Zompist Bboard Again

I think you’re both right! Some parts of language are very conscious, and other parts are so automatic as to be practically invisible to the untrained speaker. I saw a neat example of this when I read about classifiers in Lao (in Enfield’s grammar). Lao has two classification systems: numeral classi...

So… yeah, maybe you’re right, and I’m overthinking these questionable edge cases. (It is something I tend to do when thinking about syntax.) Oh, you're not alone. Any sentence, or word, can start to sound dubious if you stare at it too long. Actually, what I have is the opposite problem. Every sent...

We didn’t see [only the Louvre]. ⇒ We only didn’t see the Louvre. Yet, the first sentence exists in surface structure with a completely different meaning! For you, that meaning is unambiguously different; for me it’s ambiguous, and can be the same under highly marked circumstances. But, apparently,...

if memory serves, Bradrn has repeatedly pointed out not being a Zionist...thats kinda the point being made in rebuttal to your points. I don’t understand what you mean here. I most certainly consider myself a Zionist. Sorry...when i was typing, I couldn't recall if you were not a Zionist, or a Zion...

Can you send the organizers a message explaining your situation? Orléans is quite close to Paris; if you're actually interested in the conference it seems a bit strange not to at least try to go... Hmm, fair point. Maybe I will. (Of course I can also understand not wanting to commit to something ex...

Whaat, why miss out on that opportunity? Because I’m barely coping as-is, and I’m worried I won’t cope if I do anything more stressful on top of this. Is there some draconian punishment if you don't show up after having confirmed? Er… I doubt it! But surely the whole point of confirming your attend...

I submitted a poster to ICON2024 (advertised earlier on this board), and my submission got accepted! Yet, I’m having second thoughts on whether to confirm my attendance or not. I’ve now been living in Paris for a month, and I‘m still struggling to get used to it; I’m not sure whether further travel...

2) Related to point 1). If we learned something over the last ten years, it's that when women complain about sexism and sexual assault, you believe them (and in fact the reality is probably far worse.) Now, you know what? When Jews mention antisemitism, you believe them. I appreciate your support, ...

it is perfectly understandable why someone whose people are being massacred would speak in anger against those who subscribe to the ideology that drives that massacre. violence, or the call to violence, against an oppressor by a member of the people it is oppressing is fundamentally, qualitatively ...

In addition to all the violence I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts, which you clearly didn’t read. ok, fair enough, i hadn't. so i just did this and the closest thing to "violence" you brought up by protesters at american universities were not acts of physical violence but simply...

the violence in the US demonstrations has been almost entirely instigated by zionists and police, not the protesters themselves, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m talking about, for instance, the way that they forcibly occupied a university building. In addition to all the violence I’ve alre...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 9:55 am I implemented what I thought were continuations for zeptoscript..

Is this not a matter for the Computing thread?

I submitted a poster to ICON2024 (advertised earlier on this board), and my submission got accepted! Yet, I’m having second thoughts on whether to confirm my attendance or not. I’ve now been living in Paris for a month, and I‘m still struggling to get used to it; I’m not sure whether further travel ...

The curious thing here is its precise application, when you have negation in the mix. If you apply Quantifier Hopping twice , you move it all the way back to the beginning of the VP, and it has the intended meaning. But if you only apply it once , the meaning flips to something which is very nearly...

Other way around: what's happening in We only didn’t see the Louvre is Quantifier Hopping. We are planning to see only the Louvre. > We are planning to only see the Louvre. > We are only planning to see the Louvre. The trick is to note the semantics: what's limited is what we're seeing, i.e. the Lo...

Reviving this thread to mention an interesting observation about English quantifiers (discovered in the process of conlanging): 1. We only didn’t see the Louvre ⇒ It was only the Louvre that we didn’t see Under focalisation (I think this particular construction is clefting?), the quantifier seems to...

Two in one day! This one isn’t from a newspaper, but manages to be tremendously confusing all the same:

A portable Common Lisp toolkit for building inspectors

(As one commenter put it, ‘I was excited to learn how building inspectors were using Common Lisp’…)

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 ...