Zompist Bboard Again

PSA: This is not a continuation of recent discussions involving Bob. This is a related topic inspired by things he has said, but Bob's recent posts are more sensible and show willingness to learn about presentation of ideas. Please don't offer more of the same commentary that I've just spent the mor...

Without anything much to add, I am enjoying your work and its presentation. A note on 'finger bone' counting: counting on the palm-side of the fingers, and counting bones rather than joints, seems to me, a more intuitive way of seeing '12' existing there when counting one-handed. Also more ergonomic...

Happy birthday ZBB! This board has had a big impact on my life. It wouldn't be hyperbole to say that most of time it intellectually and creatively nourished me more deeply than school. My writing owes a lot to the ideas I was exposed to here as a teenager. I met some long-term friends here. I even t...

Wow, that's incredible design work. I love it.

What is the direction of writing? I'm guessing left to right from your examples, but I think it would look very interesting arranged vertically, since each syllable has such a variable height.

If we're talking about wide-ranging changes: I suggest we change all language names that come from a country's name. If the country has several languages, it gives undue prominence to the one that has the same name ("Spanish" is only one of the languages spoken in Spain, so we'd better ca...

How about designating languages by writers' names that characterise them? Without necessity for total standardisation, perhaps.

You want to specify English of 1580-1820? Shakespeare-Austenian. Etc.

Falls apart when you get to polyglot writers like Conrad though!

Well, in exactly the same way as the Swedish example, poetic/archaic registers of modern English can get away with it: 'Short term homes for the elderly infected' where 'infected' could be modifying 'elderly'. Just not standard registers. Sounds fine to me in standard English, because both elderly ...

Saudi Arabia ends death penalty for minors and floggings >_< Why did they put "and floggings" there? I think they expressed it this way because they wanted to communicate that they ended the death penalty for minors, and also they ended floggings for everyone. Here's another Swedish one f...

I found the word awry in the manual for the first Mega Man NES game and also pronounced it /'ɔ:ɹi/. I liked that word so much that I made up a baseball team called the Awries which had the same pronunciation. Nobody corrected me, but the few people who heard me probably had no idea where I was gett...

I love this. Poor old The. We could at least call it "Thethe" /ˈðiːðə/. True! Edited so that I at least have more than one word in my response: I actually like your Romance examples without the -te a lot: Lela Romance (French) Lola Romance (Occitan) Oa Romance (Galaico-Portuguese) Ella Ro...

I also really like the Australian languages trick of naming languages after the words for "yes" or "that" etc. France did this too: langue d'oc in the south and langue d'oil in the north, after their words for "yes". And IIRC the Pama-Nyungan family is named for widesp...

I used to think there were two words spelled <awry>, /ʌ'ɹaɪ/ and /'ɔ:ɹi/. The former had more or less awry's real meaning. The latter had a touch of the unexpected or eldritch to it, so like if your trousers went /ʌ'ɹaɪ/ you'd lost them, but if your trousers went /'ɔ:ɹi/, they might have been bewitc...

Really, really interesting - I absolutely love this idea. I do wonder though, with my music hat on, if you are keeping the number of tones at a fairly safe level. If their physiology is deigned for warbling, I bet they can make pitches over a really wide range, and their ability to distinguish pitch...

I also think that far from a linguistic joke or send-up, Tolkien was trying to be genuinely poignant in his depiction of a thought process native to a species that inherently represented all that was good about the pre-industrial, even pre-agricultural world: the tens or hundreds of thousands of yea...

I've been thinking about this a bit as I have three non-magical species you might call sentient in my con-world, and a further one (maybe more, as yet unplanned) in its wider universe - as well as a host of magical sentient species that inhabit a simulated sub-universe. I agree with a lot of what ha...

I don’t know anything of either French or Spanish, but I’d be interested if you know: do you have any idea how common that word is in Spain as opposed to El Salvador? It would be interesting to know if sereno is today a Latin American-specfic term, but it would be just as interesting to know if it’...

Ah, fascinating. Thanks Ser. I learnt that word on (what I think was essentially) this thread maybe 15 years ago. :D It sounds like that word is very uncommon in French though, since Ars Lande didn't know it. It was very common in El Salvador when I grew up, where I often got to hear it as a kid as...

Fr serein 'rain that falls from a cloudless sky'. Good one! You taught me a new word there. FWIW according to my dictionary the meaning is closer to the definition Ser gives. Ah, fascinating. Thanks Ser. I learnt that word on (what I think was essentially) this thread maybe 15 years ago. :D

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Sat May 16, 2020 4:48 pm "hard pants"

That's pretty hilarious in Britain.

Just a little addition to Vegfarandi's Icelandic examples: it might be surmised from that that the middle voice wasn't present in Old Norse and developed only in Icelandic; I don't believe that is exactly correct, though the difference might be down to terminology (e.g. what exactly is meant by Old ...