Zompist Bboard Again

Hey, did y'all know that if you own Mark hard enough, he deletes your post? I think he might secretly be J D Vance.

RE: the "dwarf" talk. The original form seems to have been dweorg, which would yield dwarrow (c.f. beorg becoming barrow), except the final g became h in some dialect that then supplied the term that the standard language uses. So far, so normal. But what if this aberrant form became stand...

Can we put a GPS tracker on the goal posts? Now apparently east can only be reckoned from Mordor, for some reason. I guess it's better than using London as the starting point, but not by much.

Here's a puzzle for you all. You're making a movie or TV show that takes place in the present day. Some people arrive who natively speak an imaginary dialect of English. I don't know what country they're from, but let's assume it is a fictional Anglophonic country with whatever history or geography ...

Must we also assume that "bedbug" has no connection to beds or bugs?

In the case of acorn both components are living morphemes, they've just been obscured by sound changes. Actually, acorn apparently isn't a compound at all -- according to Etymonline, it goes back to OE æcern and is cognate with ON akarn , Dutch aker , LG Ecker , StG Ecker (loan from Low German?), a...

I mean... Easterling exist. Humans around Rhun apparently sided with Sauron at some point. I have no idea if Easterlings are described in a way that would line up with any ethnic or racial category, though.

EDIT: Oh. You mentioned Rhun. Why does "The East" not count as east?

Well, it's possible the savage reviews have been lifted up in a "Dewey Defeats Truman" effect, but I've certainly seen plenty of reviewers who thought LotR was slop, and they would probably have laughed their asses off if you offered Conan Fucks the Venusians as a precedent. My point was t...

This is the obligatory reminder that when it came out, LotR was lampooned for its Romantic style. Tolkien deliberately imitated older styles of story telling, and to readers of the mid twentieth century, still riding high on Modernist writings about beatniks doing drugs in Algeria, LotR must have fe...

There's nothing wrong with saying "you've picked up the ball every time we try to play football with you. Next time just don't play." It doesn't have to be a condemnation of him as a person, nor does it require some standard of malicious intent on his part. It's just a recognition that he ...

People. Why do you let a goose in the house and then complain about goose shit on the floor?

So it seems that policeman > queen was deliberate, but where did the rabbit come from? Also, very fun that Bradrn's heroic attempt to parse "enimatee" became "Mary" as it got squeezed into various phonologies. Another fun observation. I had no idea what "passing the rabbit&q...

Why did you add three names into it then Darren. You're the one who let foxcatdog participate. It's all on you. But actually I don't think the text was unsalvageable at that point. It truly did get more nonsensical every step of the way. I can only apologize to Travis, because Gullahonka has some v...

I get the impression from this thread that Brits are much more intent on maintaining the Frenchiness of French loans than Americans, with the exception that in most cases ( gratin is an exception) Americans are more likely to place the stress on the final syllable than Brits. The general rule is th...

I spent so long trying to figure out where I had gone wrong with Man In Space's text. It turns out, I had understood it perfectly, it was just gibberish. And my efforts to twist it into a sensible narrative only made the translation worse.

ETA?

So it's spoken in Borneo, but is basically identical to languages from Mindanao. That narrows it down to the Sama-Bajaw languages. Unfortunately, I don't have enough documentation to guess a specific language. So I'll just guess Sama.

I'm guessing it's spoken on Mindanao?

To my ears, Arapaho /o/ has only ever sounded like [ʌ]. Historically, it is a straight-forward reflex of PA /a/, so probably the question of how /a/-y versus how /o/-y it is, is a matter for the philosophers.

I once made a Modern Yorwicks conlang, where OEN carried on in Scarborough until the present. It's interesting to see how different things can be under different local influence. I like it.