The New ZBB Quote Thread

[Raphael]

Perhaps the last of these is -ARGH.

[Travis B.]

Perhaps the last of these is -ARGH.

I must say that +/-ARGH probably is my favorite feature.

[Raphael]

I think the alt right, or far right, or whatever you call it

I dislike the term "alt right" because it's always felt like an attempt by fascists to rebrand fascism as something cool and edgy.

The original fascism was cool and edgy back in the early 20th century. For me, "cool and edgy" are huge alrm bells on any political ideology and social movement; "cool and edgy" is fine in the arts, but should be applied to politics and society in general only in very, very, very, very small doses; best wait until the ideology has lost its coolness and edginess and can be evaluated with a calm eye and mind.

[WeepingElf]

I once played with the idea of a culture that wouldn't really have a mathematically developed calendar - instead, they would handle astronomical irregularities by counting years and days based on Spring Festivals, and each year, in each community, the Spring Festival would be celebrated 10 days after the Community Elders had decided, based on observing the weather, that it was now officially spring.

Would these elders be groundhogs perchance?

[WeepingElf]

People who have hadn't played typing games as a kid how well can you type? I can type without looking because i know instinctively the place of keys and i type fairly quickly much faster then i write.

Not well at all. I type with one and a half fingers - one for typing, one for pressing shift when needed - and I think most of the time, I look.

Fingers? We used to type with our noses, holding down t'shift key with our tongues!!!

Fingers? We used to type with our noses, holding down t'shift key with our tongues!!!

Given the state of my keyboard, I think I don't really want to do that.

[Raphael]

And Apple did not branch out from phones to computers, even though you chose that as your presentation topic.

[bradrn]

Discussing the Akana reconstruction relay:

By the way, does Zewakʼ have any bound morphology? None is listed, but I don’t know if that’s because it has none or because you haven’t developed any.

It does – unfortunately, the grants weren't enough to document it.

[Raphael]

Sometimes an ach! is just an ach!

[Travis B.]

Supporting the current global copyright regime in order to fund creators is like supporting global warming to help seniors stay warm in their homes.

[bradrn]

Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence is delightful and helps explain that exotic and sometimes maddening people, the French.

[Man in Space]

Apparently in german and dutch fish dishes you can actually "taste the fish in them" unlike sushi. I'm scared to know what that means.

[Raphael]

That's Moldova.

I'm not sure if it's edgy goth, or just bad conlanging, to start your country's name with "mold".

[Raphael]

I can go into the next room and ask my wife "Why won't my phone turn on" or "when was the first battleship built," but she might not have the answer. I could go to the neighbors' house, but then I have to shower, and they're dumber than my wife anyway.

[Raphael]

The english translations don't feel like poetry at all.

When I was at university, studying ecology but doing a few subjects in German, my monolingual ecology friends asked me about my German class and I said we had to write a rhyming poem for homework. They wanted me to read it out, but after about three words in German, they were like "What does it mean?" and I told them and one goes "That doesn't rhyme though!?" and when I said "It does in German!?" she was like "OMG! I'd never thought about that."

[Imralu]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch: noun, onomatopoeic origin

[WeepingElf]

From A.Z. Foreman, on Twitter:

The major weakness of Wagner is trying to pull off improbable plots, combined with a tendency to wildly overdo the drama

True in Germany in the 1800s

True in Russia today

[Raphael]

[face-straightness=forced]
The tendency towards aspiration in Germanic is of course easily explained by the fact that it has typically been spoken in relatively cold ciimates.
[/face-straightness]

That doesn't explain the strength of the aspiration in Australian English, considering that Australia is hot enough to be nigh uninhabitable in the summer.

You need to aspirate strongly to foosh away the venomous spiders.

[bradrn]

rotting, though I love you like a brother, I am not going to make changes to a live bulletin board based on the output of a glorified Markov chain.

[rotting bones]

rotting, though I love you like a brother, I am not going to make changes to a live bulletin board based on the output of a glorified Markov chain.

I have a Tarot deck if you prefer.

[Raphael]

Not funny, but true, from hwhatting:

I guess your approach has two problems: if each language contributes, say, about 10 words, and the languages are not similar to each other, you don't really help anybody much in learning your IAL. And if you simplify the phonology, you make it harder to recongnize words - it's a bit like the pük in Volapük is based on English "speak", but if you have to be told that in order to get it, that means it doesn't really help in learning the language.
OTOH, as the world won't use an IAL anyway, except if someone becomes world emperor and imposes it, you can treat it as an art project and don't need to concern yourself with learnability.