewhere. This could mean that you cannot travel to a point in time where time travel was not invented yet. Et voila, no time travel to our present. This is precisely what our current theories pr...

Well, natural languages are nothing more than conlangs reworked by a very large number of fans, This is not true I rarely ever agree with xxx, but they have a point there. Natural languages were created by human beings, after all, so you could interpret them as a form of collaborative conlangs. I t...

I think you all have missed the main reason congrammars are written in plain terms. The conlanger is trying to communicate, while the linguist is trying to prove to their employer that they are on the cutting edge of their field. I think this is overly cynical. I’ve seen plenty of academics who jus...