Zompist Bboard Again

From our friends at the BBC : Transgender children: Texas plan to probe parents halted I originally read this the normal way, but recognized that it could be read is alleging a plan on the part of the state of Texas to probe, in the alien abductee sense, the parents of transgender children, which h...

I start to think any headline with a colon automatically ratchets up the garden-pathing/confusion potential. Maybe that's genius, maybe it's cheating, I'm not sure what to think.

I love this. Knowing nothing about Italian food, even Italian-American food, I can't really say anything more. Just... yes. Thank you!

(-- another alt-cuisine, conlang-recipe enthusiast)

I do get what Vardelm's saying. Perhaps we just experience different 'friction' when quickly reading interlinearized text -- for me, it's not spotting the tags against a background of glosses, but differentiating the tags from one another (again, when skimming or looking for a specific item).

vegfarandi beat me to it -- I wanted to make a similar comment. Different lengths of tags helps me disambiguate them when reading quickly. Especially given that block caps are already less distinct from each other. I can't imagine how dealing with it is for someone with even mild dyslexia. (Side not...

Calling on Amitabha by name is ritual, surely? And there's no need to distinguish 'theology' from some made-up 'Buddhology' -- again, I can't think of any form of Buddhism, outside its late Western extremist tendencies, that doesn't thoroughly involve deities. Anyway, yeah, I do agree that defining ...

Unless by Buddhism you actually only mean contemporary Western meditation practitioners and philosophy students, I can't think of any kind of Buddhism that doesn't involve plenty of priests, as you define them. My understanding is that Buddhist clergy are monks (bhikkhu). I don't think Buddhism say...

From earthly religions. I'm using "priest" as a cleric who performs rituals, or serves as an intermediary between humans and deities. (Wikipedia agrees, but my dictionary is more vague.) Given that, quite a few religions have no priests per se. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism come to mind. [...

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 4:51 am I once made a Tungusic conlang...

There's TWO of us!!!!?!!

Step One has been accomplished. Next, Step Three: World Domination.

'Sperg on, man.

Water is a mysterious element, even with (or especially with?) the science of fluid dynamics trying to help.

Good to know -- maybe I'll try hitting up Eisenbrauns directly about making it available again. In any case, thank you for the web-detectiving that got me this far!!

That is definitely the one I was thinking of, thank you bradrn!!! I can see that my memory has magnified the text a bit, but I still love it. FWIW, this was part of an annual exercise that they did for a few years, and I remember reading some other good bits along the same lines. So if the Wayback M...

Actually, the day before yesterday, but forgot to post here: Old Albic nominal ablaut classes Hey, it's great to see new material from your -- I don't know what to call it, 'legendarium'? 'conlang-ecosphere'? In any case, I really enjoy your work and find it inspiring, intriguing, etc. I hope there...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 10:26 pm We did it! We won the election to form a bargaining unit at my library!

A little late, but really big congratulations! That's nothing to sneeze at. Let us know how it goes from here, please, would you?

It was a really brilliant bit of work, as I remember it -- I read it all the way through the first time thinking it was a legit Hittite (or Hurrian, etc) hymn, about the Storm God chasing off the Sun and so on, until finally the penny dropped. I really hope someone can help me locate it again; if I ...

I'm hoping the collective memories & general obscurity-savvy of the board can help me out here, as I've drawn a blank so far. Years back (maybe 10-15 years?) I remember coming across on the web the results of an annual translation competition put on by a publisher (?) of biblical/ancient Near Ea...

No worries, @hwhatting! I do recognize that after decades of editing-heavy jobs, I'm probably predisposed to spot possible (or 'only-on-a-technicality') ambiguities in phrasing -- which may not exist for any healthy reader :) And PS: I also see the 'children vaccines' as confusing -- a lot of those ...

Well, that's the beef I'm having with these examples - the wrong readings are so far-fetched that my brain doesn't even come up with them. I'd expect a "Confusing Headline" to be either hard to make any sense of at all, or at least the wrong reading should suggest itself first, before you...

UK man accused of running over his wife to stand trial in France (The Guardian online, 8 December 2021)

Hey, I watched Engrenages, I can almost see the reasoning.