Zompist Bboard Again

Well, gosh, I guess I recant. Everything's fine, folks; the people killing us over imaginary numbers are gauche!

Rents often increase faster than inflation. One reason is because the building is stationary, and therefore gradually moves from one density threshold to another as other things around it are developed. If you wanted to live in an "average price zone" you'd need a motor home. But obviously...

I appreciate that bradrn is trying to observe and classify objective phenomena, and leave the psychology of speakers as a separate problem. My concern is that it is slightly illusory to call our observations and classifications "objective" when we can't quantify things like "verticaln...

Your job doesn't exist because you perform an essential function. Your job exists because you, in a personal and social context, have the influence to make it happen. This is obvious at the top, where a person's resume reads "qualifications: I already own everything." But it's the same at ...

There are loads of conlangs from the early 00s that are simply gone from the internet. Every once in a while I wonder "what ever happened to Saiwosh? Or Arendron? Or Noyahtowa?" I don't know if any of you feel the same way, but I thought I would make a space where we can ask (and possibly ...

I think a suffix works better for an auxlang, since it doesn't require you to futz with the shape of borrowed words. Italian caffe doesn't change in the plural, but presumably our Italian-inspired conlang would have to have cafe>cafi. It's way better to have cafe>cafes.

(But I don’t see what ‘philology’ has to do with it — I typically associate that term with the diachronics of classical languages.) Minor but interesting point. Could be my age showing, but in older literature "philology" was basically short for "knowing languages in their own terms,...

Nutella is the Schrödinger's Cat of the schmear world.

(two US soldiers in 19th century gear are hunkered down behind a wooden palisade) "Corporal, you told me the Mikihahaka have no word for war!" "They don't general!" (an arrow narrowly misses the corporal's head) "I swear, they don't!" A messenger on horseback rushes thr...

I understand that bradrn isn't making some weird claim about eye-tracking or the psychology of jamo-stacking, but I'm not sure what the point is. It's true that Korean, at a purely theoretical level, makes use of vertical space by stacking meaningful elements, but what does that entail? From a naive...

I think if vowel marks are obligatory, to me that just sounds like another kind of abjad. I don't think we can say that langages that always pair C and V glyphs because of the language's phonology are alphasyllabaries or syllabaries or anything like that. At some point the usage of the script as def...

[*] Abugidas , in which consonantal graphemes can be used on their own or with a vocalic modifier to form syllabic blocks; and ... Next up: abjads and alphabets, most probably. (Unless I change my mind, of course.) You've fallen into the 'old men and women' ambiguity. Is a system which uses consona...

Holy crap, thank you! I'll DM you when I get back to my desktop.

Looking for Karen Booker's Comparative Muskogean: Aspects of Proto-Muskogean Verb Morphology. I found it on ProQuest for $40, and I'm wondering if anyone has access to a scan I can borrow? I definitely have things to trade if there's anything you need.

I think on day one of university level higher math, the professor says "Listen, since every other field is just a specific application of ours, that means that once you get good at math, by definition you are also good at botany, sociology, meteorology, geology, neurosurgery, HVAC engineering, ...

Reminds me of the time a bunch of computer scientists used software designed to track the spread of a virus to determine the urheimat of PIE. Naturally, the software just returned the earliest attested location, Anatolia, as the source. Everyone involved wiped their hands and said there, we solved i...

I, too, have quite a bit of interchange between the Cot and Caught sets, despite not merging them. Another word where I can't seem to make up my mind is "jaw." But the sets are still distinct. /Q/ for "coffee" and /A/ for "awe" sound dead wrong to me. Note: although I'm...

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:54 am Why was Last Action Hero generally panned by critics when it came out? IMO, that movie is brllliant!

The one thing a movie critic can never forgive is a movie that thinks it's enough to just be fun.

Hanzi has some logograms that are extended as semantic clues, and some characters used for their phonemic value. But a stage of written Chinese in which every single word had its own logogram and every single word could be diambiguated solely through phonemic means? That is completely unattested. Si...

Not the way we've approached it, you're right. But if you just encountered a system like this in the wild, it might not be a crazy idea to say that "person is marked on the noun" like OP said. The point is, marking possession on nouns is common, and it doesn't take much finagling to make i...