Zompist Bboard Again

Thanks for your input! I agree that exposure is very important. If you keep hearing and reading more and more texts in a language produced by native speakers, and if you also have a bit of a knack for learning languages, then sooner or later, you should, without even intentionally trying to, develop...

From my own experience, I realise there's a difference between being interested in how languages work and being good at learning them. Inspired by Zompist's essay on the topic I was therefore wondering if people here have had any interesting experiences learning a second (or third) language in pract...

Interesting question! This may not be what you were looking for, but there is a review paper looking into how stable the Big Five personality traits are over time. Basically, its conclusions are that people tend to become more emotionally stable, more agreeable, but also more dominant as they reach ...

@Ahzoh: That sounds really awful, and I am sorry. To second what others have said, you shouldn't be too hard on yourself. You did the best you could given the situation, and those decisions are never easy to make.

Yeah, from looking deeper into it, the Social Democrats in Denmark seem more like a center-right party than anything, and not even center-left as Social Democrat-type parties typically are. The fact that they are in a government with a centrist and a center-right party should not be surprising then...

Thank you, Flau, for your answers. I think we're learning a lot here. No problem, I'm glad they made sense! I responded to your other question in the elections thread. Danish people in general do indeed see it as a government responsibility to protect children from unfit parents (they may not put i...

(Whether a Social Democratic government will help us much in weathering the current right wing populist wave is a discussion for another post). I'd be glad to hear your views on this! Our right-wingers are pretty enamored of Denmark. They feel that Denmark will successfully avert right-wing populis...

The thing is that the combination of lingering colonialism and the welfare state is the perfect recipe for paternalism, which is very evident in the apparent Danish attitudes towards Greenland. It is so easy to justify to yourself being a colonialist when you have convinced yourself that your colon...

Short answer: I pretty much agree with you. Since I'm Danish though living abroad, I'll write a long answer as well. You point out the colonial and racist aspects of these two cases, which is of course part of it. Another aspect, which may be of interest to some of the discussions on here, is that t...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 06, 2025 9:15 am My, how time flies. I depart for Glasgow (via Dubai) in <24h!

Good luck, and safe travels!

IIRC, in English grammar this is generally called ‘secondary predication’. EDIT: actually, that’s something slightly different. Looking more closely at your examples, those are just ordinary ditransitive verbs taking two objects. I'd call it a resultative (and some websites agree). It's not a distr...

IIRC, in English grammar this is generally called ‘secondary predication’. EDIT: actually, that’s something slightly different. Looking more closely at your examples, those are just ordinary ditransitive verbs taking two objects. Cool, thanks! I didn't know about this concept, nor about attributive...

I was looking at Zompist's page on Flaidish and came across this sentence: ʔok garse ʔelzichpo, ʔok ʔozse festpo ʔaax I if-ONG disobey-PART, I get-ONG paint-PART blue If I disobeyed, I'd be painted blue Memorable enough in itself, the sentence also made me wonder about the syntactic role of "bl...

I think conworlders should study the town of Baarle-Nassau. Take a look at this map: Topographical map What are you looking at? Baarle-Nassau is a town in the Netherlands, near the southern Belgian border, and it has 22 enclaves that belong to Belgium... which collectively form another town, Baarle...

How many of us, and who of us, have a similar expression in the natlangs in which they are fluent? And which natlangs are those? And what are the expressions? Danish has the even more unpleasant-sounding skide grønne grise ("shit green pigs") for getting very frightened. There's also the ...

So I’ve heard. Alas, Glasgow is apparently the rainiest city in the UK… That sucks! Though if it is any consolation, while Glasgow has a lot of rainy days, it is apparently similar to Sydney by amount of rain. That admittedly doesn't help with temperature, but it means you'll presumably have to dea...

-10F with the right layers is actually pretty ok and anything between about 10F to freezing was actually fine with a t shirt and maybe a light jacket as long as I wasn't going far and keeping active. Back in the lower 48 though "comfortable" has become about 50F to 75F so I guess it reall...

Thank you!

Lērisama wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 9:41 am ¹ Sadly the traditional picture thereof succumbed to linkrot

Don't worry, I already had plenty* of tea** today.

*That is, both online and IRL tea
**So far mostly digital pickles though

Thank you all for the warm welcome! (and for all the pickles and tea)

After being a fan of this board and thinking about joining for a long time, a few days back I finally did. Hi everyone