Zompist Bboard Again

Fair enough. I'm involved enough in Algonquian linguistics to know whether the standard analysis is derivational or inflectional, only that I'd somehow got the impression that it was normally analysed as agreement, which I normally think of as an inflectional category. I know nothing about Algonqui...

I think it's useful, when writing, to consider two questions, with regard to each sentence you write: how does this relate logically to the preceding sentence; and how does this relate logically to the overarching theme of the post? If you can't answer these questions, your readers probably can't ei...

Yup. Second and third are just how pronouns work; first isn't anything because it's not a valid English sentence, but it might be the ungrammatical way someone might try to convey the concept of a resumptive pronoun.

The second two are logophoric, and all three (like most pronouns) are anaphoric.

Have you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel: Chances are of course that both the novel and its translation reside in Google Books, and the translation is mostly from an actual translation or translations :). JAL I doubt that. That translation may be good...

Another book I'm currently reading is The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? , by Jan Zalasiewicz, about what traces of human activity alien explorers might find in 100 million years. Parts of it also serve nicely as an introduction to some basic ideas of geology. Interesti...

...finally gotten back to 'finishing up' a piece I was writing months ago about a musical instrument (or family thereof) in my conculture. ...and then I make one little paragraph about related instruments in neighbouring cultures, aaaand now I'm developing the whole phonological history of a dozen d...

To look at this from another side: my family's from Ireland. In two hundred years, Irish has gone from the language of the majority (i.e. millions of people) to a language of a minority with amost everyone at least a second-language speaker, to the language of only a minority, to the language of a ...

When playing D&D, I can hardly get myself to call my stats force , dextérité , constitution, intelligence, sagesse , charisme . I've played more RPGs in Japanese than in French. When you've never heard of something in language X, it's really hard to discuss it in X without a lot of translation ...

Never seen this one before, though I guess it's common jargon: spox, "spokesperson". I'm guessing it's pronounced spoxe?

Of course it was a bad idea! It's caused the whole of the US to spell lots of words wrongly, which is very irritating to read...

Oh, and one other small point: the people who speak Pravic aren't humans. I'm not sure that's relevant; it's been a while since I read the book -- but I think they were meant to act like humans... More or less, sure - but it's certainly possible for non-Terrans in the Eikumen (or however she spells...

Yes, I think Pravic is plausible. [Pravic would not, of course, be entirely successful, but the ways in which anarchism would not be successful is kind of (one of) the point(s) of the novel, so...] Conlangs do pretty well in sf-land. There's a few futures with Esperanto, there's Laadan, Heinlein's M...

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:59 am They don't occur for a good reason - they are really hard to distinguish acoustically from the bilabial stops. Give it a go yourself and you'll see what I mean.

They're also impossible to make if you don't have perfect teeth, which many people in ye olden days did not.

This doesn't look good for May, but one thing you have to hand her, not looking good but still being PM is her signature move. Surely it looks worse for the hard brexiters? It looks like they hyperfocused on getting that 15% of the party members to write to the 1922 committee, and not much on comin...

There have been remarks that the ERG is "a party within a party". The Militant Tendency for the late-2010s generation? Tempting to think, particularly in light of the current instability of the party system. But I think not, at least not yet - fo two reasons. First, while the ERG is passi...

In what may be an attempt to maintain his reputation as a complete joke, Rees-Mogg has said that he accepts the results of the vote but that May should resign anyway. No, that's a very reasonable position - it's what most people think, I think, or at least most people in politics. Historically, a &...

Well yeah, that's why they're right-wing! It's certainly why they're Brexiteers - it's an ideology all about passion and sentimal feeling being more important than, say, maths... Yes, May seems set to win (though a sitting cabinet minister noted that Tory MPs are "the most duplicitous electorat...

Footnote: the Party Chairman and the Chief Whip have been sequestered in No. 10 until 11pm. If today isn't the day, I think the hierarchy at least thinks it is... Unfortunately, I think she's likely to survive the vote. Fear will prevent most from deposing her, the same way Labour clung on to Brown...

Footnote: the Party Chairman and the Chief Whip have been sequestered in No. 10 until 11pm. If today isn't the day, I think the hierarchy at least thinks it is...

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was in some difficulty today (quelle suprise). She arrived in Berlin to discuss Brexit personally with Chancellor Merkel, but soon discovered that in fact no orderly and graceful exit was possible - that, in fact, she was locked in for an indefinite period and could ...