Zompist Bboard Again

A footnote in Bret Devereaux's latest blog post ( https://acoup.blog/2024/11/22/fireside-friday-november-22-2024-roman-naming-conventions/ ) says the following: It’s likely most sling bullets were always stone, but it is really hard to tell a stone sling bullet from, you know, a smooth rock. Becaus...

I don't think there is a difference in denotation between "rock" and "stone". "Rock" is maybe slightly lower in register than "stone"; in the quote from Bret Devereaux "rock" sounds kind of dismissive in a way "stone" wouldn't. I would gues...

Back to the topic of the urban-rural divide, I have a possibly interesting anecdote. About a month before the election, I spent a few days in the small rural town of Morrison, Illinois (population 4,000). Inside the town, there were noticeably more Harris-Walz signs on people's lawns than Trump-Vanc...

I think it's Census Office internal terminology, used to be able to compare areas in different states which might use different local government terminology. The Census Bureau divides the US into tiny areas called census blocks (apparently there are over 8,000,000 of them) and groups contiguous one...

I think the key criterion here is whether the verb-object combination has its own argument structure — if they can take another direct object, that may justify an analysis as a specific kind of compound. They never take direct objects. I think I've read a claim before that the idea comes out of tra...

I don't think I was clear--all the verbs I mentioned in Mandarin are (obligatorily, I think) transitive. The four verbs take different kinds of objects, but shuō , for example, requires huà "speech, words" as an object if it's not followed by a direct or indirect quotation. These verb-obje...

shuō : the most basic verb, ‘say, speak, talk’. Can be followed by direct speech. The recipient gets duì ‘towards’. gàosu : ‘tell’. Takes recipient as direct object. Can also be followed by direct speech. jiǎng : ‘speak, tell’. Never followed by direct speech or recipient. Can take a kind of speech...

I’m not quite fluent in Mandarin, but I’m decent, so I’ll give this a shot. Off the top of my head, I can think of four relevant basic verbs. 说/說 (shuō) is the most common; by default it takes 话/話 (huà) “speech, words” as its direct object, just meaning “to talk”. It can also be followed directly by...

French isn't (quite) Germanic, and it distinguishes e.g. mon "my" from le mien "mine". But the other language I'm familiar with, Mandarin Chinese, uses the same construction for both: 我的 "my, mine".

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Aug 28, 2023 8:42 am Serious question: Do people in Mainland China these days produce calligraphy in simplified characters?

It exists, but generally calligraphy is always in traditional characters. If I remember correctly, Mao himself produced some works after the introduction of simplified characters.

Arzena wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 5:28 pm So stoked by the idea of an Almea Vicky 3 mod o.0

I don't have Vicky 3--I doubt it would run well on my computer--and Vicky 2 is what I'm familiar with modding anyway, which is why I'd choose it.

Oh, well. I'll try out making one, then. The one posted above looks a little distorted in Jagai and Šočya.

Is there still interest in this? I missed it when it was originally being discussed, unfortunately, but I recently got onto Zompist's Patreon, and that has made me want to make an attempt at a Victory II mod. Also, I was wondering whether Zompist had already existing Mercator projection maps of Alme...

I enjoyed reading about Sarroc quite a bit. I've noticed a few things too, though. In the reflexives section, there is an instance of “reflective” that I think should be “reflexive”. In the section on subordinate clauses, the first two example sentences are in different orders but have identical glo...

Unfortunately, I have no idea what the etymology of the surname Whelchel would be. As for pronunciation, I would guess /wɛltʃəl/. There is a rule somewhat commonly observed in the US (and, as the German commented, not in Britain, if I recall correctly) that "which" should only be used in n...

Sentences 1, 2.1, and 2.2.1 are all fine for me (well, sentence 1 should have "started" instead of "start", but I don't think that's what you're asking about), but 2.2.2 doesn't work. You could say "It was only last month that I became available, picked one out, and started ...

Oh, yes, platform is right. "The fact that" is pretty semantically empty, and to the extent it has meaning, it means something more like "situation". If I were translating the sentence into Chinese, I think I'd drop the "fact" entirely (something like 這場夢讓我聯想到在網上學習語言). ...

(I'd like to narrate the dream I had last night as a writing exercise. Thank you in advance for any language corrections.) At the beginning that I can recall, in the dream I was walking in a city I had never come been to . Having gotten off a bus earlier, I seemingly was going to the place where I'...

"Can't" is equivalent to "cannot". "Must" works differently. "Mustn't" and "must not" are equivalent, and they both mean that something is forbidden. If you want to say that something is not necessary, you can use (from most to least formal) "ne...

To put it another way, "cannot" is 不能 and "can not" is 能不, but "may not" is ambiguous between 不可以 (and maybe 不可能, if you force it, though it's not very natural) and 可以不/可能不 (both of which meanings are very natural). "Mayn't" is only 不可以/不可能 (but it doesn't exi...