Zompist Bboard Again

That section of my copy of Lass is well-thumbed, but I thought the increased detail you provide is more relevant for conlanging.

I can’t believe no-one has yet linked this guide from the old board . It’s a great overview of what kinds of vowel systems are found in natlangs. With how much people keep referencing Alice's work here despite it having succumbed to linkrot multiple times I feel like it needs to be better preserved...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2024 10:15 am Monarchies can be stable. The French monarchy kept the same dynasty (taken in the wider sense) for nearly a millenium.

Although the fact this is called "the Capetian miracle" speaks to how likely it is for a monarchy to be stable.

Historical kana orthography! Amaterasu save me.

切 for "write" implies writing is a recent acquisition - the ancient meaning, preserved in its use in fǎnqiè formulae, is "run together". Is this your intention?

I took Ancient Greek to GCSE level - we had to pick additional classes to take in the third year (that's year 9 for state schools) and I'd enjoyed Latin in the first two, so I thought why not. We went from a class of twenty-seven at the start of the third year to nine who actually took the GCSE.

That doesn't seem to explain the difference between the leftmost one and the second one from the left, though. You may have an emoji font that makes the differences between all four hard to see. The two dimensions, as said, are the position of the flag (lowered or raised) and the position of the do...

This sent me down a rabbithole. I had thought the Radley Road continued to be the Radley Road into Radley itself, but checking the map it becomes the Foxborough Road past the junction with White's Lane (which marks the current boundary of Radley itself) and then Church Road past the junction with a ...

A walrus is a thing that verifiably exists, with defined ecology, biomechanics, etc. whereas fairies, as fictional things, are defined only within the confines of individual stories. If a walrus is at your door then while something is clearly wrong with the universe the amount of wrongness is fixed ...

I saw a post on Reddit that reminded me of this thread. The creator of the thread had apparently been on a tear complaining about one game character in particular (a Korean man named 장거한 Chang Koehan) and this person was fed up with it. (Emphasis mine.) You again? Has your bitch slept with a Korean ...

But how far does the road numbering system of metropolitan France extend? Which one? France has a national road numbering scheme, but some of those are also E-roads which extend outside the borders of France. (The UK's road network is included in the E-road system, but we don't signpost them becaus...

How many of the streets with name names (elm, johnson, etc) do you actually know (name and location relative to each other) off the top of your head? A few, although I'm an introvert with a bad sense of geography - more outgoing people definitely know more. I know the cul-de-sac I live on, the majo...

Printers and authors, of course. Copyrights go back to around 1500, long before corporations existed in any form we would recognize. I felt like this might be a bit of a semantic argument - like maybe early printers were a guild or joint ventures or something, since I imagine a printing press wasn'...

imagine if actors had to pay royalty to the east india company or whatever in order to put on shakespeare, or cellists needed to go online to buy the rights to bach's prelude before learning it. Music itself is not copyrightable (it's considered to be an idea) but you can copyright a performance or...

Obviously the only ethical way to do this would have been to download a pirated copy of the book off teh Interwebs and review that. I have mixed feelings about the prevalence of piracy-as-activism on the modern internet. On the one hand: you successfully avoided financially supporting a person with...

It's a minor point, but how is this worse than (for example) calling a working-class girl in a novel set in Victorian London Molly, or a random not-very-important male character John Smith, or giving a river a name which just means "Long RIver"? The criticism of "Cho Chang" as I...

For me the line is whether the person's politics are being expressed in their work to a significant degree. I find Markus "Notch" Persson distasteful, but he didn't put any of himself in Minecraft, which has its own issues with regard to emergent properties of its mechanics and the problem...

The usual English translation of what Julius Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon, is “The die is cast”. This is a matter of philological dispute. Caesar was quoting Menander at the time; Plutarch (writing in Greek) accordingly provides the quotation ἀνερρίφθω κύβος ("let the die be cast&qu...

"I don't want to think." Japanese: kangaetakunai Korean: saenggak sipji anda "For my family" Japanese: watasi no kazoku no tame ni Korean: nae kajok wihae Could we have glosses please? I am leaning heavily on Wiktionary for the function of Korean verbal forms, since I do not kno...

I think I tried to respond to that when it was first posted but it failed to coalesce into an argument I felt comfortable posting. I remember making a point that it's not filling in the details, it's just filling in details. Star Trek played a trick on everyone: when they pulled their zoom-and-enhan...

kodé wrote: ↑Wed Jul 24, 2024 10:12 pm Whoa, what kind of trees are these? They’re wild! I understand the constituency, though since I have different theoretical leanings, I’d have a different constituency.

I took the excuse to use this since a friend who is working with it mentioned it that day.