The New ZBB Quote Thread

[Raphael]

I was just looking at a Hausa grammar, and learned that "he" is shī. (And pronouns do have a gender distinction.)

Can you think of other words like this? That is, language pairs where roughly the same phonetic word has opposite meanings.

Greek ναί 'yes' comes close, cf. Czech ne or Swedish nej.

Polish tak "yes"
Indonesian tak "no"

Combined with the fact that the Polish and Indonesian flags are the same but upside-down

[Raphael]

Debating whether to re-romanize CT. Specifically, changing /ŋ x ʕ/ from ĝ ḫ g to _⅁ g ĝ. This would make it more consistent in the romanization as I already have d for /θ/, and I think it'll break LaTeX less.

[Raphael]

It makes sense that lay people would have a biased view. Most of the pope's activity goes right over our head -- I know the Synod on Synodality is important, but even the name boggles me.

[Raphael]

For TNG (at least some of which is legit), we know just about the words for "louse", "egg" and a couple of pronouns, but that doesn't mean they just said "me louse you egg, heh heh?" all the time.

[bradrn]

If any of you know a way to apply sunscreen to your eyelids and the skin around your eyes without a lot of it sooner or later ending up in your eyes, please let me know.

Remove eyes, then apply sunscreen.

[Man in Space]

doping silicon might as well be negotiating with mephistopheles that he may send your uncle's soul to the fifth hell instead of the seventh

[Man in Space]

Which leads to an interesting question: what would an AI-generated conlang hallucination look like?

"Of course a preposition is a type of phoneme, everyone knows that!"

[Raphael]

I mean obviously, being alive on it's own comes with a myriad of risks. I've never heard of something that died that hadn't first been alive.

[Man in Space]

I'm Eddy too, but in a different way, as some of you well know.

We're all eddies in the space-time continuum.

And this is his sofa we're sitting on, is it?

[Raphael]

if old english was so good, however, why is there regular english?

hippies

[Raphael]

norwegians and danes going french made english unlike german. germans going roman made french unlike gaelic. and don't get me started on what berbers going arab did to spanish!

[WeepingElf]

There are times that I wonder if Malloc is, in fact, an AI trying to convince us all of the danger and superiority of AI...without also revealing that Malloc is an AI.

[Raphael]

WeepingElf and Travis discussing what Facebook is like these days. Sigh.

I am on Facebook, but make only limited use of it - I use it mainly as a bulletin board service. It sucks at that, but there are some groups over there for subject matters for which I haven't found good standalone forums. Of course, there are also plenty of groups over there that are bad - when I looked for a group about Indo-European linguistics, I found exactly one that admitted non-academics like me and didn't include the expression "Aryan race" in the group description. I joined that group, and it is indeed of fair quality. I still prefer standalone forums like this, though.

To me the words 'Aryan race' in any context is a big red flag...

It is, and therefore I excluded all those groups from consideration. It tells a lot about Facebook that this narrowed my choice to just one group.

[Man in Space]

I was greeted by this when I went to the first unread post in the thread:

Shit a Brick
Obnatlang
How many of us, and who of us, have a similar expression in the natlangs in which they are fluent?
And which natlangs are those? And what are the expressions?

ObConLang
Which conlangs, and whose conlangs, have such an expression, or an equivalent expression?
What are those Conlangish expressions?

I initially read this as him expressing frustration at some conundrum he was having that necessitated answers to the listed questions. It took me a minute to realize that the underlined phrase was the subject matter, not the horrifying realization I thought it represented at first.

[Torco]

I don't think that proofreaders are obsolete just because now people can always use they're autocorrect.

I think you mean “there autocorrect”. Amirite?

Let me see how well I remember my old hobby...

I don't think that beta-readers are obsolete just because now people can always use one's autocorrect.

I think you mean “the autocorrect”. Amorite?

[Raphael]

I've seen some sex educators argue that there should be more emphasis on how to have enjoyable sex in sex education classes in school.

This sentence reads very differently depending on where "in school" attaches to.

[Raphael]

I'm worried that tasteless artists will be mistaken for AI from now on.

[Raphael]

Reports that Iran hit US base in Qatar. Sigh.

Is it too much to ask for, that Trump's gift plane was there?

[rotting bones]

PR is like running from a bear: you don't have to be the best/fastest out there...you just have to be seen as less bad than/faster than the other guy.

[bradrn]

Your question is basically asking how the US government should store its kryptonite, Green Lanterns, and Rings of Power.