Zompist Bboard Again

Brief interlude: the Extinction Rebellion trust fund people are back. Evidentally they're worried that they're not unpopular enough - boasting about causing misery for Londoners and spraying gallons of fake blood in the streets weren't enough to make themselves really obnoxious, so now they've 'bran...

Xwtek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 8:56 am

jal wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 7:54 am What kind of "way" do you mean?

What to fuse.

Whatever you want.

You could have your verbs have valency-evidentiality-polarity-version-telicity-pluractionality fusion, and your nouns have tense-person-orientation fusion. That would be very non-European.

Quite a lot's been going on with Boris, btw. There are two major court cases going on in Scotland. In one, the court is asked to issue an 'interdict' demanding that the PM not break the law, specifically the Benn Act (which requires him to request an extension). If the PM still broke the law, he cou...

Just to keep people updated: Heidi Allen's been converted again. Now, to recap: in February, a bunch of Labour MPs left Labour to form The Independent Group. Two days later, Heidi Allen was converted from a Tory MP to a TIG MP. In March, The Independent Group changed its name to Change UK - The Inde...

No, but it's a property of languages, not of phonemes. "Non-rhotic" just means "isn't R" (used of phonemes) or "doesn't pronounce the R" (of dialects).

What evm appears to be talking about is some sort of sandhi rule, which should probably go in its own section...

I can't go through line-by-line, life is too short. So I'll just pick out a few representative points. "If I take an epic fantasy world seriously enough to permit this sort of analysis, I'm liable to find it full of languages significantly stranger than I feel competent to deal with – weirder t...

Or, to put it a bit differently, if, earlier this year, a big fan of Theresa May had shown up in the British Politics Guide thread and ranted about how your mockery of her was "idiotic" and therefore wrong and you obviously didn't understand the first thing about Brexit, most people on th...

I don't get the rancor... so far as I can see, Rye is mostly saying that if Tolkien's lore is true, then neither the elves nor their languages should look like things that developed from a long process of evolution. Well, see my responses to all the other "this is the one true way to conworld&...

I think he could maybe write a more interesting analysis if he concentrated less on inflating his self-esteem through the mockery of others, Yeah, it's really bad when people try to inflate their own self-esteem through the mockery of others. That shouldn't be done. Ever. And it's absolutely imposs...

Sorry if this has been posted before, but old school conlang blogger Justin B Rye has some new content on his website. The fact that his site is still growing after twenty years is amazing; it's like finding out that Richard Kenneway is still collecting conlang links or something. Anyway, check out...

Conceivably there could also be verbs for some higher units like 'ten' or 'a hundred'. You mean, there is word for to be 5 and to be 20, while there is no verbal form for number between them, except supported by tsuu? Yes, I think that would be realistic. Although of course it would also be realist...

I've not seen the retention of laryngeals proposed as a strong characteristic of anatolian vs non-anatolian. At best, it's a weak support for the theory (i.e. we know they were retained in anatolian, and only suspect they may briefly have been retained elsewhere but aren't certain). And of course, t...

Then, there is something wrong with this dictionary . On the other hand, now I'm confused whether it's OK not to treat them as homophone. Then put it right! There's a lot wrong with it, but it's mostly correctable. Well, 'right' is subjective, innit? It can't very well list every possible pronuncia...

I don't think there's much of a settled market here - there are too few buyers and sellers, and prices would be too dependent on individual priorities. Personally, I'd charge a very high price, because I don't like the idea. Others, on the other hand, might even be willing to pay to have their work ...

Random thought: suppose there's a hard Brexit. One of the many problems with that is that it might lead to serious shortages of various things in the UK because various goods could no longer be imported into the UK on the same terms as before. But couldn't the British government get around this by ...

It sounds very plausible to me - it's not unusual for low numbers to have different rules from high numbers, and in particular for high numbers to be more invariant than low numbers (eg to have gender agreement on low numbers but not on high). Essentially what we're talking about here are verbal adj...

I had to unlearn the pronunciation for either pidgin or pigeon. They're both either [pɪdʒɪn] (British) or [pɪdʒən] (US). I used to pronounce the former as the [pɪdʒɪn] and the latter as [pɪdʒən]. Since I align more to US English (despite Indonesian usually align more to British), I'll use the latte...

The term "Pigeon English" is a source of amusement. I do wonder if 'pigeon' as in "It's not my pigeon" comes from the Chinese-English pidgin. AFAIR, it probably has two origins. One is the word 'pigeon', meaning 'business', borrowed from pidgin. The other is the use of pigeons a...

I've got a combined linguistic/political, or, if you will, conlanging/conhistory question: Suppose there are two closely related speech varieties - let's call them Speech Variety 1, or SV1 for short, and Speech Variety 2, or SV2 for short. At the "start", SV1 is clearly the more prestigio...

Basically this deal would let Northern Ireland export goods to Ireland, while being protected from competition from Irish workers in the service sector. Could you expand on this, please. Irish and British workers will continue to have free movement across the island. Sorry, by "Irish workers&q...