Zompist Bboard Again

Horrible news yesterday. Local elections have swept the far right into power across the country. Don’t put the cart before the horse, as they say. There has been a tremendous increase in Reform councilors, it is true; but that doesn’t necessary translate to them being ‘in power’ if there are more c...

malloc wrote: ↑Fri May 08, 2026 7:45 am Looks like we might be getting a new pandemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hondiu ... s_outbreak

No, we probably won’t be.

Man in Space wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2026 5:00 pm For the pitch accent rule, using ^Vacc _ and _ ^Vacc doesn’t cause subsequent accents to disappear

Could you give me the whole rule you tried which didn’t work?

This is something I’ve contemplated once or twice myself. For instance, consider an intelligent being living in the plasma on the surface of a star: perhaps they would come up with some formulation of mathematics in which differential equations were basic and obvious things? Meanwhile, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ ...

would the math of the andromedans then be quite different? possibly. i mean, i'd expect it to still work , but it probably wouldn't be the same. is ours the true one? is theirs? No, it's the same. 2 + 2 = 4 is true in Andromeda too; pi is still the ratio of circumference to diameter. Their quantum ...

Thank you Lērisama! This is because Brassica expands your original set of rules to [b… pʰ… bʰ…] / [p…] / _ Svcl etc. and then replaces the categories one by one, and can't find anything to replace all but the first category on the left with, because the lengths are mismatched. There is a way to simp...

Aaargh, not another wildcard problem… that syntax is almost more trouble than it’s worth, and the semantics confuses even me sometimes. Remind me to look into it tomorrow when I have time.

Ah, the Saanich strategy!

Man in Space wrote: ↑Tue May 05, 2026 8:56 pm Brassica is awesome. bradrn, thank you so much for this tool, and for sharing it with us.

Thank you for the compliment! Now I’ll have to find the time to read this post…

Or, moreover, any situation where a feature is realised over two or more surface morphemes, a.k.a. ‘distributed exponence’. (I’d be very interested to know what jal would make of, say, the bipartite TAMP forms in Dorig , or for that matter any of the stuff that Komnzo gets up to…) Lol, I wouldn't b...

Your position essentially says that anything which is not fully productive cannot be analyzed as a separate morpheme, even if it communicates meaning by itself (e.g. the - en in fallen , taken , or gotten ). Or, moreover, any situation where a feature is realised over two or more surface morphemes,...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2026 12:36 pm

þeprussianfrog wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2026 12:06 pm Hello!
The website's currently down for me.

This was already reported on the GitHub; I’m in another country but will look into it when I get back home.

Website should be back up now.

A morpheme is an idemtifiable element of a word that changes the meaning. driven without the -(e)n would be the base form, not a past participle. Ergo it's a morpheme, even if not a productive one (although even that is debatable, as people have formed things like boughten ). And as -en is an ident...

Even within pure mathematics it’s interesting how often people find peculiarly deep and beautiful connections between concepts which at first seemed completely unrelated: e.g. the modularity theorem (between number theory and algebraic geometry). I don’t believe anyone really knows what to make of s...

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do becaus...

Bug report: using ⟨ɹɨjɹ⟩ as an input works when “Apply” is selected, but does not when “Report rules applied” is selected. Actually, this is not a bug. No rules were applied to ⟨ɹɨjɹ⟩, therefore no rules were reported. Still, this situation is clearly confusing. I should add some text explicitly sa...

I really do not get what people are arguing about here. Insofar as I can understand anything of the dispute at all, people seem to be having trouble with the very concepts of nonconcatenative morphology and unproductive morphology. Which is weird, given how common both of those are…

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding. Well, that is certainly the...

For example, I once had doubts about the validity of stridden , while I had no doubt about the validity of strode . This is interesting. I can’t recall having seen ‘stridden’ before, and it does feel extremely weird to me. I have no idea why. (I also am unsure what I would have given as the past pa...

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas an...