The New ZBB Quote Thread

[bradrn]

I'm kind of glad I'm on the "ignore list." It's probably the only time my name will appear on a roster of professional linguists.

[Raphael]

This is a few months old, but just now caught my eye; I quote it here mainly for the last line:

One explanation I read that really makes sense to me is Philip K. Dick's. Christianity is like a mutation, or gene therapy if you like, and communion spreads the virus/genes/whatever.

'Body' and 'blood' would be really sort of DNA code.

(I'm, um, not sure the Church accepts Dick's theology.)

[Travis B.]

This is a few months old, but just now caught my eye; I quote it here mainly for the last line:

One explanation I read that really makes sense to me is Philip K. Dick's. Christianity is like a mutation, or gene therapy if you like, and communion spreads the virus/genes/whatever.

'Body' and 'blood' would be really sort of DNA code.

(I'm, um, not sure the Church accepts Dick's theology.)

Question is, what would the point of receiving the body and blood of Christ again and again be then? Also, wouldn't they want to give young children receive communion as early as possible, rather than dealing with Sunday school and whatnot?

[Ares Land]

This is a few months old, but just now caught my eye; I quote it here mainly for the last line:

One explanation I read that really makes sense to me is Philip K. Dick's. Christianity is like a mutation, or gene therapy if you like, and communion spreads the virus/genes/whatever.

'Body' and 'blood' would be really sort of DNA code.

(I'm, um, not sure the Church accepts Dick's theology.)

Question is, what would the point of receiving the body and blood of Christ again and again be then? Also, wouldn't they want to give young children receive communion as early as possible, rather than dealing with Sunday school and whatnot?

That's Philip K Dick for you -- the ideas are cool but don't really bear much rational scrutiny.

For a very dark take on the same idea, I recommend the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

[bradrn]

A glottal stop is choking in phoneme form.

[Raphael]

This reminds me that I used to find the word library without it's first-r amusing, as it makes me think of dishonest fruits (a lie berry).

[Linguoboy]

This is supported by the fact that, for all its complexity, Irish mutation has fewer types of mutation and fewer exceptions and caveats than Welsh mutation, which is (like all things in Welsh) essentially a man trap for anyone trying to learn it.

[Raphael]

To anyone suggesting an IE language can't become tonal and monosyllabic, you should hear my father-in-law and his cousin when they're out fishing.

[Raphael]

EDIT: a full third of making this blog consists of scrolling through Amazon new releases trying to find something that's not "Book 37 in the Erotic Vegetable Insertion Series." Just wanted you to know how much I suffer for my art.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

if I lost my car keys yesterday, and today I find them next to my cereal bowls...do I need to then go across the street to search for my car keys?

IMHO, those are wandercarkeys, obviously derived from your neighbour's. If your car keys are next to your cereal bowls, you obviously couldn't have lost them, so IMHO you must've borrowed them.

[alice]

A simpler explanation is that the original Indo-European homeland was in South-East Asia, from where the swine-drawn chariots gallopped towards the steppes, wiping out all heteroorganic clusters in their paths.

[bradrn]

You did not say anything of the sort, I was arrogantly assuming it to be the case

[bradrn]

(In response to thread ‘New conlang, please help me give it a name’)

Mallory?

The only example text is my signature. However, I will include it here, for reference:

Hlithr ta Erloth ta Hlerrts ta Moew ta Olarrk ta Sithe.
death of abyss of kingdom of Moew of sand of witch-PLURAL.
The witches of the desert of the kingdom of Moew of the Abyss of Death.

1) Hlither and Thither
2) Ta Ta For Now
3) Revenge of the Sithe
4) Dave the Language

[Qwynegold]

Kassite is an ore of the rare elements which phonemes are made of.

[bradrn]

Once he gets to the major civilizations, he sounds like Marvin the Android. "The Babylonians were the worst. Now the Romans, they were also the worst. The Americans, however, are the worst."

[Zju]

[ I]t may be possible to measure [linguistic crackpottery] quantitatively by noting that Nylands are concordant with lexeme–kilometers. [...] [ I]t thus follows that 1 nl = [...] 4,000,000 lx km. Of course, this must mean that 1 mnl = 4000 lx km. [...]

[bradrn]

I think uplifting animals is totally possible. You just tell them “Good boy/girl”, scratch their ears, and give them a biscuit. At least, it works with my dog…

What going on forty years of being a card-carrying sodomite has led me to probably tilts more to the "love the sin, hate the sinner" side of things, I guess.

[Ahzoh]

A glottal stop is choking in phoneme form.

No no no, that's the epiglottal stop.

[Raphael]

I know that this thread is generally about jokes and humorous and whimsical stuff, so the following quote might seem too dry to be worthy of inclusion here, but I think it just makes a very important point:

Every system deteriorates over time and needs constant work and reforms. Every system anyone will ever come up with will have the same problem - people learn to game it for their own advantage to the detriment of others; many people will try to amass advantages and power; positions will become entrenched; and lastly, people will get used to the good sides of the system, forget about the bad sides of what it replaced, and detect new things that suck and need to be changed.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It is a good and relevant thing to consider.