Random Thread

[JT the Ninja]

What's more random than posting on a forum you haven't visited in years?

Well, technically I guess it isn't random, since it was caused by much nostalgia and conversation about conlangs..but whatever. []

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Well, hello there.

[JT the Ninja]

Well, hello there.

General Kenobi...you are a bold one. []

[zompist]

Heya JT! You must be, like, all old and stuff. What are you doing these days?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Well, hello there.

General Kenobi...you are a bold one. []

Alas, your avatar is bolder than mine...

Or is it... let me go and find one...

[JT the Ninja]

Heya JT! You must be, like, all old and stuff. What are you doing these days?

Hey zomp! If 35 is old, then I guess I'm old? Still mostly the same (though my beard is longer). Still working on my conlangs in fits and spurts. I'm on a discord server for silly linguists, so that helps. The past year and a half hasn't been fun, but you know, God's good, I keep going. []

[Vijay]

I’m a third year undergraduate student doing a double major in physics and chemistry.

How in the world did you come to get interested in - and, even more surprisingly, make time for - conlanging, linguistics, and languages as obscure as Amazonian and Papuan languages? I mean, I have time for similar linguistic interests, but then I have plenty of time on my hands.

Heya JT! You must be, like, all old and stuff. What are you doing these days?

Hey zomp!

Welcome back!

If 35 is old, then I guess I'm old?

I actually thought you were slightly younger than me. Turns out you're actually slightly older, though still younger than my brother.

[]

Is this your signature for all your posts now?

[bradrn]

I’m a third year undergraduate student doing a double major in physics and chemistry.

How in the world did you come to get interested in - and, even more surprisingly, make time for - conlanging, linguistics, and languages as obscure as Amazonian and Papuan languages? I mean, I have time for similar linguistic interests, but then I have plenty of time on my hands.

Also geology, programming, music, maths… I’ve had these really intense interests for as long as I can remember. It helps that I read very quickly, and remember most of what I read. Also, I haven’t always been a third-year student — I had lots more time a few years ago. But the biggest factor is probably terrible impulse control: I tend to get distracted very easily when I should be doing something more important, and these days ‘distracted’ usually means ‘reading the latest interesting linguistics article I found’. (Or sometimes, posting here. A surprising number of my ZBB posts were made while I should be attending to my lectures.) It doesn’t help that everything’s online these days, which just makes it easier to become distracted with something else.

As for how I got interested in linguistics particularly: I don’t know, actually. I’ve always been interested in writing systems, and I could spend hours looking through Omniglot or scribbling out my own conscripts. (I have memories from Year 2 or so of printing out pages from Omniglot before school, then spreading them out around me at lunch and puzzling over them while people tried to play soccer around me… yeah, I wasn’t a typical kid.) Also, my mother is a speech therapist, and I learnt phonetics from Wikipedia and her old copy of Ladefoged. Eventually I discovered that people could actually create whole languages (I think Lojban was the first I encountered), and it just snowballed from there.

[Raphael]

According to the BBC, a number a major internet websites are currently not working, such as Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the UK's government's website.

Wow.

[Raphael]

Apparently, it was the fault of a cloud computing provider called "Fastly":

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57399628

[Ares Land]

Heh, thanks. I was struggling with a particularly vexing problem at works and it the problem was a repository i was trying to access was effected by the incident.

[Vijay]

It helps that I read very quickly, and remember most of what I read.

JEALOUSY!

[Raphael]

It helps that I read very quickly, and remember most of what I read.

JEALOUSY!

Seconded.

[Raphael]

I'm at more than 2000 posts now.

[Vijay]

Well, I'm not quite there, but I'm close. I think trying to make every ninth post a Malayalam lesson and every tenth post about some Dravidian language variety is slowing me down a bit.

[Raphael]

With all the other stuff happening in the world at this moment, what else could happen now?


...


...


Ah yes: something weird, that we probably don't know everything about, happening at a nuclear power plant in China:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57474384

[Ares Land]

It's an EPR (European Power Reactor) design, and further bad news for that project too. (In case you weren't worried enough, there are two of these in the UK and one in France.)

The French companies and state agencies involve are basically saying: a) no, there's nothing to worry about, honest b) no, we won't tell you what's happening. And then they wonder why people don't like nuclear energy!

I don't think we should worry about anything catastrophic; I am very much annoyed though because that's basically my tax money at work and I think I kind of have a right to a bit more than secrecy and empty reassurances.

[Ares Land]

I had a little anecdote to tell in the Caste topic, so I checked a genealogy website. These things are truly great -- I found out my family tree now goes back to the sixteenth century!

There's a very interesting story there.

Like I said, most males in my family were coal miners, and my early ancestor is no exception.

What I didn't know is that coal mining placed you fairly high in terms of social class back then. In fact my ancestor left a trace in the written record because he was a burgermeister and an alderman (he lived in the Spanish Netherlands.)
By the early twentieth century, the family had very much taken a step backwards. They were coal miners still, but very much in working class.

That's, like, textbook Marx.

EDIT: as if it wasn't Marx enough... He was co-owner of a coal vein.

[Raphael]

It's raining quite intensely, and the sun is shining quite brightly.

[Linguoboy]

It's raining quite intensely, and the sun is shining quite brightly.

The devil is beating his wife.