Zompist Bboard Again

I remember reading a discussion on teh Interwebs (it may have been here on the ZBB, but phpBB's search feature is so broken as to be useless) where people were discussing the pronunciation of nasal vowels in French loans in German, and the general view of them of them was that they were pronounced ...

Stop debasing yourself with the "but they too", it comes across as very infantile and it does nobody any good.

Very much digging your radicals, Man in Space. At this point, would you be able to put together a couple of sentences using them?

Ahzoh wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2025 10:54 pm Chuck should have gotten covid and died during the pandemic, along with some other useless people.

Wishing death on people seems to be all the rage on this conlang hobby forum.

I remember playing Football Manager ages ago, perhaps it was even still called Championship Manager. Its developers were such diligent translators that, in the Dutch version, they parsed Francesco Totti as "Frankrijksco Totti". That was early '00s machine translation for you.

I bet that as we speak his whitelaced, swastika embossed jackboots are dictatorially resting on the desk in the Oval Office.

De valse vrienden lichten me altijd een voetje ⁰. En "er".. Ik weet nooit , ¹ wanneer ik die ² zou moeten / moet ³ gebruiken. ⁰I think this may be an expression, in some old-fashioned Dutch, but it isn't current. I'd never use it. This idiom is still in common use, JAL. I would not use it...

jal wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 3:25 am

AwfullyAmateur wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 11:13 am400th word is sebokušeset, meaning sugar-water, which in Soduar is used as a cosmetic.

For some reason, for a second I read "sexbot". 🤔

Στην κρεβατοκάμαρα το μυαλό...

There's no need to get into the semantics of "brutish", but the idea of being driven into the "mosquito infested jungle" by bands of machete-wielding drunken youths is, at least to me, a grim one. This quote is from pages 14-15: Monei’s adult children openly accused their materna...

I like to quote Kulick & Terrill’s Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap This one is great, thanks for mentioning it. I absolutely love how the grammar is filled with ethnographical notes. As much as it is a linguistic grammar, it is an account of the life of a speaker of Tayap, which is pretty bruti...

Bro, are you kidding me? If I ever get called in the middle of the night by a +675 phone number, you bet I am picking up. The chance of Tok Pisin' with my new friend, twirling the telephone wire while discussing sago grub recipes till the sun comes up is not to miss.

Found this gem in the Tok Pisin dictionary: gesfaia : Random phone calls made by anonymous callers – strangers who may be either men or women, but are mostly made by men. These calls are made to unknown people with whom lengthy conversations are then conducted, ‘phone friendships’ may then evolve in...

I especially like the last one. It has a distinct grimoiric quality to it, reminiscent of the sigils of ceremonial magic. What significance do they have?

How likely would it be for a regular voicing distinction in stops to unconditionally develop into a contrast stiff vs.slack stops? For example, *p, *b > /p, b̥/. Are there known natural language examples of such a shift?

Meine däitsch Freund han mir jeesaat, dat isch en deutlichen Aksent hätt, wenn ich Däitsch schwad', ävver et es net Holländisch. Dat freut mich janz doll!
My German friends have been telling me I have a dinstinct accent when speaking German, but it is not Dutch. Which delights me!

You are categorically uninterested it seems in heeding our advice, so every well meant word spent will fall on deaf ears. However, since this might serve as general advice: if you indeed feel so deeply hopeless and depressed, please don't seek the cure for it on a conlang forum.

I am interested in some specific styles of electronic music, and on related music videos on Youtube there will invariably be comments in French that serve to remind me that for exotic word formations, you need not travel to the lower Sepik basin. A favorite: Quelle dinguerie du lourd!! Un sacré gros...

[snip] Well, what is to say? The deranged generally are not locked up in wards, but are free to meme on the internet. Although I am not a Christian, there is a Bible quote that is worthy of mention in this context: Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. Per...

Is it spoken in Mexico?

I'm posting this here because I'm not sure where else to post it. It's a writing question, about something I'm trying to write (although I didn't manage it to write anything for the last few weeks). I'm putting it behind a cut because it contains spoilers for something I may or may not publish some...