Zompist Bboard Again

Does it ever happen to anyone else that, when you've read something that was written a while ago, you find yourself thinking in old-fashioned language for a while afterwards? Indeed; sometimes when I have read too long, or seen again some work by Shakespeare I can find myself blank verse adopting, ...

John Bercow is no longer the Speaker. Instead, today Ken Clarke, as Father of the House, is conducting the election to replace him. It uses the multiple-rounds balloting system familiar from the Tory leadership election and elsewhere: there's a series of ballots of MPs, and after each one the lowest...

It certainly looks Romance - Italian or Spanish. But of course that might just be because you're emulating romance, rather than because it is.

But the actual tongue movement is tiny! If you have your tongue as for /T/, and just push it a milimetre further, you get a lin'uolabial. If you have it as for dental /t/ and push it a couple of milimetres further, you have a linguolabial. What?? I agree that linguolabials are easy to make, but I j...

I don't mean to poke holes, particularly as I don't think you're aiming for strict realism here. But I don't think smallpox works that way. Smallpox is actually quite difficult to spread, and very difficult to have become endemic. It spreads slowly and inefficiently. First, smallpox cannot be spread...

So let me get this straight: Everyone has to shut up to stay safe sometimes, but you're bad at it, but you've lived at least a dozen and a half years without anyone shooting you, but somehow "there's a good chance" it will happen anyway? It's amazing how many macho badasses there are, on ...

case+number exponence is itself restricted to indo-european languages (and semitic?) You don't seem to have read your own reference properly. WALS lists Finnish, Nenets, Chukchi, West Greenlandic, and Yaqui as all having case+number exponence. And Lugbara, according to the notes - I think they don'...

And of course if you stand successfully you get to sit. But when you stop sitting you stand down, rather than up, which is a little counterintuitive...

That's true. I don't buy the idea of a Brexit Party backlash against Johnson because he failed to deliver Halloween Brexit. Sure, he failed. But it was very clear to everybody, I think, that he was absolutely forced to fail by Parliament - he delivered a deal that most Leavers would probably support...

Though for me at least [ʃ] and [j] seem to be in about the same place (with the tongue body maybe a bit further forward for [ʃ]?). For me, /S/ is actually further back than /j/. However, I can if I want produce /S/ where I produce /j/, and /j/ where I produce /S/, without any change that comes clos...

Then where do you imagine agglutinative languages come from? Did humans evolve with three languages - one agglutinating, one fusional and one isolating - and all their descendents have stuck to those categories ever since? Note that if languages can stop being agglutinating, then they must be able t...

But that's my point - you looked in two dimensions. You looked 4,000km in every direction, but not 4,000 years back in time, let alone 8,000. There's nothing magical in the snow that forces these languages to be agglutinative because of where they are - that's just the languages that happen to be th...

It's the forgotten language of a paleolithic tribe of humans living in north-east Siberia. They live in small nomadic clans and have a shamanistic religion. They hunt various kinds of animals, mostly seals, walrus reindeer and mammoth. Mammoth is the hardest prey, so it is held in high regards amon...

So we all agree the plan is to continue getting extensions until the Sun expands and kills all life on Earth, rendering the problem moot, yes? No, I think we've given up on that. The conservative plan is for brexit as soon as possible - they say perhaps not this year, but 'early january'. That's wh...

Update: Frente Amplio won 49.45% of the vote, so they need to have a run-off, but it's pretty clear they'll win (the Nationals got under 32%). And I was wrong before: there was no chance of the far-right beating the Colorados, because although they were neck and neck with them in the polls, I hadn't...

So there's presidential (and other) elections in Argentina today, which have not been mentioned yet. As is traditional, Argentina is in the midst of an economic crisis, which adds an extra little spice to the elections. So, can we take it you've moved to Argentina? Or is this just an interest from ...

It's a clever system, in that I can see why it would encourage eusociality.

However, I feel I should point out that you don't actually need chromosomal hijinks to 'justify' eusociality, which can evolve with an ordinary XY system. As, indeed, it has!

I acknowledge it may no longer be directly relevant, but I just wanted to point out an error/assumption: the above calculations of how many genes are shared assumes that each chromosome contains the same number of genes. In reality, the human X chromosome contains around 800 protein-encoding genes, ...

Is the two-syllable literally something like [ˈlɪtʃli]? I can't speak for Travis' daughter, but I would guess it's /lɪɾli/? Although I can imagine your version too - though it sounds more English than American, I think. The key, I guess, is whether you begin by deleting the schwa before or after th...

Interesting how this provides evidence for the hypothesis I read 20 years ago (and wish I could find again) that the default foreign language for English-speakers is shifting from French to Spanish. Presumably this is due to America being right next to Mexico. I think the tendency is present in Bri...