Zompist Bboard Again

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Oct 16, 2026 12:35 pm I thought "Spengler" was [ˈʃpɛŋlɐ] in StG.

And you are right, as I as a native speaker of German can ascertain. The name denotes, BTW, a profession, namely a plumber.

@ WeepingElf: Yes, maybe Rømø or Fanø, where, apparently, only Danish is spoken. Or a fictional island in that area. It might seem silly, but when I imagine an alternate history to set a conlang in, I don’t want it to “replace” a real language; for example, I wouldn’t want to imagine an alt-history...

Weird and terrible problem. So last week, I was canvassing and one person panicked because he mistook me for a burglar. He chased me down in his car demanding an explanation but I could hardly give one because I was obviously terrified. I met up with another canvasser who explained the situation an...

Maybe set your language in Jutland? (E.g. a Jutland that never became Danish-speaking?) Yes! A not-completely-Danified Jutland is a very good setting for several reasons. It would make various features of my conlang more convincing, such as the lack of final-obstruent devoicing (which I believe beg...

When, if ever, would you capitalize numbers written out? Of course you'd use lowercase when writing something like "There were five chickens in the coop." But what about, for instance, "The number five has different symbolic connotations in a number of different cultures"? I don...

Uncleftish Beholding comes to my mind here.

I am not a native English speaker, but Zulu traditions seems like the most correct form to me.

In my project, in Europe it is more like incremental improvement (every freak weather episode and oil shortage drives voters towards the Greens, and every shady deal of the centre-right with the far right drives voters away from the centre-right and towards the centre-left), though later, a wave of ...

One long-standing question is where exactly these people should live. Over the years, I have placed my conpeople in many different settings, generally without much consideration on how they got there. Sometimes that meant the St Louis area (in other words my hometown), other times outer space (the ...

Don’t underestimate the ability of humans to expend staggering amounts of time and effort in hopeless causes. Exactly. If you've ever seen an interview at a parliamentary election where the candidate is bullishly confident of winning the seat when clearly they have no hope - e.g. a Conservative and...

Sorry to hear that. But it is never too late to start something new.

I think the leftists are in part themselves responsible for this because they communicate wrongly . It's almost always dystopias and doomsday sermons. This makes many people think that the future will be worse than the present, and from there it is not a long way to the belief that the past was bett...

Where did you get the news that Bolsonaro has won? As far as I have heard, there will be a runoff, though a Bolsonaro victory in that runoff seems likely. There will be a run-off, but never since Brazil's redemocratization has a president who won in the first term lost in the second. Bolsonaro has ...

Where did you get the news that Bolsonaro has won? As far as I have heard, there will be a runoff, though a Bolsonaro victory in that runoff seems likely.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:20 pm Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

Yes, I'd be interested.

alice wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2026 2:50 pm Well, L. Ron Hubbard said that the operating frequency of a thetan was 10^69 Hz, so presumably it's nothing more than the desire to inspire awe with Very BIg Numbers.

That's way shorter than Planck time!

Apparently, who made that map confused Austria and Australia

Do you think that Europe could win a war against Russia? While obviously European countries all have their own armies, it has been eighty years since their last major war. They will have to face millions of battle-hardened fanatics with nothing but basic training and their grandfather's fading memo...

'Phags pa knew a few Indic-derived scripts. But I guess he deserves extra points for making the vowels more separated. You mean, King Sejong (or the scholars who invented Hangul for him) knew a few Indic-derived scripts, I guess. 'Phags pa is not a person but a script ;) No, I mean 'Phags pa, the p...

I think Phags-pa and especially Hangeul should be considered full alphabets, so "invented only once" should be changed to "probably invented at least twice." Fair enough. Still, I think Peter Daniels overemphasizes the alphabet/abjad distinction. And an abugida is pretty much eq...