Zompist Bboard Again

the paper i read could be eighty years old ... now that I think of it, im almost sure the only permissible clusters were nasal+stop, which we typically today think of as being not a cluster at all, even if it's bound to word-internal position. that said, there is a language in Polynesia, Tuvaluan, w...

Polynesian went through a stage in which internal consonant clusters inherited from PMP still remained, but final consonants had dropped out. e,g, you could say "manta" but not "matan". this would be a fallback solution if nothing else feels right .

kind of reminds me of the autistic society, to be honest .... it depends really if the trait is biologically bound to last forever, which is probably the best way to answer the question ... because if not, i imagine that the few extroverts in society would command such power that they would take cha...

Thank you to Moose and to bradrn for defending me, though, honestly, it hasnt changed my mind. All I see is more talking over my head, speaking for me, and looking for cloaked interpretations of my words, as though I were a 5-year-old barely able to get a coherent sentence out and, at best, given th...

i believe the anecdote but i think the kissa word is actually one where the k really spells /k/ and not the palatal sound. i remember being surprised because i thought IPA [ɕ] would be a prefect sound for onomatopeia of urination.

my dad pronounces ziti with a true [t], not flapped, but i wasnt able to explain to him how it was strange in terms he understood. he may have picked it up from Greek, assuming that Greeks, at least in America, use the same word to refer to the dish.

I want to add for the sake of contrast that it's common in my writing to have democracies where voting is done in blocs through the census. For example, suppose a neighborhood has 468 people. When the combined census-election happens, they send their representative, who gets 468 votes at the nationa...

East Germany's Parliament afforded seats not only to political parties, but also to organizations within their society, which were outside the party system and, so far as I know, their representatives were not elected by the people but rather by the organizations themselves. I try to avoid borrowing...

No I dont think so... I've never heard of a language that has differenbt forms for a consonant based on what the POA of a consonant in an adjoining syllable is. closest i can think of is Latin's /l/~/r/ allomorphy, but that is dissimilation, and is responsive only to one consonant: another /l/.

I think youre being just as unfair to libertarians here as you are to conservatives. Please note that up above I never agreed with your claim that, as you say, libertarians are the kings of the "you'd believe exactly what I do if you were only smart enough and educated yourself" stance . I...

i still want to reply to this, though its perhaps a good thing i waited two days and that the conversation has mostly moved on ,............ So many leftists seem to, at best, view conservatives as no more than miseducated leftists, as if our interests are the same as yours but we just can't see it ...

yeah Antarctica is definitely the tamest continent, in that there are MILLIONS of penguins walking around all vulnerable like that and yet they mostly survive unmolested .... but even there, there are exceptions. the large body size of Antarctic penguins vs other penguins might be the reason why the...

Australia is close to southeast Asia, where (at least in SIngapore), corporal punishment is a primary means of punishment for theft and some other crimes. This includes Australian tourists. It may be that the mental image of caning as punishment is more established in Australia than in other English...

https://twitter.com/i/events/1450987166843035650

Trump expected to launch new social media platform, TMTG, freeing conservatives from the need to use Twttr, Parler, Gab, etc

Ive been doing a lot of this lately .... i found a way to mix politics and writing, and realized that democracy could exist in a world with primitive technology. Democracies are the most interesting form of government for me, since in a monarchy or military dictatorship, there is no question of &quo...

if you mean in isolation, on their own planet, then yes, Im pretty sure a society like this would be viable. They would have some things that we do not, and we have some things that they will not, but I dont think autism in and of itself would stop humans from dominating the ecosystem, controlling a...

the Left will never understand the Right. What else is there to say? I think that's basically correct. One way I've seen it described is that, to conservatives, rights are negative. You don't have any rights to anything. What you have is freedom from a certain number of things, but no more. Anything...

i started with an alphabet that i acknowledged was Romanesque .... but as I worked with it over the years, I realized there were a lot of shapes that had just never occurred to me. We have only one Q, one G, etc .... but letter shapes with bumps and bolts in other places would still look Romanesque....

Well it's occurred to me that if Romania really is an island of paradise in an otherwise war-torn world, refugees from both the Axis and Allies would be flooding into Romania from the very outset of war, and that's a loose end I can't tie up even with a coup d'etat followed by Sovietization. Perhaps...

Some details I wanted to put in a separate post for ease of reading .... The point of divergence will be August 30, 1940, the date of the signing of the Second Vienna Award, in which Romania ceded important territory to a country it had until then been seeing as an ally. The point of convergence may...