zompist bboard

Finally someone other than me puts up a new phrase :P Minor transcription corrections; the ones not changed stand. /(ə)n/ is reinterpreted as /n̩/. θ ð j eɪ :> t̪ d̪ ʒ eː /d̪ə-mæn nekst tuː miː sed ˈsʌdn̩lɪ ɪn ə ˈdriːmɪ vɔɪz, "ʒes, aɪ t̪ɪŋk aɪ ʃəl ɪkˈspres əˈgjuːzətɪv d̪ə-keːs baɪ ˈpriːvɪks"/ <The-...

That seems to have passed the point of no return! This is my best stab at the appropriate British English, though I fear it's probably pretty generic. <The man next to me said suddenly in a dreamy voice, "Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!> /ðə mæn nekst tuː miː sed ˈsʌd(ə...

Rants about the passive voice are the best for this, in my experience; you get people trumpeting that "a sentence has to have a subject and a verb", or the person who I heard say, in all apparent seriousness, that "the passive voice should be eschewed." Not to mention the ones who go on about the e...

Alces wrote:An ort is a leftover scrap of food. The word may be derived from the English cognate of the German prefix Ur- added to a reduced form of the word eat.

I've seen 'ort' used to refer to the little scraps of thread one gets in sewing and embroidery.

Rants about the passive voice are the best for this, in my experience; you get people trumpeting that "a sentence has to have a subject and a verb", or the person who I heard say, in all apparent seriousness, that "the passive voice should be eschewed." Not to mention the ones who go on about the e...

Rants about the passive voice are the best for this, in my experience; you get people trumpeting that "a sentence has to have a subject and a verb", or the person who I heard say, in all apparent seriousness, that "the passive voice should be eschewed." Not to mention the ones who go on about the e...

Rants about the passive voice are the best for this, in my experience; you get people trumpeting that "a sentence has to have a subject and a verb", or the person who I heard say, in all apparent seriousness, that "the passive voice should be eschewed." Not to mention the ones who go on about the ev...

Well, there's Japanese; I am no expert but if I understand correctly almost all of the pronouns are actually nouns or demonstratives that have become conventionalized. E.g. "boku", which originally meant "servant" but is now used as "I" by men, with a casual connotation that's so strong as to be co...

Well, there's Japanese; I am no expert but if I understand correctly almost all of the pronouns are actually nouns or demonstratives that have become conventionalized. E.g. "boku", which originally meant "servant" but is now used as "I" by men, with a casual connotation that's so strong as to be con...

Richard W wrote: We have of course one quite well with new units of measure - amp, volt, dyne, erg, mill (the angle - 6,400 mills to the circle), click (= km).

Also kay, meg, gig. Though I don't know about ter; I usually hear people say tera.

As far as I know nothing has actually been written about northeast Tuysafa outside of your own article on Proto-Northeastern, but based on the climate New England and eastern Canada would probably be a decent enough analogue. That's what I was thinking when I picked the area--I specifically wanted ...

Is there anything much about north eastern Tuysafa in terms of flora and fauna? I was thinking (for the bit I'm interested in) something along the lines of New England forest, possibly managed in much the same way for tree nuts to be a major crop.

linguoboy wrote: "They wanted a picture, they wanted a handshake, they wanted to have a word."

Hmmm. I think part of it in this specific sentence may be that it's the indefinite, pseudo-singular "they". I could be wrong, lacking the larger context, though.

Favourite false cognate: the Irish word for 'jersey' sounds very much like 'guernsey'... The Irish 'geansaí' sounds like that because it's from "gansey", a type of sweater/jersey which originated on the Channel Island of Guernsey. It's not a false cognate; it's a borrowing. The English word is the ...

And tin's another white metal, so it wouldn't "dilute" the color of the silver as badly.

Yng wrote:
Formally of course contracted forms are perfectly acceptable - but I wouldn't use 'have got' in writing, I don't think.

Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they have not.

Granted, that was more than a hundred years ago.

Useful sentences in duolingo: Tá an fear sa chuisneoir (I think, may be getting it wrong) = The man is in the fridge Grossvater ist nicht mein Vater (should be eszett) = Grandad is not my father I feel fully equipped to travel in Nightmare Ireland and Creepy Germany! I had one the other day that wa...

Apparently, the Irish pronunciations are all wrong (no surprise there!). She sure doesn't sound like the prof I had in my two semesters in college, and given that it was twenty years ago the fact that I can even tell should indicate the degree of disparity. ;) Duolingo tells me I'm 23% "fluent" in ...

In my high school French class we were all told to pick "French names" from a list. Some people went for the French pronunciations of their regular names, some went for as different as possible. (I was one of the latter, using Christine, Marie-Noelle, and Genevieve in different years; my given name ...

Matrix wrote:
I think you just rolled a natural 1 on your Spot Sarcasm check, dude.

...you think Danny-boy was being sarcastic? It's a pretty standard attempt to inflict shame on someone who's not adequately genuflecting to their parents.

You do realize you wouldn't have been alive to even think about changing your name if it weren't for your parents right? I have had arguments with my parents too, I think everyone has, but for me it's no reason to no longer respect them as being my parents. It's always so cute when people talk abou...

What is surprising is that Terrans could digest Almean food! Why? I mean, food is for the most part sugar, fat and protein, right ? and sugar is a trivial molecule which every plant on earth does, it's not terribly surprising that almean plants might use sugar and its various composites <fructose, ...

It's classist because it directly references class in a derogatory manner. That's pretty much the definition of "classist". I have no opinion on your personal state of classist-ness, but trust me: using a word that's the equivalent of "trailer trash" is going to raise some eyebrows. "Da Hood" defin...

This from the man who introduced tokkie into the conversation? That is a common Dutch word for what in America I think is called "trailer trash", though it's an eponym, popularized by a tv show of said name. I fail to see how it is classist to use that word. It's classist because it directly refere...

Benturi, I think my answer to whether it's realistic depends in large part on the scale you're assuming. Basically, the smaller all those islets are, the more realistic it seems to me, just because there are so many of them.