Zompist Bboard Again

They'll probably just ignore the apostrophe most of the time when trying to say the words They won't ignore it as such (they're not reading it out loud after all). Their eyes will just gloss over the word at full speed, treating it like a hieroglyphic. "This character is named [random sequence...

Insisting that a conlang featured in a work of fiction about something else must fulfill the same standards as a conlang in a reference grammar about that conlang makes no sense to me. I'm sure somewhere on a geology forum people are complaining that the hills in a movie are from a different geologi...

I've never understood the notion that an auxlang will be more difficult to learn if it has phonemes or clusters unfamiliar to the learner. Since when have you ever struggled to learn a language because it was hard to pronounce? If you can't pronounce zdravstvuyte right, then just say it wrong. You'v...

That's not how politics works and you know it. If something can be read the way you want it to be, that's the end of it. You don't need to support the idea, or rule out reasonable alternatives. You just assert things and collect outrage points.

I can't imagine anyone objecting to Webster Reformed Spelling on the grounds that it is difficult to comprehend. Presumably the issue some people take with it is its nationalist symbolism. Since Webster was in good company at the time, with numerous proposed spelling reforms buzzing around the Engli...

But please, take it to another thread. "Two and two make five!" "No they don't. They make four." "Can you please not derail the thread?" "But you started it." "I think you'll find the first person who mentioned all this "four" business was you!...

There are a couple of questions that use something like "stops other than nasals." Would it be simpler to say "plosives?" It would be nice to explain at the beginning what the test means by point of articulation. For example, would dental and alveolar count as two, or one ("...

Well, can we just ask Masako to edit his initial page every month or two, depending on how quickly new resources are added? I'm obsessed with a historical grammar of the Iroquois languages that I recently stumbled across by Charles Julian. It has brief chapters on each language with a bird's-eye vie...

...they should be 15+ points ahead...

This can basically be said at any time about any center-left opposition party. It's obvious that the reasonable people should be winning, and it's just as obvious that elections will never work that way.

What's this 39 billion pounds being "given away?" I assumed the so-called divorce deal where the UK settles up all its debts and payments would be in a separate agreement. But McVey seems to think the EU deal is writing a check to the EU for no reason. I swear Brits should be glad the US e...

But without synergy, how will we ideate paradigms? Here is a video of Steven Pinker (not necessarily wanking Steven Pinker here, just a cool video) trying to come up with a more objective guide to writing style based on linguistic knowledge. It's worth a listen, though it mostly weasels out of the r...

I'm trying to think of more ways to encode politeness. There's verb endings a la Korean and Japanese, particles like in Thai, weird avoidance languages in Australia, special pronouns all over the place, and of course every language uses word choice to denote politeness or formality. But what am I mi...

Use of the present perfect construction for durative events extending up through the present (e.g. "I've been living here since 1988/for 30 years") seems to be a peculiarly English innovation. Or can anyone think of examples from other languages? The present perfect would be "I have ...

What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today? Anything we write now is inherently doomed to fall flat on its face - social issues are much harder to predict than economics or technology. You can identify trends, higher birthra...

You know all that mid-century SF where advanced technology exists alongside social stagnation? You know, the ones where men in stetson hats lecture their house-bound wives about nanocomputers while smoking a cigar in a hospital. My favorite is the Foundation series, or maybe the part in I, Robot whe...

I've often had the same thoughts about Arabic "not needing" vowels. In my experience, native speakers seem to mostly treat it as a mnemonic device rather than a precise script. I've never seen single words written down except where context makes it obvious (i.e. stop signs and the like). Y...