Zompist Bboard Again

The academics are not the ones putting up paywalls. Believe me, everyone hates Elsevier. On the practical side of things, you can access some (not all, alas) academic papers through some public or university libraries; you'll need a library card for a relatively modest fee. The Library of Congress ...

See, that's the thing. A lot of people I'm complain about say their actions are part of human rights or that oppressor peoples are wholly exempt. I don't know what to call this tendency, but it intermingles in all movements and I'm sick of letting it pass. I mean, they're wrong, but that hasn't sto...

As far as I know, I never got a phishing email from the CBB (or any emails from the time of the attack), and I don't have my email public on there. So it's definitely not something that happened to everyone, and I don't think whoever did this got very deep. But I'm also not a computer expert. ETA: I...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Apr 17, 2025 3:36 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Apr 17, 2025 3:19 pm Somewhat belated addition:

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 3:53 pm
Greek ναί 'yes' comes close, cf. Czech ne or Swedish nej.

"neh" also means "no" in some colloquial variants of German.

Words starting with /n/ loom large for negatives in good portions of IE.

ない nai in Japanese also means isn't/not.

Just got a letter from my lawyer about the speeding ticket. They say that my charge was negotiated down to illegal parking and that I must pay $225 for the fine. Considering the alternative was six months in jail, that seems like an improvement. Unfortunately it still leaves me with a criminal reco...

It's ok malloc, I got your joke

Dire wolves weren't even that close to wolves to start with (I mean, still closer related than say, bears, but less related than coyotes or maybe even foxes). So starting from wolves to "remake" dire wolves is ridiculous in the first place.

We've all told malloc, repeatedly, that he is catastrophizing, that he needs to get help for his mental health, and that things won't look as bleak if he gets it. I have even personally pointed out previous times that he has assumed the worst, and nothing of the sort happened. He can literally look ...

Sorry, I never got back to you about things. I've been on a little writing spree, and time just has not registered that much for me. For phone, or at least Android, I tend to use a few free+ads games called "Kawaii Nihongo" and "Kawaii Dungeon". They have a few other games but I ...

Yes, the Irish spelling is not random, but follows clear and logical rules, even if these rules are not always easy to grasp for non-Goidelic speakers, and reflect, more or less, the Old Irish pronunciation. I know it's not random, but for the life of me I’ve never been able to comprehend the rules...

So I was using an online text editor and decided to try their grammar checker. My general thought is it's bad :( but it did leave me with a question that I'm posing here: In your dialects or just your specific idiolect, is the word "sweets" used and is it synonymous to candy, or used for m...

I feel a sudden need to revive this thread, with the observation that Irish bhfaighidh is apparently pronounced /wiː/. My verdict to any aspiring conlanger who tried that would probably be, ‘that’s unrealistic and unusable, try again’… Isn't the ⟨bhf⟩ a way of writing the eclipsis of ⟨f⟩, so it's e...

I'd suggest trying DeepSeek, since it uses less resources to run but I've found it has a hard time with things like sound changes and the like at least when I tried it. But you could still look into it. I mean unless you hate the Chinese but that would be a political issue.

Malloc, I live in a red state, and I promise you, even people who were diehard Trump supporters election day now hate the guy, or at least aren't as open about their support. They might STILL hate the Dems, but they aren't going to be voting Rep again if they can help it. This is a perfect time for ...

Thank you, those are all interesting perspectives, but most of you seem to subtly shift things around to view things from the perspective of the inexperienced professionals, in witch case it becomes a classic Catch-22, I was more wondering about the whole problem from the perspective of the larger ...

Duolingo (for the small part that I tried using it,) told me that "Douzo yoroshiku" is what means "Nice to meet you", but now that I ask google, apparently it has the same meaning as "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" , and "Douzo yoroshiku" is slightly easier for my ...

konnichiwa, kona desu. kona-san, konnichiwa! korin desu. korin-san, konnichiwa. hoteru wa doko desu ka? (I don't know how to reply with "no, I don't know where the hotel is") :D Hey welcome! You did very well for a beginner here. I do have some notes: When it's a first meeting and after i...

This is accomplished via evaporative cooling, also known as sweating. Or just stay in water until things cool off. Unless the water gets too hot¹ – then you have no way of cooling down ¹ Admittedly I do not live in a hot country and struggle with temperatures over ~25°C, so I have no idea how reali...

109° today. I know I could say 42.8 but in this case the Americans are right, 109 sounds cooler (or perhaps hotter). So human bodies have to somehow keep themselves cooler than the surrounding air , or else they die? This is accomplished via evaporative cooling, also known as sweating. Or just stay...

Well first off, my dialect (idiolect?) is rhotic. I have the START vowel in both for quality but bard is short and barred is long. Otherwise, at least as far as I can tell, they are pronounced the same. I''d try to record it but I'm pretty sure I'd be too conscious of it now and over emphasize the ...