Zompist Bboard Again

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 2:40 pm If of followed Welsh orthography, shouldn't it be pronounced /oːv/?

I mean, it is though, the /f/ gets voiced in some environments.

I read the Láadan grammar by itself, not having read her novels or anything else. I was only interested in the language itself. for instance in Làadan, I always wonder what is the motivation why unnaturally lack some voiceless consonants... impersonal grammars don't give answers for such questions....

penguin: water-flyer

Next: cat (either housecat specifically or 'felidae')

You're overlooking the postfix operator. In so far as phonetic attrition is removing what's left of it, as a complete number 'sixty' is being replaced by 'six oh'. In the words of Wikipedia, "citation needed". I have never heard anyone say six-oh in place of sixty outside of highly-marked...

https://www.wordmine.info/Search?slang= ... in&sword=Q

It says there are 120, but at a glance a number of them are proper names.

It's not just that you could have a guy hanging out with Theseus who's named Jason. It's that his wife could quite properly be Melissa.

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log! This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from get...

H’druk g’har dWatch, Sh’rt’azs! ... “Welcome to the Watch, Corporal Smallbottom!

Is...is it just me or is the Dwarfish for 'Smallbottom' basically 'short-arse'?

It is a zeugma. "Take your hat and my advice with you." It's meant to be jarring, but it's not innovative.

I've heard it a few times in contexts where I would say "thingie" or "doodad" or the like: "Hey, while you're up, grab one of those twisty guys, would you?" But it's rare, and for me highly marked. I've never heard "dude" in such a position.

Sənágmehan.
2-not-passive-irr-see
I may not be seen.

The third example in the Modern Hanying Syntax section: Shouldn't the translation be "You may not be seen"?

I fairly frequently respond to someone telling me about a thing that happened by saying "Nice!", and it's not ironic. "I logged in and the person I needed to talk to was already there." "Nice!" Which is not to say I never use the word sarcastically, but that takes tone ...

Well, they aren't unfamiliar to me! Everyone else gets to make their own decisions.

Shed: the place where two sets of warp threads are held away from each other so that the weft can be passed between them in weaving.
Fell: Where the completed cloth turns into warp threads--not the same as the shed, because the fell always exists but the shed doesn't have to.

This isn't on the same subject all, but it's a Fun Fact About Names that I only recently learned: the name "Myra" was invented by Fulke Greville for his Caelica poems, and has no known etymology. It may be a romantic cypher of 'Mary', although given the atmosphere of the poems and Myra's ...

Word derivation: Um...I get they maybe want to be cute and subtly show the irony of the baked-in "subjugation" of this supposedly "dominant" people as contrasted to its (ridiculous, again) "high" status. But it is completely nonsensical and insensible to disable most a...

Sal, I think you have the right of it, thank you.

I'd call that non-standard but barely acceptable, perhaps because 'guy' is juuust not-specific enough? 'Doctor' would not do at all. "I asked Charlie and the angel said yes right away!" works, but again 'doctor' doesn't. Actually, looking at that, I think whether the word works depends mos...

I understand that collaborative projects can get big. Everyone wants their own niche. But for the love of tiny green monkeys, does that Indo-European thing have to be everywhere ? Not that some of the creators haven't done cool things with it! But some of the early stages of the project are really p...

The alya or wild deer was a primary prey animal of the Cɛbaun Kīn around Tuysafa's northeastern Great Bay. Though broadly similar to the roe deer of Earth, the alya was more domesticable due to a few key behavioral differences--primarily that its herding behavior was more amenable to humans installi...