Zompist Bboard Again

If you want to see some truly horrifying consequences of relying on AI to make decisions that humans should be forced to make, +972 Magazine has some amazing reporting about "Lavender", the system being used by the IDF to decide which Palestinians should be targeted for assassination: http...

This is an areal change that swept across much of West Germanic, including some English varieties, specifically Yola. The change probably happened in the middle ages. In particular, compare Dutch zien , Limburgs zeen (but also West Frisian sjen , Low Saxon sehn ). A couple things worth mentioning: ...

This is more an English-learners-of-German question. It seems to me that English-speakers in general have an easier time learning the ach-Laut that the ich-Laut, despite the fact that the ach-Laut is only found in certain English varieties such as Scottish English, and the ich-Laut being found nati...

I really don't know what to say at this point. Seven workers from an NGO trying desperately to save the Gazans from starvation are dead after their three vehicles were individually targeted and struck by the IDF and the best defence the latter can come up with is "Our bad, we thought that maybe...

I was surprised to see that the thread I split off from the discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict specifically to talk about larger underlying issues of colonialism and racism has become so active. Now I see it's because y'all are just using it to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is...

So here's an interesting pair of sentences: "You don't kiss like him." "He doesn't kiss like you." Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latte...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:15 pm

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 3:53 pm Oddly, neither of the two "incorrect" pronunciations he gives is /ˈn(j)uː.fənd.lənd/.

And I have never, ever heard the "incorrect" pronunciation given with /faʊnd/.

That's how I said it myself growing up until I finally learned the standard pronunciation in my late teens.

How to say "Newfoundland" like a real Newfie!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da9zslIFj7o

Oddly, neither of the two "incorrect" pronunciations he gives is /ˈn(j)uː.fənd.lənd/.

I'm not sure how much to buy this explanation that I read once, but basically Irish was doing reasonably okay up until it was made an Official Language of Ireland. (I'm not sure what the reasoning was, if thats true ...maybe individuals en masse thinking "well, if its official and got governme...

What I meant was that Czech was suppressed in public life as a whole for a few centuries in the Czech lands, yet it somehow managed to not only survive but actually replace German in public life (of course, this was made definitive by the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia at the end o...

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 6:35 am Is it "comedy movie" or "movie comedy"?

"comedy film" is what I would be most likely to say.

BTW, the reason I'm revisiting this thread is because yesterday I came across a piece in the Guardian which validated my initial point about the ongoing nature of the settler-colonialist project in North America: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/26/medical-experiment-indigenous-canadians-l...

Who's assigning people "moral value" according to these standards? I'm primarily concerned with who is working to make this a more just and inclusive society and who is more concerned with defending their own privileged position within it. I've had this conversation with Travis enough tim...

I will give you that there have been injustices against Native Americans since then, as you mention -- but the key thing to me is that guilt or lack thereof is personal, not collective . Just because European-Americans have committed injustices against Native Americans until the present does not me...

Perhaps it’s selfish, but the viewpoint from which I tend to think about this is: ‘what is the chance that a family member of mine gets murdered in a terrorist attack?’ At this point, they’re still more likely to be murdered by an invasion from Gaza than by an invasion from the West Bank. Is that r...

If you yourself, by your own admission, are complicit in all those bad things, and you see that as bad, then why don't you just stop? What kind of adolescent gotcha is this supposed to be exactly? Given that the structure of global capitalism makes essentially everyone who's not living a bare-bones...

How many languages have ever been spoken? There are seven-thousand-odd spoken today, roughly, but I'm wondering if we have an estimate for how many have been spoken at any point in time. I know this question is not very well-defined but even still there might be some way to put a rough number to it...

But everything in religion has an exception, and I'm told that Native North American religion has a positive view of the world, at least when it was run by Native North Americans. Yeah, it took widespread enslavement and genocide plus exposure to Christian eschatology to give us movements like the ...

However, the matter is that much of "anti-Zionism" does manifest itself in opposition to Israel and the Israeli Jews themselves, and furthermore is often extended in a way to Jews in general. This is unacceptable - is an Israeli Jew born today responsible somehow for what happened in 1948...

I’ve seen suggestions that the goal would be for Gaza to become something like the West Bank, where the government is more willing to cooperate with Israel, and the IDF has the ability to do much smaller-scale and more targeted operations. There are still regular terrorist attacks from the West Ban...