Zompist Bboard Again

A collection of linguistics and language themed youtube channels. In English, I've been watching Simon Roper and Jackson Crawford. Roper isn't a linguist, but his videos are all quite good and clearly well-researched. I know less about the subject matter of Crawford's channel (Old Norse), but they seem reasonably reliable. Both channels have a calm, relaxed vibe that I really enjoy. In Japanese, I've been watching minerva scientia and Omizan Sakamoto's channel. They have a very different presentation style, with mostly short videos consisting of only text slides and a voiceover. Minerva scientia is mostly readings (of varying quality) of texts in a large number of ancient languages, as well translations (whose quality I mostly can't judge). They're also evidently a conlanger. Omizan Sakamoto has mostly videos on the history of the Japanese language, which are quite good (if short).

Currently reading Prokosch's Comparitive Germanic Grammar.

I just finished reading The 2020 Commission Report by Jeffrey Lewis, a fictional account of a fictional war between the USA and North Korea which includes the use of nuclear weapons. A very grim and chilling read. It starts out as something that Tom Clancy might have written if he would have been politically more to the Left, and then turns a lot darker.

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 5:43 pm Simon Roper

I really enjoy his videos. They are so deliciously laid back, yet very well researched and interestingly constructed.

I accidentally watched the first opisode of The Queen's Gambit on Netflix and ended up binging it. I liked it way more than I expected to.

Also watching Humans again, having watched quite a bit of it a couple of years ago but not finished it. It's just got past the point that I had last seen up to. I am quite impressed and definitely gripped; for a British TV show it has a lot of polish and more than a couple of outstanding performances. They keep cutting the soundtrack off mid-flow every time they change scene though, rather than having any kind of considered transition, which is really jarring.

Currently reading The Brink - President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 by Marc Ambinder, about how close the world came to nuclear war in the 1980s. Generally fascinating reading, but there's one slightly weird short passage:

By 1983, four Keyhole (KH-11) satellites in high orbit provided continuous near-real-time coverage of Europe and the Soviet Union. Their advanced coupling device absorbed reflected photons from the illumination of the sun to provide crisp, detailed, daytime coverage of virtually any target.

That sounds like a kinda odd way of saying that these satellites were looking at their surveillance targets. I'm reminded of Zompist's old piece If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories, or of the old xkcd cartoon MacGyver Gets Lazy:

https://xkcd.com/444/

Upon recommendation from several of my apartmentmates, I've recently started reading The Wandering Inn, a web novel about a woman from earth who gets transported to a fantasy world in which people have classes, levels, and skills à la D&D. It is currently on-going, with updates twice a week (and it's already pretty long, with a word count in the millions, so I've got quite a ways to go before I'm caught up)

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:18 am Today I finished Matt Parker's Humble PI, a mostly delightful book about mathematical errors that had serious real-life consequences. (The parts that are not delightful are the ones about mathematical errors that actually killed people.)

Re-read it. Still good. One quote caught my eye this time:

Our modern financial systems are now run on computers, which allows humans to make financial mistakes more efficiently and quickly than ever before.

The presents my girlfriend gave me for the 20th (Salvery abolition day):
Listening: Danyèl Waro's Tinn tout, Gwendoline Absalom's Vangasay, Alain Péters' Parabolèr
Reading: Jared Diamond's Bouleversement (original title Upheaval)

Lust, Glory, Light, Dogma etc. by KMFDM

(I really should listen to Dogma more often.)

I've now read William Poundstone's Priceless, more than seven years after zompist reviewed it on his blog. Interesting!

I've just read yesterday The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. Like everything else I've read by him, it is very witty and funny. But it is also really sad, and I got nightmares from it. Would recommend with caution depending on one's mental state.

Just finished William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), this time more than twelve years after zompist recommended it. Nice work, and converted me to range voting for single-office elections. One minor criticism is that when he talks about proportional voting, he basically only explains multi-member-district STV; he doesn't even mention any form of list-voting, which is globally probably a lot more prevalent than STV.

I'm trying to learn Wolof.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:49 pm I'm trying to learn Wolof.

Do you have any good resources to recommend? I'm not happy with the grammars I found.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:36 pm Do you have any good resources to recommend? I'm not happy with the grammars I found.

I think I'm working with the same materials that everyone else found on the internet: https://gofile.io/d/AJ4OWb

PS. Although I'm trying to watch recordings on YouTube and look up vocabulary in the dictionaries.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:36 pm

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:49 pm I'm trying to learn Wolof.

Do you have any good resources to recommend? I'm not happy with the grammars I found.

I bookmarked this a while ago: Resources for learning Wolof. Courses, dictionaries, grammars, and linguistic papers both in English and French. Free, with links to non-free resources.

Vilike wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 4:37 pm I bookmarked this a while ago: Resources for learning Wolof. Courses, dictionaries, grammars, and linguistic papers both in English and French. Free, with links to non-free resources.

Thanks. Kaspersky isn't letting me enter that site. I will go there through Linux.

PS. Unrelatedly, YouTube recommended this video to me just now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuwgZSjuznY

I just finished Tell Them Of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by M. Enard; and onto Bushido by Inazo Nitobe presently!

(and listening to the sultry timbre of this Hungarian audiobook narrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zjzsYz ... l=Irodalom )