Zompist Bboard Again

Some of us, raised in a different tradition, might interpret those three Asterixes as a rating, and wonder why everything is so mediocre.

What do they do with the Newspeak, given that it's essentially based on English? Do they leave it in the original, or render it in some translated form? And, given that Newspeak was a parody of Esperanto, what would an Esperanto translation do? Would we have something like "duoplaplimalbona nov...

I don't think that airquotes are even used in all countries that do use quotation marks. Not sure if I've ever seen them in Germany. that didn't stop us from doing them with one hand at shoulder height and the other near the waist in high school german class DId you call them "Luftgansefüssche...

Don't panic: you can fix that if you use a PQ242 (don't use the CQxxx clones; they may be cheaper but they can't handle the throughput) in cross-grain mode and a couple of specially modded AY38910's to handle the rescaling. It's a bit fiddly but perfectly doable considering what you've already done.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that: - If you use strong typing, you will sooner or later encounter situations where weaker typing would be much more convenient and useful. - If you use weak typing, you will sooner or later encounter situations where stronger typing would be much more conven...

This is not unusual in some Scottish dialects; my wife's pronunciation of "seven", for example, sounds a lot like /sɪvən/.

I just think people have read too much sf and imagine something that just isn't going to happen. It's like a lot of sexy SF ideas certain people get very excited about; make a lot of noise and don't worry about trivial details like scale, cost, what to do if things go wrong, and so on. See also: te...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 4:06 pm

alice wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:18 am The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

This kind of purple prose is not for everyone, but I'm liking it.

I see what you did there!

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Mar 24, 2023 7:22 am is it used for penis?

I shall be disappointed in french if it isn't

Alexei Sayle seems to think so, at 55 seconds.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 4:12 pmBut that woods is only half a mile wide.

Is "woods" singular in the USA? Over here we'd say "that wood is", or "those woods are".

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Mar 21, 2023 5:39 am(Of course, if your main hero is named Jerry Otter, and he makes friends at that school / camp with a Jon Easily and a Jermayne Ranger, and they defeat an evil necromancer called Mouldewort, than you may really have a problem )

Dammit!!! How the hell did you know?

The setting has our fifteen-year-old protagonist going to a kind of quasi-magical prep-school/boot camp [1] and having to overcome several obstacles, including various sorts of prejudice and institutional bias, in order to make it through to the end. I happened to be reading a list of "fantasy ...

I've just discovered that the setting for my soon-to-be-written novel is a cliché and should be avoided at all costs. And I've just created 144 believable names for it too. Oh well, time to start from the beginning again.

Don't forget that the only practical difference between a proto-lang and a normal language is that a proto-lang tends to be older and not always fully reconstructible.

Wait, you wrote the Vowel Systems overview? In that case, thank you so much! I know it’s not authoritative, but it’s been so helpful to my learning nonetheless! Yes, it was me, and I'm glad you found it useful. It was a litte unnerving finding something very similar in Lass's Phonology , though, wh...

I have a gut feeling that alice has an identity problem or something like that, but maybe I am overinterpreting things (in which case, sorry, alice). You are a bit, but there's no need to apologize. It's just rather scary when people bring up stuff I wrote long ago as in some way authoritative, whe...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:35 pm(Incidentally, I wonder if conlangernoob might be interested in the Vowel Systems overview on the old board. Of course it’s not totally comprehensive, but it gives a good idea of the range of variation in natural languages.)

The basic difference between programmers and normal humans is that programming involves figuring out how a process works at a level of detail that most people would find excessive or boring, and thinking of weird cases that most people only think about when they occur. Programming has indeed been d...

At the extreme reductionist level, it basically boils down to 1 = "do it", 0 = "don't it".