Zompist Bboard Again

It seems that while your definition is probably the most neutral current definition, the use of 'Zionist' as a derogatory term meaning 'Jew' or 'Israeli' is really common in practice, which is really unfortunate as your definition is probably the most useful current one and we don't need more slurs...

How exactly would you define a Zionist¹. I'm rather skeptical of actually looking this one up, because people who are interested in defining Zionist are likely to have an agenda of some kind, and usually seem to have an inherant morality implied in their definition. I am aware of 3 modern uses of t...

Sorry for reviving this thread after such a long intermission, but I just have to note how sick* I find this: Pro-Israel guy in the UK claims that starving people is good for them because it reduces obesity: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for-israel-condemned-over-claim-wa...

The contrast between Zompist proclaiming hope about our situation and everything I am reading elsewhere feels ever more jarring. Trump administration ‘looking at’ suspending habeas corpus for migrants, Stephen Miller says Newark Mayor Arrested While Protesting At ICE Detention Center I suggest read...

Your Bugs were pretty alien, as I recall. (By the way, whatever did happen to the Bugs?) I'm still mostly happy with what I wrote about the Bugs back in the day. One thing that's still to consider is whether to place them on the same planet as the rest of my conworlding (which would be convenient f...

I’m still contemplating this idea for my own conworld. What made you reconsider? It didn't work that well for the short story/novel ideas I had in mind. They're, if not hard SF, at least relatively realistic science fiction, so the idea implies wormhole-building precursors... who distract from the ...

The old idea was that there was intermittent connection between Earth and that conworld from prehistoric times on. That was an intriguing idea, but I feel it doesn't work that well, narratively. (I have several ideas in mind, revolving around first contact, and the connection tended to distract fro...

7´z°³l²µd²k²Ä±d´µ¶6²k° (mouths giving sounds whose totality unnamed by many many many image naming...) not all mouth noises can be named even by a very large number of signs... Butaŋrwelbuwalsefwe daw — IPA ni waʼi. bu-taŋ-rwelbu-wa·lse·fw·e daw — IPA ni waʼ-i but-4p-can-PASS·call really — IPA FOC ...

Well, alveolars are common so I don't want a majority of the vowels mutating. In fact, i sort of want to create a weak coronal-peripheral phonological behaviour contrast. One possibility is the phenomenon called ‘prosodies’ in Chadic languages. Basically, these are word-level processes of palatalis...

Mihi-est possession co-existing with possessor-in-the-genitive I’m not sure what either of these mean. Mihi est possession is a type of what WALS's chapter on predicate possession calls an ‘oblique possessive’². That name comes from the Latin construction³ of predicate possession where the possesso...

Inconsistent ergativity Inconsistent how? Mihi-est possession co-existing with possessor-in-the-genitive I’m not sure what either of these mean. Pretty much every result of inflection is illegal, and has to go through repair strategies I only half remember […] Stress obays some annoying rules, that...

Lērisama wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 5:02 am secondly, be because there are several aspects that are anti-intuitive for me, the monolingualish English speaker

This is what I presumed, so my question was: what are those things, in particular, which make it difficult for you?

Lērisama wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 3:03 pm Mábon ew-àpa.

mab-on

head-ACC.DEF

éwa=

1.ACC=

àp-∅

break-3n

It breaks my head.

Na ni anu?
what FOC job
Why?

This article has some good recommendations at the end, for people in the US: https://www.science.org/content/blog-po ... -worldview

Last we spoke about it, weren’t you investigating wormholes as an option? Yes; they're interesting in that they're a prediction of general relativity, so you can figure out some of the properties they would have. The bad news I can't really follow the math :) I think I remember the paper you linked...

And the biology is totally implausible (another fact she cheerfully acknowledges, not that I can remember where). I assume you mean the whole 'Earth is a Hainish colony' idea? Yep, that doesn't really make sense. Come to think of it, the stories would have worked without that -- no reason the Cetia...

This is another reason I love Le Guin’s work. She’s written somewhere of her irritation that the ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ inevitably excludes the social sciences; to make up for it her books and short stories are packed with speculative societal structures. To me, this makes the experience of...

See zompist's 1990s lament that science is killing science fiction: https://zompist.com/killsf.html I don’t recall having encountered this essay of his before, but I’ve had precisely the same thoughts myself. I particularly agree that (a) this is what’s driven the blurring of lines between SF and f...

But anyway, I don't think SF is really about predicting the future. At heart, SF is about taking a handful of ideas (preferably but not necessarily related to science) and coming up with a good story about it. The worldbuilding is here to support the idea; if anything, accurate prediction may even ...

The Australian Labor Party has been reëlected. (It will never not annoy and confuse me that their main right wing party is called the Liberals.) Indeed. And with a huge majority in the lower house, too. I guess we’ll see now what they do… As for the Liberals: they’ve always leaned to the right, but...