Zompist Bboard Again

Honestly, while I don't think AIs will go away, the tech bros will stop trying to push them into everything once the new money making technology of the future comes along. And then the rest of us can make sure there are proper limits on AIs and their uses. Assuming people even care enough at that po...

More the former. Japan's main way of handling dead bodies is cremation, and anything having to do with death is a little taboo in the first place. Thank you! ETA: " anything having to do with death is a little taboo in the first place " doesn't sound that different from most Western cultu...

It also discusses the low autopsy rates in Japan compared to other countries, Are there cultural objections to autopsies in Japan? Or perhaps cultural objections to acknowledging that a deceased person might have been murdered? More the former. Japan's main way of handling dead bodies is cremation,...

I just finished a Japanese drama called "Unnatural." It's about forensic scientists solving socalled unnatural deaths (not always murders, but most of them are especially later in the story). It also discusses the low autopsy rates in Japan compared to other countries, and shows a bit abou...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 11:28 am Today I learned that there's a sport named pickleball.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickleball

Yeah, it's pretty popular where I live near the Utah-Idaho border, but I rarely heard about it before I moved out here and didn't really know what it was.

I rarely use cash unless I know I'm going somewhere that only takes cash. While I've heard some people budget better using "cash only", physical money tends to burn holes in my pockets. But then again, most people see cash as a "real" thing while bank account numbers are ephemera...

I really wish forums became popular again net wide. Tumblr, for all it's faults, is still one of the better big sites out there, with a lot of folks from twitter and reddit migrating over, and yet the owners and staff are trying to turn it into the exact sites that people are leaving for it. Being p...

For a language that is underlying SOV but has free word order, agreement is your friend. Remember that free word order technically goes beyond just the positions of subject, object and verbs. It's good that you have some form of agreement between the nouns and adjectives since that can free up where...

Intervocalic fricativization of voiceless stops

[kø̀.xø̀.mí]
gögömí
"colour, vivid colour; (now literary) red"

I feel cat people who spoke Old Japanese would make a lot of use of the so-called "exclamatory" form. At least most of the cats I know are quite exclamatory.

Sounds like an interesting read. Do you happen to have a link handy? https://vdoc.pub/documents/the-japanese-language-through-time-73ns9uutl0l0 I did notice that if you save it, you need to get rid of the period after vdoc in the name (or just rename the file more generally) otherwise the PDF reade...

ʃl (along with sl) > ɬ

[ˈi.ɬən.nə]
isclenne
"electric squid, will 'o the wisp"

Really an accomplishment over several days, but I found a PDF of The Japanese Language Through Time by Samuel E. Martin, and have been reading through it for useful information. Some of the ideas are a little outdated (it IS from 1987), but I've been able to find several good bits of reference for m...

Yeah... I don't know what I was thinking of with <j> for /j/ since most people reading it won't get that. Not sure what to do with i2 then, but then the three main issues would be the vowels, with <y> as /j/ and <mb nd nz ng> for /ᵐb ⁿd ⁿz ᵑɡ/. So I'm currently at: /*p *t *s *k/ <p t s k> /*ᵐb *ⁿd *...

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 5:49 pm If you want people to pronounce this correctly *mb, *nd, *nz and *ng are probably essential.

Yeah fair point. I guess I can be looser with the vowels than with the consonants.

Working on a romanization for Old Japanese. I'd like to only use single characters for each phoneme (as understood currently), and preferably only letters that would be easy for English speakers to guess the pronunciation, but I'm having trouble mostly with the vowels. /*p *t *s *k/ <p t s k> /*ᵐb *...

Low nasal vowels raise before losing nasalization:

[na'zeː.taː]
nazántá
"lindworm, evil dragon"

I think, just like learning phoneme distinctions you didn't grow up with taking practice and study, so too does getting out of your cultural world view. Most people won't care to put in the time, others will fall back on it when it makes for a better story within their cultural context. Some will de...

Foxcatdog: I'd say most video games have some elements of fantasy though admittedly I avoid sports video games, racing games and first person shooters almost entirely. But fantasy (and indeed, scifi and science fantasy) is pretty broad when it comes to games to the point that it might be easier to l...

… Alliance Party leader Naomi Long commented on her party's unusually good result by saying something like (quoting from memory) "I think it's fair to say that we hit it out of the park". Wow, I never even realised that had anything to do with baseball at all! I'm not a big fan of basebal...