The New ZBB Quote Thread

[zyxw59]

ʎd > ʎɟ

A sound change which also makes sense upside-down

[Raphael]

alice, in response to jonlang's question about how Tolkien managed to achieve what he achieved:

A combination of good time management and absence of social media distractions?

[WeepingElf]

Sardines are, in fact, the mythical Sea People.

How would schools of little fish devastate the Late Bronze Age Near East?

[Raphael]

Quick clarification: I don't answer for God

[Raphael]

I have a moon, but I ignored it...

[Travis B.]

As just one example, "I'm not as fit as a fiddle" or "Are you as fit as a fiddle?" sound odd to me-- they are grammatical, they just arguably lose the idiom.

These are both fine for me as examples of "fit as a fiddle"

"How fit do you take me for? As a fiddle?"
"I prefer metaphors to similes. I am a fit fiddle."
"I need to train more if I'm going to get into full-on fiddle fitness."
"There's only so many fiddles I'm fit as, and that ain't one of them."
"She made a scene when we forced her to wear the violin costume. She had a fit as a fiddle."

[Raphael]

And don't forget that doing an internet search for virtually any symptom will turn up numerous results referring to unpleasant, incurable, and potentially fatal diseases, most or all of which are very likely red herrings. We've all been there.

[Raphael]

How hilarious would it be if, instead of a rubricated Bible, you had one where everytime Jesus speaks it has a little blue check mark next to it?

[Raphael]

b) Computers aren't very good at a lot of what our brain does. (With a humongous load of data, a few months of work and constant nursing by a few engineers, you can teach a computer to recognize cats. Babies pick up that skill pretty much instantly.)

[bradrn]

I’m curious to know how you got this opportunity.

There's a monthly meeting on the 2nd Friday, no, wait, I've said too much...

[Moose-tache]

Fuck it, I'm quoting myself.

If trainwrecks could dream, their nightmares would be this conlang.

[bradrn]

Fuck it, I'm quoting myself.

You’re not allowed to do that!

[Vardelm]

Fuck it, I'm quoting myself.

You’re not allowed to do that!

In that case, I'll add the quote!

If trainwrecks could dream, their nightmares would be this conlang.

[Zju]

From word evolution game thread:

Glides coalesce with following vowels, lengthening them.

[øːː]

[o]

[aux]

[Raphael]

Why is english such a stupid language?

Because you're using the free version.

[Raphael]

From a bit later in the same discussion:

Is English one of those dual-licensed things where there's an ostensibly FLOSS version that's missing vocabulary and syntax and a proprietary version you have to buy to get the full usage out of the language?

Yeah, we call the fully paid version "a college education".

[Linguoboy]

Ah, de Gaulle. The Scrappy Doo of world leaders.

[Raphael]

(As a conlanger, I think it's extremely depressing. I had plan to do a survey of Simbri dialects -- covering an area about the size of France -- but I think I'll go whimper under the bed instead.)

[Travis B.]

There is a lot of prior work on that class of suffixes. Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English resorts to analyzing -ic in these cases as underlyingly -ical with omission of the -al. "The Architecture of the English Lexicon" by Jonathan B. Alcántara (1998) instead analyzes -ic as underlyingly /-icə/ (page 3-117).

This is just generative phonology at its usual making up of unattested "underlying forms" to make things look as if they adhere to its stated general rules - instead of just saying "you have to remember that suffix -ic has this or that effect" they say "you have to remember that suffix X is actually underlying suffix Y and then our ingenious rule 22 applies".

Worth investigating: Sound Pattern of English came out in 1968. That's also when the really good weed arrived at MIT.

[Raphael]

I personally am skeptical about the capabilities of robots themselves in the near future, so I have few worries about a robot apocalypse (just like we haven't seen a cow apocalypse, despite cows being more intelligent than the most powerful AI's in existence today),