Zompist Bboard Again

Why is it called "reduplication", which implies three or four of something, and not just "duplication", which implies two, when the vast majority of instances of it involve something being (more or less) doubled? We must be told!

mocha wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 4:30 pm It will work in the next update of Project Alice!

Is this something I should know about?

And that's why I have great difficulty coming up with case endings. I have a lot of morphological, phonological, and aesthetic constraints. I know what you mean. It often feels like 90% of the problems in my conlangs arise from having such finicky requirements in those areas. Me too, plus a good de...

I recently found myself wondering: "historically, in a group of N people of the same birth gender from the same geographical area, how many shared their first names?". After a bit of searching I found this , which contains the rather remarkable statistic that in England and Wales around 18...

Here's Kate Bush's "Running up that Hill" in Early Middle English which some of you might enjoy. There are some other interesting covers there, too, such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in mediaeval Latin.

OK, "Semitic" was a stupid example . Please disregard it.

Here's a version you may not have seen; I don't know if it qualifies as "fantasy" or not.

I was wondering how languages without suffixing morphology, such as the Bantu and Semitic languages, form acronyms, if at all, given that there are only a limited number of initial consonants. Does anybody know?

Bear in mind that he has to avoid offending the most important people in any election campaign: the owners of the right-wing newspapers.

On the other hand, I'm sure you recall xkcd's warning about standards . Oh yes; I remember it very well from the time when I asked about harmonising the syntax of SCAs.. But I'm not trying to create a standard here, just wondering if there already is one, or anything like it. The answer seems to be...

Most IPA letters are variants of Latin letters, and could be ordered immediately following the basic Latin letters they are derived from. IPA letters which cannot easily be reduced to Latin letters that way, such as the glottal stop, may be placed at the end of the alphabet. This is what Pullum and...

I was thinking in general terms, not for a particular language. Unicode order isn't helpful, as WeepingElf points out, since it would be nice to have, for example, <ɛ> after <e> and before <f>. I know it's not that difficult to come up with such an ordering. The Phonetic Symbol Guide by Pullum and t...

Is there actually such a thing, which (to pick a totally random example of the top of my head) one might pass an argument to a string comparison function such as one would use in a sort? My researches so far seem to suggest "no", but perhaps one of you knows better.

Marxists have been predicting the collapse of communism for 175 years; with that track record, one should, as the Bayesians say, examine one's priors. You do mean "capitalism", of course? :D Yep. They look about the same on the page. :P And thus is Horseshoe Theory vindicated.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Oct 03, 2023 2:29 pmMarxists have been predicting the collapse of communism for 175 years; with that track record, one should, as the Bayesians say, examine one's priors.

You do mean "capitalism", of course?

Two recurrent nightmares of mine: 1. I’m back in high school and I have basically done none of my calculus homework for the entire year. 2. I’m back in university and there’s some problem where I can’t graduate unless I pass this one class that I keep failing (Symbolic Logic, which I did actually h...

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".) Yeah, there are numerous forms of authoritarian politics and lumping them all into fascism is careless if understandable. It feels good to characterize your opponents in the harshest terms possible, but yo...

Comic Sans and Palace Script. All others are abominations unto the LORD.

A gentle reminder that convincing malloc that his fears are not related to the real world has never worked. <sarcasm="very heavy indeed"> But surely AI will improve someday to the point that it will be able to do even that? </sarcasm> More realistically, I think that when AI creativity do...

So you would argue that software engineering is fundamentally much harder and more complicated than art or literature, such that automating it the same way is simply not feasible? "ChatGPT, write me libraries in three unrelated computer languages, with full documentation and fully comprehensiv...