Zompist Bboard Again

It's not that deep. I just mean we can try to guess how an increase in temperature might affect an oceanic and continental climate differently. Antarctica doesn't have a monsoon, and Siberia doesn't have a circumpolar current. We have to look at how those processes work to understand how a change in...

Yeah, when we talk about climate we're dealing with huge knock-on effects of relatively small and hard to predict changes. Intricate models break down under the strain of small externalities. I'm trying to guess what a certain part of Antarctica would be like during part of the year based on two or ...

One hurdle with this sort of approach is that places getting warmer is only a minor effect of climate change. Under the more pessimistic but realistic projections for the near future, say 2.5 to 3 degrees warming, terrible things would happen to agriculture, coastlines, etc. But an actual 2~3 degree...

IIUC, the problem is the cool summer. The tip of the Antarctic Peninsula currently has a mean annual temperature similar to that of Yakutsk, around -8. But in Yakutsk, the summers are reasonably warm, being in the teens and twenties for months at a time. For this reason, the permafrost begins about ...

This is very fun! I do think your changes are very naturalistic. I have also made a WG conlang by cobbling together attested or near-attested changes, and found the result to be somewhat boring. Have you encountered that problem, or have you found ways to make your language interesting? Also, do yo...

I think some of the researchers on this topic are not contrasting f with ɸ, a pointless distinction that is literally impossible to care about, but rather contrasting f with p. There's a whole range of scopes and levels of confidence at play here, as with any good crackpottery.

I have read at least one paper that noted /f/ is less common as we go from attested languages to proto-languages, which would be a very intriguing way to address this problem, but of course it runs into some issues. Confidently reconstructed photo-languages is a pretty small sample size. And if the ...

This is very fun! I do think your changes are very naturalistic. I have also made a WG conlang by cobbling together attested or near-attested changes, and found the result to be somewhat boring. Have you encountered that problem, or have you found ways to make your language interesting? Also, do you...

If your consociety represents a radical break with the past, historically that is at least if not more likely in places where the existing system is strained than where it is functioning most effectively. Both South Africa and Sweden have high wealth inequality, but I would put my money on South Afr...

Eddy, I'm sure you've noticed by now, there is no upper bound to a neurotypical person's tolerance for stupid, infuriating nonsense. As long as we are a minority, nothing in society is required to make sense beyond the sense provided by custom and consensus. Language is sex seven. Civilization is si...

I was looking forward to seeing Modern Gothic, but life comes first. I just hope most of the errors aren't my fault.

Well, there is a whole language based on oral potato insertion: Danish.

(people in this thread): "I don't get it. How can 'butterfly' mean a lepidoptera insect if there is no way a person could reasonably work out that it's a lepidoptera from the semantics of the word's components? And if they made up the word, how could they do that, confident that others will und...

How do we feel about the idea that /f/ is a post-neolithic innovation?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav3218

1. Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that.

2. It's pretty common for languages to be named after a place by its own speakers, especially if the official name post-dates the establishment of organized states.

3. What's something you find aesthetically repulsive in a conscript?

1. [...] 2. It depends on the language, obviously. But I either make root dictionaries or phrase dictionaries. Anything in between just gets messy. For a recent project, in which verbs are highly labile, and can be used as nouns freely, and interact in semantically unpredictable ways with grammatica...

Phags-pa is based on Tibetan. I never noticed that the Mongolic script predates it. TIL! Zompist brings up a fun is-a-hotdog-a-sandwich argument: when does an abugida become an alphabet? Phags-pa and Hangeul give vowels the same visual weight as consonants. In Hangeul they are always mandatory, and ...

True, but it never gets any worse than "three dozen and six", oe "six and three-zen" in practice. I'd find both of those a bit annoying, because 42 says the same a lot more succinctly and without me having to do addition. You have to do addition with 42 too, only you’re more use...

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." Sometimes my conlanging instincts move me to invent a deliberately terrible script, i.e. one that is so underspecified tha...

I once read an article trying to make an argument that computationally more information is lost removing the short vowels from Arabic than from Latin. In short, the article was trying to dispel the idea that nothing of value is lost by not writing short vowels in an abjad, and that the Arabic script...