Zompist Bboard Again

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jun 07, 2022 4:32 pm I thought it was the Habsburgs who had the screwed-up jaws.

And in a wonderful example of the Oneness of Person and Universe, somebody once told me that the reason that European Spanish has /θ/ was "because the Habsburgs all had hare lips".

Of course, it's worth establishing what "minimal grammatical complexity" actually is and what it looks like.

"Social Democrat" in the UK tends to be associated with the SDP, David Owen, and the Gang of Four, which makes it somewhat anachronistic.

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 9:48 am

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 9:45 am Now that's weird.

Why? Two years is too short, four years is too long. Three years is just right.

It makes sense if you turn it upside-down, then Aussie "3" becomes Northern Hemisphere "5". Well, sort of.

Vangelis is dead.

What is a kestrel? It's a bird, of course, but what kind of bird? To most people it's one of these , but in two separate instances - in the glossary at the end of the Rogue vade mecum , and in a fantasy novel I read many years ago - it appears to be a seabird, which in the second instance flies in f...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu May 05, 2022 1:36 pmCasting your vote by making a mark that can be removed with a simple eraser seems risky to me.

Removing someone's vote like that is known as tampering with ballots, and we don't do it here.

I went to vote today, and I was allowed to keep the pencil I was given to mark the ballot paper!

Just feeling incredibly hopeless with everything political happening recently plus the midterm elections this fall which will give the worst people a clear shot to take untrammeled power outright. This year seems on track to match 2016 and 2019 (when my mom passed away) in terms of catastrophe. I h...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun May 01, 2022 10:53 am I personally am quite straight, but I likewise have often been strongly attracted to solitary activities, which likely has similarly influenced my interests.

This describes me too.

Something else I get in dreams a lot is being in a large house with lots of bedrooms and geometry-defying "secret passages" (usually door-sized pieces of heavy paper you have to walk through) between rooms.

I also have such dreams. I am often back in school, but then I have problems I did not really have back then: can't remember the schedule, can't find the rooms, running out of paper for taking notes, etc. This is weird. I often get dreams of being back in school too, except that I'm forever missing...

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 4:55 pmBut I understand the frustration... not only having a fascist get a total that high, but having the alternative be a centrist, and the most boring of diacritical marks.

Not for nothing is he known in these parts as "Monsieur Circonflèxe".

For those of you who can identify a particular Slavic language when hearing someone speaking it, what do you listen out for?

In trivial vents, wasp season has definitely started here. It is, of course, perfectly understandable that just when the weather gets pleasant enough that you might want to spend more time outside, the insects get the same idea, but it's still a bit annoying. "Wasps: The skinheads of the anima...

For what it's worth, ser and estar derive from the latin for "sit" and "stand" respectively.

Vardelm wrote: ↑Thu Apr 14, 2022 10:29 am This is basically Spanish ser vs estar, no?

Or for that matter Irish is vs tá. A lot of my conlangs have this.

An interesting exercise on this topic might be to hypothesise a Culture Test for 2301. Two entries go without saying: - there sure are a lot of lawyers - you think your kind of people aren't listened to enough in <appropriate-seat-of-government> A cynic might also add: - Donald Trump will still be c...

Is there a coherent explanation for initial /ps/, /ks/, and presumably an older /ts/? Obviously these come from /p t k/ + s, but it seems to be more complicated than just zero-grading.

Just finished reading The Fabric of Civilisation: How Textiles made the World, by Virginia Postrel. Very interesting with lots of relevance to conworlders. Recommended.