Zompist Bboard Again

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...

Bibi seems to think he can permanently destroy Hamas and its capacity to commit atrocities. Most analysts seem to think this is impossible, given that leaders of Hamas are safely holed up elsewhere (primarily in Qatar), but even if it were, why does he think that it (or some equally extremist organ...

That Welsh-language entry is unexpected. I wonder if maybe it was used in a video game or something, in addition to the movie? Equating "song" with a manifestation of a work (to use FRBR terminology ) also skews the numbers in a particular way, away from traditional tunes and old standards...

I also am of the view that the Israeli gov't and the factions in control of Gaza do not effectively represent the Israeli and Gazan peoples. That, frankly, sounds like wishful thinking to me. On the Israeli side, yes, right now, Netanyahu personally isn't that popular because October 7th happened o...

Somehow I seemed to have drawn the ire of some rando on Wiktionary, which I edit regularly. His latest criticism is that I "have no affinity" for some of the languages I edit which is...unhelpfully vague? It's gotten to the point where today I looked up what Wiktionary's harassment polici...

But I don’t think there’s a total moral equivalence here. It is true that Gaza is currently controlled by factions with nasty and near-genocidal ideologies… but there is a huge diversity of opinions in the territory, and many Gazans find that ideology repugnant. It is possible to support the aims o...