Zompist Bboard Again

You will, no doubt, be all astounded to hear: the government has not fallen. As expected, Theresa May has survived the parliamentary VONC. The House has full confidence in her to, as the DUP said, 'continue delivering Brexit'. Unfortunately, the House continues to refuse to accept the Brexit she wa...

Well, granted that she had a hard set of problems to solve, but it's hard not to conclude that about every step May took was a disaster: * quickly invoking Article 50 * calling an early election * defining her "red lines" in a way that ensured a Big Problem in N. Ireland * negotiating a d...

Anyway, for any politics watchers: the big Brexit vote is at 7pm GMT tonight, and is expected to last a few hours (there's a lot of amendments). As it turned out, they mostly got cancelled, except Rees-Mogg and friends', which went down 600-24. The main motion was lost 432-202 - biggest ever defeat...

snip snip Thanks for the expansive answers. Some of it must be cultural. E.g. a writing system for Persian was only devised during the empire, and only used for inscriptions; it was impossible to make it the language for administration or diplomacy or literature. As mentioned, instruction in Arabic...

Thanks, fair enough.

Assyrians were an Akkadian peoples Actually, many indigenous American languages have died out with their ethnic groups still surviving to the present. In the case of Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Arabic the local peoples heavily intermarried with and were assimilated into the larger ethnicity: several Sem...

Putting this here because it's mostly about trying to work this out for conworlding purposes, and is only indirectly linguistic really. For instance, Latin obviously replaced local languages in what's now France, Iberia, and part of the Balkans (and the rest of Italy, I guess), Saxon replaced presum...

What decisions have you made about this for the languages you haven't posted grammatical sketches for? I think you said in the Proto-Eastern one that Western languages are mostly VSO, but what are their morphologies like? And what about Qarau or Somoyi-Methelyi?

The Romans are also famous for their overly complicated naming systems, of course, and for the way that people changed their names. Augustus, for example, was: - Gaius Octavius Thurinus - Gaius Julius Caesar... but this was the same as his "father's" name, so most people called him Octavi...