Zompist Bboard Again

I similarly view "the Zulu" as referring to archtypical Zulus, while "the Zulus" refers to actual individual Zulus in the plural. I finally found an ethnic group name with no singular/plural distinction in my speech - Sioux . I think I would then choose meaning 2 over meaning 1 ...

For me, the plural of Zulu is Zulus , so: the Zulu's traditions , the Zulus' traditions and the Zulu traditions all have slightly different meanings, even when one doesn't have a particular Zulu or group of them in mind. No. 1 refers to an archtypal Zulu, no. 2 to your actual Zulus, and no. 3 could ...

Did the Elisp expression (setq x) have well-defined meaning? I think it used in Emacs 20.2, and probably later, but now it's being rejected as having too few parameters. I believe it set the variable x to t; or at least, it resulted in the variable having a value other than nil.

Presumably the same way ‘googol’ did — one person suggested those values and others followed. One has to wonder whether these words truly meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion. There seem to be various systems within closely related cultures. Are you one of those perfidious deletionists? No, I t...

A question I find more interesting is how those particular values ended up being conventionalised. Presumably the same way ‘googol’ did — one person suggested those values and others followed. One has to wonder whether these words truly meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion. There seem to be var...

Well, all you need is math and a way to read it out loud. Take your example of mahaugha = 10 62 . Wikipedia helpfully annotates it as "hundred novemdecillion". I'd put it to you that almost no one could read that and work out what a novemdecillion is. It's obviously 10 114 . Lots of us ha...

If Russia can't even conquer a significant portion of Ukraine in all the years they have spent trying (only occupying limited portions despite all its efforts), how do you expect it to get anywhere against the nations of the EU, which overall is far stronger militarily and economically than Ukraine...

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...

It is extremely unlikely that Putin would invade the Baltics, unless he has assurances from the USA that they won't participate. He did enough sabre-rattling for Sweden (particularly noteworthy) and Finland to abandon their neutrality and join NATO. I don't think their joining has weakened NATO.

Loss with compensatory lengthening (and coloring?) aw > oː, so <w> comes to be seen as mater lectionis. aʔ > aː, so <ʔ> can also come to be seen as a mater lectionis. In which language(s) do you mean? I had thought in Aramaic, but it seems that where the monophthongisation of /aj/ and /aw/, where i...

Call me a doomer, but I keep hearing rumors that Russia is planning to attack the rest of Europe, perhaps starting with Poland. Assuming that does happen, how much chance does Europe have of defeating them? It seems a foregone conclusion that the US will not contribute any help, which is probably w...

aw > oː, so <w> comes to be seen as mater lectionis. aʔ > aː, so <ʔ> can also come to be seen as a mater lectionis. A curious parallel: in Sumerian, there were glyphs for ʔan, ʔab, ʔin...then the glottal stop was lost, so these became VC glyphs, which had not previously existed. So how did Sumerian...

some consonants merged with the previous vowel, so that the resultant vowel could be seen as being written with the consonant Not sure I understand this? Loss with compensatory lengthening (and coloring?) aw > oː, so <w> comes to be seen as mater lectionis. aʔ > aː, so <ʔ> can also come to be seen ...

Of course, the real reason why abjads don't write short vowels is because Egyptian didn't write them either, and the original Semitic abjad was inspired by Egyptian writing. Of course, that raises the question of why didn't Egyptian develop a way of writing them until Greek script was largely taken...

Does anyone know a robust method for specifying in a standard font format that lines written horizontally overlap vertically? This happens with ascenders and descenders that look like flourishes. This seems to happen naturally for real in at least Georgian and Tai Tham; I don't know whether it happe...

Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans' . Not the first time someone has said something has said something like this; the question is: "how"? One scenario that nearly came to pass (admitted to in the past week, nearly happening this spring) was the US...

I think "steppe nomads" may be overstating things-- pastoralism developed at about the same time as agriculture. 'Immigrants from the East' then, as far as Y-chromosomes go, which is the more interesting marker. Autosomes can be less affected by pervasive dominant incomers. (The model her...

A key feature of non-rhotic NAE is that NURSE is typically still rhotic or, in older non-rhotic NAE, undergoes diphthongization even though commA and lettER merge, I should note, so this is definitely not non-rhotic NAE. Well, can you tell me what is going on? Here is an example . The spoken text i...

There now seems to be a strong feeling around that the Basques descend from yet another group of steppe nomads. Really? On digging, it looks as though the evidence for 'another group' is purely linguistic. Basque men are overwhelming of the S116 subclade of R1b, which is also common in France and t...

Forni: Hi guys! Basque is an Indo-European language. Here are my sound changes!! Please ignore the fact I skipped some in my etymologies. <izar> should really be *izel, but no it isn't! His 'demonstration' actually got published in a proper journal. The editors thought its demolition would be helpf...