zompist bboard

I am deeply angry about the fact that even if I make it to Seattle now, it will ring hollow given my current age. I will have wasted my entire youth, the best years of my life, in a place I hate with no opportunity to enjoy life as well as others. Seattle would mostly like you to fuck off -- any mo...

My only curiosity is, here, why no one has brought up all the many arguments that the Voynich is a recent fake? In other words, a conlang. One with enviable production values? I''m not a Europeanist, so I'm not speaking from intimacy so much as from scenting bullshit projected on others: the Voynich...

Vijay, all my relations with the local and state police are handled (if not by statute, then at least by internal policy) through their LGBTQIA* ombudsmen/offices/etc. The people staffing those positions are very chummy with the people who feel I need to 'die in a fire' etc. And in the bigger pictur...

Vijay, all my relations with the local and state police are handled (if not by statute, then at least by internal policy) through their LGBTQIA* ombudsmen/offices/etc. The people staffing those positions are very chummy with the people who feel I need to 'die in a fire' etc. And in the bigger pictur...

That's why I recommend not to reveal his preference for conlangs... Especially since the pleasure it gives is even more intense... You delightful thing. You fill me with lubricious thoughts. Only you! Yes, only you, among all the betas of zompistery, can fulfill me. That is the pleasure you intense...

Re: people asking, where? North America, West Coast, in the U.S.A., in an urban area. Extremely queer and sex-positive, as far as P.R. goes. I assume anyone who's actually interested has far since grubbed up my ISP and specific location; because, after all, this is all Techie-Land now. So why should...

I'm female and homosexual. So over Pride weekend I got a hatchet, spray-painted pink, thrown through my window, accompanied by lots of messages about raping and torturing me to death in re: not agreeing that women are whatever males say they are. I'm ashamed to say I've finally -- after years of shi...

Why you'd call these gerund(ive)s though I have no idea. For what it's worth, Turkish has quite a few subordinating verbal endings ('converbs') ' Since the 1860s or so, 'gerundives' was (and in some circles still is) the term of art for these things in Turkology (and thence Mongolistics, and occasi...

Well, Nina Paley herself doesn't deny the existence of transgender people[....]. To loop back to the original post in this subthread (is that the word for it?), I feel I should fess up and say that I had no idea who Nina Paley is (and still don't, besides what that post told me: an animator?). Mèþr...

What is a TERF? Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A subspecies of feminist who denies that there is or can ever be anything in between "male" and "female", and thus refuses to accept the existence of intersex or transsexual people. Well, that's a definition of "TERF" used by non-TERFS. I've neve...

Yes, surdeclinaison is very common. Turkish can do basically the same thing with genitive and locative phrases ( bahçe-miz-de-ki-ler-e 'to the ones in our garden' < garden-1pl-in-NOM-PL-DAT; Hasan-'ın-ki-ler-e 'to Hasan's (ones)' < Hasan-GEN-NOM-PL-DAT). Most of the weird features of Basque are rea...

At one point, I did introduce into a couple Siberian conlangs of mine the existence of phonetic variation based on speakers' sex, but never really did much with it. I threw it in there because it seemed like a cool areal feature, and one which could plausibly (on sociolinguistic/historical grounds) ...

General question about resources here: does anyone know what happened with the massive grammar/textbook/language-material-related download website 'language.ws'? There's an old notice saying it's going up for sale, and it now seems to be inhabited only by aggressive adware that scares the crap out o...

Could seems counterfactual when used with passive or non-volitional active verbs, but not with volitional active verbs, where it to me indicates the ability of the subject to do the action in question[...] "You could have smashed that vase over his head, if he hadn't ducked" is not a counterfactual...

Might is not synonymous with could to me here, as might may indicate counterfactuality whereas could indicates ability (even though such ability may never be exercised). That's absolutely not my own (internal) understanding or observation of how it's used (by others around me), is all I can say. I ...

I think there's a third option, which I hear a lot in American English from all over -- for the counterfactual option (Sal's #1): "You could have broken that vase!"

It frankly sounds more colloquial to me than "might have" in that context.

Looking at that???????

You ain't seen dbu-med orthography, then

I haven't 'done' Tibetan in nearly thirty years, but this still struck me as grammatically, orthographically? phonetically? and stylistically weird, not-normal. But I think the gist is pretty clear: 'Whatever amount of happiness in the world, That all has arisen from desiring happiness for others; W...

Vijay, thanks for filling me in about Omniglot! I had no idea they even had a blog -- I guess I've been thinking (for some reason???) that the site was fossilized and dead for years. Am I right in thinking you're not, then, interested in trying to do it our/a better way, here?

Neither. EDIT: Also, correction, I've never listened to a song in Hrangkhol before. This suddenly made me wonder: would there be interest in a second 'Guess the Language' thread where we use audio samples, instead of texts? I'd be interested in giving it a try, but can't judge how dumb an idea it i...

Not sure exactly what you're referring to, but it seems like it has to do with people outside of a community being angry that the community hasn't been preserving their language. Yes, that's the kind of situation I meant. More specifically, the last remaining speakers/semi-speakers, together with t...

Not sure whether it's fieldy-enough work to count, but as far as high-risk linguistics go, I've been the target of death threats and a casual rifle potshot -- along with the language speakers who brought me on look at documenting/revitalizing their language. It turns out a lot of white boys were rea...

Most of the pseudo-Tungusic and pseudo-Mongolic languages I've played with have had 'official' orthographies using a Cyrillic base; one with a hanzi-based literary form; and I've played around with Manchu, Mongolic, and even Uighur~Sogdian alphabets for them too, though not very seriously. At variou...

It's both an incontrovertable and widely accepted fact that Altaic is a completely demonstrable and proven language family, and it's also the fact that "Altaic" is obviously and unambiguously nonsense as a 'genetic' relationship. Seriously, both points are plain facts in both professional circles an...

Thank you, I do appreciate that link.

It answers neither of the questions I asked.