Zompist Bboard Again

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 policie...

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2024 1:11 am Just read Ed Zitron's piece The Rot Economy, ( https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/ ) which brilliantly sums up a lot of stuff that some of us might have been thinking for a while.

Echoes here of Dan Olson's Line Goes Up.

Just started to read the Wikipedia article on the whole Post Office scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal Wow. That's really very fucked up. Ian Hislop of Private Eye has made bringing this to light something of a personal crusade and has delivered several blistering sc...

It's hard to enjoy the mild weather in Chicago in February without thinking of how much we've fucked the climate.

Just in case you didn't hear it yet, Northern Ireland seems to have an Executive again, because they somehow managed it to get the DUP to temporarily stop sulking. I must be extra thick these days because I've read over the new agreement and still don't quite understand what concession from the Bri...

Zju wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2024 7:28 amAre all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

Are you asking about English, about Romance, or about both?

Why, for instance, should a Hebrew word for 'lion' have anything to do with a similar-sounding Italian word for something entirely different , namely a particular kind of passage in an opera? Nobody could mistake them for cognates! I think "nobody" is a little optimistic. I could easily s...

This one from NPR is kind of a crash blossom: New 'Washington Post' CEO accused of Murdoch tabloid hacking cover-up

From the Beeb: Japan: Man sentenced to death for Kyoto anime fire which killed 36

Could we have a new Board rule against posting something and then immediately announcing that you won't read responses to your post? The whole point of online forums is to facilitate discussions. If you don't want to discuss, you've got no business posting here. I don't see what purpose this would ...

Could it be someone who knows malloc, knows about his anxiety issues, and is playing a cruel prank on him? I suppose that's possible, but it's more plausible that this is one of the many known phone scams in which someone impersonates a law-enforcement official and demands money for "legal fee...

Has anyone else come across the proposal that qhapaq simi, the "noble language" of the Inca elite, was a Macro-Arawakan language related to Pukina? I just stumbled across this last night and I'm curious what the evidence is.

For Japanese, the polite copula です desu is generally considered a contraction of であります de arimasu , where the first element is a locative particle and the latter is a verb of existence. But other contractions have been proposed, such as で‎ する de suru , with the light verb generally used to verbify n...

I'm annoyed that my housemate wants to wait until Christmas Eve to go through our stockings. They're St Nicholas Day stockings, not Christmas stockings, dammit! They've been filled for a week already and I want some of the tasty chocolate inside. (Actually, I've already begun snitching.) Next year, ...

4) Optionally, use Italian-style plurals (-o and -e to -i, and -a to -e, nouns ending in consonants could still add -es) instead of Spanish-style plurals. The reason for that is the difficulty in maintaining the final -s in the real world, causing many Spanish speakers to lose the distinction betwe...

So the meaning is different in French and in German - in German, a Markise is always made of canvas. And prototypically, so are "awnings" in English. A search for "concrete awning" does get about 20,000 Ghits, but if someone said "We decided to add an awning to the back of ...

For some reason, Australians often describe something as "shithouse" instead of just "shit", so then every fucking monolingual Australian who thinks they can say a couple of words in German will say "Scheisenhausen" 🤦‍♂️. (They can't say Scheiße ... it always sounds li...

The only things that look non US-American to me are that they use the word "chook" (Australian for "chicken") and say "chips" instead of "fries", but, like, "buffalo ranch chips"? I don't even fucking know what that is. 🤣 Chips with buffalo sauce an...

What do you call the roof over a porch or a verandah? The only word that really comes to mind is awning . "Awning" for me implies removable, usually cloth. But the roof of these structures is generally permanent, made of wood or even stone and brick. I think I'd be most like to stay "...

One thing I should note is that <ö ü> are treated as simply allographs of <o u> in America, as demonstrated by the infamous "heavy metal umlaut", Oh, I handle that by simply pronouncing it. If the bands didn't want me to pronounce it, they shouldn't have put it there. A friend of one of m...