Zompist Bboard Again

Someone must have hacked Salmoneus's account! ;) No, just kidding, but this kind of swashbuckling speculation seems a bit out of character for this well-known skeptic. The difference is, this is a dead-end question. Something like "is PIE's closest relative Uralic?" is a foundational ques...

Off the top of my head: what about /ɥ/? In Anatolian, it could strengthen to /ʝʷ/ outside of a nucleus - seems trivial - and then dissimilate to plain /ʝ/ before a following labiovelar. For that sound to in turn become /ɟ/ is again trivial, and /ɟ/ could easily provide a dental stop or a dental or p...

Blench's data in the first paper, assembled across earlier works ups the ante much further than just numerals I'm aware - when I said "would involve at least", I did not secretly mean "would involve only". Even these aside though this still leaves not much chances of the two not...

Hmm. I was expecting some /bUs/, but what I was hoping for was some /bVz/ or /bUz/. My father's always semi-affectedly used these (that is, both the vowel and I assume the consonant are features of his 'native' dialect, which are 'corrected' in formal speech but often, probably intentionally, restor...

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Oct 14, 2018 10:43 pm All this makes me start worrying a bit about the future of our language.

I wouldn't despair just yet - your language has forty million speakers and an extensive contemporary literature. I think several other languages are more at risk of extinction then yours.

Blust, writing in 2009, says that a "historical connection" between Austronesian and Tai-Kadai "now appears virtually certain", but that whether it's genetic or just extensive borrowing remains "a point of contention". Though given that the borrowing would involve at le...

We've probably had this one, but I can't remember, so:

bus

?

CNET: NASA astronaut details fall to Earth after failed Soyuz launch

Genuinely read it the other way at first, was curious.

The real problems with cutting migration were that a) there were a bunch of refugees we were required under national and international law to accept; Slightly off-topic, but I can't help feeling recently that treaty obligations to refugees aren't long for this world. They were widely accepted when ...

Good to have you back, Chris. Thanks! I've been conlanging a bit again and thought I'd drop in. I agree that May isn't pro-EU in the sense that, say, Ken Clarke was pro-EU (and, to be fair, Corbyn isn't exactly anti-EU in the sense that, say, Nigel Farage was anti-EU). But she's certainly on the pr...

It didn't, though. Taking, for example, 2013-2014, there were 560,000 immigrants, of whom only 214,000 were from the EU (there were also 317,000 emigrants). It's true that the Tories couldn't actually have met their target without cutting EU migration - but that's disingenuous, because they were fre...

I'd say Corbyn is the same; he was a Leaver until he became leader of the opposition. Agreed. But Sal claimed that May was pro-EU leading an anti-EU party, and Corbyn was anti-EU leading a pro-EU party. I agree more or less about Corbyn, but I don't see how May could be said to be pro-EU. She's pro...

What do we mean by 'left' and 'right'? Well... Political space Let us imagine a number of politicians. These politicians "compete" with one another for the votes of the public - but how can the public distinguish them? Because they have "positions". A position implies a "spa...

Interesting analysis, Salmoneus, but I think it suffers a bit from your apparent conviction that economic policy is the "proper" measure for what is right-wing and what is left-wing in politics and every other possible axis is a deviation from the way things ought to be. Hi, yes, that's b...

[note: I thought I'd posted a reply on the poisoned chalice thing, but it's mysteriously disappeared (again!). I'll opine on that in a moment] alice: I'm not sure "senile dementia" has a consensus meaning in a political sense. I think the situation of the UK is certainly not "terminal...

So, it's that time again: cabinet members are privately predicting May may be gone by the end of the week. The problem is, again, Brexit. There's general dislike of her soft brexit approach. But more importantly, she's now said to be considering accepting a 'backstop proposal' to put a border down t...

[*] Phonological change cannot split two word that is already a homophone. So, yeah, it is the only way. Not technically true. See, for example, English dialects that distinguish 'can' and 'can'. The two loopholes here are stress (i.e. different words may have different levels of stress in a senten...

Meanwhile, I'm apparently the last person on the planet (or at least in the UK) to have watched Bodyguard *. But I'm caught up now. Despite the hype, it's actually really good! The finale, unfortunately, makes no sense, in the way that the finales of crime and conspiracy dramas generally struggle wi...

It should be noted however that this calendar has no use in everyday life by any culture in the civilised world. If you ask a Carastan for the current year he will say 'the 271st year in the reign of Gesostinos IX the Perplexed', while a Tagorese merchant from Yɛṃ Tǝlar will respond that it's 'year...

Cool! I can go on ignoring him like before. Since I happen to have blood meridian; or, the evening redness in the west directly in front of me, I may as well give a taste. This is just random stuff, not picked to be best or worst or whatever. The opening goes: See the child. He is pale and thin, he...