Search found 2627 matches
- Sat May 04, 2024 4:48 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Syntax random
- Replies: 195
- Views: 114291
Re: Syntax random
We didn’t see [only the Louvre]. ⇒ We only didn’t see the Louvre. Yet, the first sentence exists in surface structure with a completely different meaning! For you, that meaning is unambiguously different; for me it’s ambiguous, and can be the same under highly marked circumstances. But, apparently,...
- Sat May 04, 2024 4:33 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: "Experiencer"
- Replies: 40
- Views: 4590
Re: "Experiencer"
Another point is that conlangs' grammars are created consciously and with clear intent, whereas natlangs' grammars just sort of evolve on their own. People making naturalistic conlangs are, well, trying to be naturalistic. Often that means simulating natural changes. E.g. you take a word list, run ...
- Sat May 04, 2024 4:19 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4691
- Views: 2063208
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
Wikipedia is not an authoritative source here. :P David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language : "The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, but it does not acutally identify the boundary between Old and Middle English. It was a long ...
- Sat May 04, 2024 5:10 am
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Syntax random
- Replies: 195
- Views: 114291
Re: Syntax random
Other way around: what's happening in We only didn’t see the Louvre is Quantifier Hopping. We are planning to see only the Louvre. > We are planning to only see the Louvre. > We are only planning to see the Louvre. The trick is to note the semantics: what's limited is what we're seeing, i.e. the Lo...
- Fri May 03, 2024 8:28 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Syntax random
- Replies: 195
- Views: 114291
Re: Syntax random
Reviving this thread to mention an interesting observation about English quantifiers (discovered in the process of conlanging): 1. We only didn’t see the Louvre ⇒ It was only the Louvre that we didn’t see Under focalisation (I think this particular construction is clefting?), the quantifier seems t...
- Fri May 03, 2024 12:47 am
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: Almeomusica
- Replies: 142
- Views: 11642517
Re: Meet the Žambeys
Right, makes sense! Is Elcaďináe a plausible option? Mmm, doesn't sound good. You could maybe get away with " soî Elcaďinî " (that is, eliding cimî ). Does Zaugu Mogemum work? I assume this is based on the place name Mogema. I don't like all the m's; I think Mogemen sounds better. Right -...
- Thu May 02, 2024 4:20 pm
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: A monochromatic consociety
- Replies: 8
- Views: 280
Re: A monochromatic consociety
So from this, we could assume that having only one type of cone for normal daytime vision would be basically black and white vision but it would look different depending what the sensitivity peak and overall sensitivity curve for the single cone would be. Wavelengths outside the curve, no matter ho...
- Thu May 02, 2024 3:49 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
- Replies: 733
- Views: 137475
Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
When do you guys think will AI be able to create fully fledged conlangs? I asked both Gemini and ChatGPT to create conlangs for me and while both were able to come up with a reasonably good list of sound changes, the overall result was not what I asked for (I asked for a descendant of Middle Englis...
- Thu May 02, 2024 5:05 am
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: Almeomusica
- Replies: 142
- Views: 11642517
Re: Meet the Žambeys
I'll look at my notes but I'm afraid there's very little there. No worries ‒ you mentioned keyboardists ‒ I thought C.K. was a truckers’ magazine, am I missing something here? Heh, yeah... the initials stood for Contemporary Keyboard , later just Keyboard . Though this kind of silliness has been te...
- Wed May 01, 2024 7:13 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: Almeomusica
- Replies: 142
- Views: 11642517
Re: Meet the Žambeys
Ah! You mentioned its name being related to the magazine but I don’t remember if there was more. What was it about keyboardists? I decided in the end that I won’t skip the next two days anyway ‒ perfect chance to lay out the modal system while we’ve got both a Verdurian- and a Kebreni-speaking musi...
- Wed May 01, 2024 4:15 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: Almeomusica
- Replies: 142
- Views: 11642517
Re: Meet the Žambeys
Some quick reactions... There are two days until Ulian, and two more fameless small towns to spend my few remaining coins in – Zola and Cuendaya Kainei. I forget if I told you the metanarrative about the latter town, but it has a slight reputation for good keyboardists. Zevy – from Kebreni zeviḣ - l...
- Mon Apr 29, 2024 4:18 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
- Replies: 43
- Views: 1143
Re: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
My main problem with the idea of time travel is that you wouldn't just have a few people trying to kill Hitler... ...you'd have hundreds, or thousands, or perhaps even millions of people trying to kill, or prevent the killing of, basically every major or minor historical figure. Time travel stories...
- Mon Apr 29, 2024 3:49 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: "Experiencer"
- Replies: 40
- Views: 4590
Re: "Experiencer"
I think there’s a fundamental and very important difference: natural languages have evolved under the process of normal language transmission, whereas conlangs have not. Even collaborative conlangs have not undergone this process. It's true of most languages, but why is this fundamental or importan...
- Fri Apr 26, 2024 10:10 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: War in the Middle East, again
- Replies: 455
- Views: 75036
Re: War in the Middle East, again
I also remember that I found out about this on a list of the most remote archipelagos on earth. What I don't remember is the usual name of the place, except that it starts with a K. I'm bad with names. It's only 7900 miles from the US, if you go straight down. (That is, it's one of the only bits of...
- Fri Apr 26, 2024 3:28 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Settler colonialism in action
- Replies: 183
- Views: 5797
Re: Settler colonialism in action
I’ll take that as my cue to take a left turn: to what extent is the repression/possibly genocide in Xinjiang/Uyghurstan an instance of settler colonialism? Like in Tibet, it’s systematic repression of an indigenous population that won’t cooperate with the CCP coupled with (that’s the important part...
- Thu Apr 25, 2024 6:51 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: War in the Middle East, again
- Replies: 455
- Views: 75036
Re: War in the Middle East, again
So, to me, this suggests that there is a very substantial contingent of people who like to amplify accusations against Israel, but don’t seem to care much about other conflicts. And we must ask ourselves: why is this? You have a point, but this is also a bit disingenuous. 1) "Israel is no wors...
- Wed Apr 24, 2024 7:38 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: War in the Middle East, again
- Replies: 455
- Views: 75036
Re: War in the Middle East, again
It's not that it is a Jewish ethnostate in and of itself but rather that it is a settler-colonial state where the settler part is going on right now , rather than being mostly well in the past (even though as commented, there have been abuses in, say, the US up to the very present, albeit on a far ...
- Wed Apr 24, 2024 4:15 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: What are the phonotactics rules for Classical Latin?
- Replies: 22
- Views: 1007
Re: What are the phonotactics rules for Classical Latin?
/s/ is always weird phonotactically. Some say it's a vowel. You could (might? should?) treat the <i> in Mandarin <si zi ci shi zhi chi> (pinyin) as sibilant vowels. For sure, phonetically. Phonemically, like other aspects of Mandarin, it's a puzzle. By normal phonological principles I think we can ...
- Wed Apr 24, 2024 4:07 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: War in the Middle East, again
- Replies: 455
- Views: 75036
Re: War in the Middle East, again
do we remember what a state is? it is generally understood to be the monopoly of violence over a territory: how about the other part? jewish here means an ethnicity [...] So, an ethnostate, a policy of the monopoly of violence being held by a certain ethnic group, presumably in its own interest, an...
- Tue Apr 23, 2024 3:12 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: Verdurian grammar questions
- Replies: 10
- Views: 673