Zompist Bboard Again

Rant! I read the first two Teixcalaan books and really enjoyed them, but I thought the fake Meso-American thing was a little grating. there was a Mayan king of Copán named "18 Rabbit," and so I guess people just assume that this was a normal naming convention among Meso-American civilizati...

The way you fix it is going to the shop and asking them to replace your electronic throttle control actuator. It'll cost you $200.

Brave New World is not written in Huxley's usual style. A better representation of his work would be After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. It has a good encapsulation of his political and scientific beliefs, and it all reads like he's on drugs, because he was. The man was an absolute Whacko . And he wa...

I once made a West Germanic conlang on a lark. I wanted it to be realistic, mostly using unique versions of sound tendencies already established in other languages. Some local flair, but still thoroughly nestled in its linguistic context. The result was just Dutch-German. Sure, I had pages and pages...

Where on Earth does "one hundred and five" imply 100.5?

What is a consonantal root system but ablaut on steroids?

You could call it "a ten of days."

(or my favorite: a "daycade")

"Baron" was used in some cases as a short hand for nobility. E.g., The Barons' War did not exclusively involve barons. This is probably because barons, being the lowest rank of the nobility, are the most numerous. But at least in modern society, these details are pretty obscure. Most Brits...

This is, however, mitigated by the fact that those lost final consonants are mostly still there in Korean and Japanese, hence guo/guk/koku "country" and guo/gwa/ka "fruit."

Considering Mandarin has already collapsed eight tones into four, it seems that you can just abandon tones with no consequence. I'm told this has also happened with the Mixtec language, whcih has three tones compared to the several tones of the Oto-Manguean protolanguage, but I don't know anything a...

I came here to remind bradrn not to assume I was talking only about him, and I found another person being wrong about Hangeul. One of the things I always hear when it comes to Hangeul, is that it is featural - which means that each jamo looks like the shape of the mouth as it is pronounced. Maybe we...

Somewhere on a Korean linguistics forum: "Hey, did you know the English Latin alphabet requires people to read forward and back, constantly changing direction?" "How so?" "Well, you know how you can make a word like F-A-T fat?" "Sure." "But then, what if ...

Wikipedia, desperately in need of a comma:

The Jena Band [of Choctaw Indians] was isolated until the 1950s on Whatley and Bowie lands, having limited contact with area whites because of Choctaw determination to maintain their community and discrimination.

That's not rain shadow exactly, but mostly the result of the Asian monsoon. As air is "sucked in" by summer highs over continental asia, it is deflected by the coriolis effect counter clockwise. This means that during the northern hemisphere summer the winds are moving southwest to northea...

Rainfall. Technically, rainfall relative to transpiration rate, but if we're confining ourselves to a certain latitude that only changes the results a little. Most savanna occurs in one of two places: the sahel region, where tropical rainforest transitions to desert, or areas closer to the equator w...

Well, in most cases there are two marked participants. So wak- tells you it's a third person subject and a first person object. Here's the thing. Proto-Iroquoian had two sets, with subject coming first and object coming second. So hsi+kw would be 2>1, and ki+tsa would be 1>2. If you saw tsa by itsel...

I have that book, and read just the opposite. Let me go back and check, and I'll respond later today. EDIT: OK, so I’ve consulted the various documents I have on Mohawk, and I cannot find any evidence that the object series is used for subjects. This is a more difficult thing to confirm than you mig...

I thought about that, but I didn't want to commit, and I'm still learning since my knowledge of some of the midwestern Algonquian languages is embarrassingly poor. If I have two or three more of these in me I'll separate them out. Anyway, split-S is definitely how a lot of linguists have described s...

Both! In Lakota, for example, reduplication is fairly regular: sha "it is green," shasha "they are green." Creek has hatkis "it is white" and hathatkis "they are white." Creek also uses infixes. hayyis "it is cold" becomes hayhoyis "they are col...

Eastern North American Verbs, Part 1: Pronominal Prefix Sets In the same way that we can talk about “Standard Average European,” there are sets of features that are common across North America, or at least large parts of it. The basic template for a ENA verb is something like: 1) directional, instru...