Zompist Bboard Again

On a lighter note, I wonder if in the world of sports, by 2301 concerns about CTE will have lead to soccer being replaced as the world's most popular sport by a hypothetical sport that would be very similar but wouldn't allow heading the ball (and might allow for some limited hand play to make up f...

Something I've been thinking about a bit lately: how useful, really, is the concept of Turing completeness? My impression is that if I understand that concept correctly, it seems to imply that in theory , you should be able to play last year's best-selling high-end games on an ENIAC. But how would ...

I have a question about GIMP (thought if there's some way to do what I want to do in MSPaint or something, that's ok too): Is there some way to draw a line where, instead of using the mouse to draw the line by dragging it around, you simply tell the software to draw, say, a straight line from, say,...

Finally started on a phonological evolution. It always weirded me out that zompist and others could just come up with a bunch of evolutionary rules, on the spot, but I guess that today, I started thinking like them and immediately notice what could potentially be modified by a large number of speake...

Uvular fricative gets devoiced:

[ʒəkʰ ˈχanɨ ˈʃʰiχəkʰ]

the vowels with the "little tail" were nasal vowels which recently lost their nasalization. Natively, we still call the letters ⟨a nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨a⟩", ⟨e nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨e⟩" etc. Of course, since there's no nasality that a modern native speaker can notice, the most lo...

For the most part, Lithuanian has a pretty strict one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, with the notable exception of some vowels: /iː/ ⟨į, y⟩ /uː/ ⟨ų, ū⟩ /ɛ/ ⟨e, ia⟩ /æː/ ⟨e, ę, ią⟩ /aː/ ⟨a, ą⟩ As you would expect, whether to write the little tail or not is pretty much the bigge...

As just one example, "I'm not as fit as a fiddle" or "Are you as fit as a fiddle?" sound odd to me-- they are grammatical, they just arguably lose the idiom. These are both fine for me as examples of "fit as a fiddle" "How fit do you take me for? As a fiddle?"...