zompist bboard

Rousseauois. All the vowels, all the time.

I've decided to a) get a new host, and b) try to move the board there. Part a) is done. The new host is Bluehost, FYI, which phpbb recommends. Head on over to http://www.verduria.org EDIT (January 2021): Thanks to bradrn, this board is visible again, but use verduria.org for all new posting. I'll ke...

So I'm wondering how these age consorts/cohorts are defined. Depends on the institution and its size. Ordinary families have cohorts by generation, but a large institution will have a smaller age range. If the cohort is getting large and there's been a lull in recruitment, that's the ideal time to ...

So Haleza Grise wrote:Does the saffron on the flags of Ctésifon and Krasnaya represent Caďinas?

Yes. That's actually why yellow is used in the historical atlas for Central languages.

(And for that matter, the Xurnese flag is why I used red in the atlas, and purple as a background color on the language pages.)

Gah. Stupid board ate my post. This may be briefer than it would have been. Good catch on the gods, I'll fix that. Institutional bands can be pretty large-- up to 150 people or so. That works for a nunnery, a gang, a school, etc. Larger institutions like armies are divided into multiple bands. Adult...

Heh. Well, nothing is intentionally ugly, but one thing I was trying to avoid was looking exactly like every other terrestrial flag. So, though there are some of the usual tricolors and stripes, I tried to use different colors and shapes. Curesi is of course a blend of two flags. I think they'd each...

OK, so apparently Parliament has passed a bill that says Parliament can't weigh in on Brexit. Only didn't they just do that by voting? Also, the government somehow made a concession which amounts to "maybe we'll talk some more", which was apparently key to getting certain members to vote not to vote...

Conversations, even among humans, are normally cooperative. Even in an argument, people take turns, try to use terms the other(s) will understand, etc. So, I suppose you could try to obstruct a conversation by adding pronouns that won't be used, just as you could (say) suddenly start speaking in Cad...

Ultimately, this is because linguistics is a narrative tradition - like botany, political science, history or theology - rather than an experimental process like the sciences in a narrow sense. Ah, the early 19th century... how is it there? I've always wanted to visit. The architecture seems so lov...

Really interesting summary, thanks! But why should a theory of phonology have to account for sign language? I mean, linguistics obviously should. But it's kind of like expecting acoustics and vision to work the same. There are similarities (both because of physics and because of neurons), but also i...

From a gaming site:

This Dark Souls 3 all bosses without skips WR speedrun is great

One point about which I'm not sure concerning English - in German, the restriction by nur together with erlauben can mean "only X can do Y", but it can also mean "Y has permission to do only Y, but they are also free to do Z". Is that the same for English? Yes, but I believe only if "only" appears ...

The four lineages (xelyên) of eastern Ereláe are supposed to each live in their own part of a settlement. It's taboo to marry within the xelyên. It's eccentric but allowed to live outside your xelyên's area. So, there are roughly three levels of relationship. One is marriage, which at least potentia...

Neat! Astraios, do the rak sentences have the same meaning if the velo subclause is omitted?

(Also, I'd like to use these in my book. Could you PM me your name for proper attribution?)

I'm a little confused about what you're looking for. Are you saying that the ambiguity with "only" exists in Mandarin, but the ambiguity with "not" doesn't? I don't know how Mandarin quantifiers work... my Mandarin grammar doesn't say! It wouldn't at all surprise me if they're like 'not'. Are you a...

I've been working through quantifier and negative scope, and come to the conclusion that English is really messed up by allowing these elements to hop around. An example: In hell, Satan only allows conlangers to write auxlangs. This could have four meanings, depending on what "only" is taken to modi...

Yeah, it's not surprising... there are other cases where adding more stuff to a 'bad' sentence makes it acceptable. An example from a very different construction. This even has a name, Heavy NP Shift. *We consider unacceptable that. *We consider unacceptable adultery. We consider unacceptable the lo...

For the Chomsky sentences, the point seems clearly to be not mundanity, but whether the cataphoric pronoun is in a fronted subclause (legal) or in the main clause coming before the subclause (illegal). In isolated sentences, I agree that the pronoun can come first if it's in a subclause and otherwi...

Except that Zompist seems to have an additional rule that some otherwise illegal structures become legal when their semantic content is sufficiently non-'mundane', and apparently the syntacticians he's read have agreed. Actually I'm interested in English as it's actually used, not as they taught yo...

I'm pretty happy with Elkarîl. Though it needs to be Unicoded! On a re-reading, I think the only thing I wish I'd spent more time on was subordination. It's just not very interesting. (Also, since I'm in the middle of a lot of syntax-- well, I'd add more syntax. :) ) I'm more dissatisfied with the p...

Šọ̈́gala wrote:There's also X as /ɨgz/ in "Xavier", at least in my midwestern U.S. accent.

I wonder if the people who came with that were the ones whose baby alphabet books had X-Ray instead of Xylophone.

ETA: LB, I hope you dissuaded him by threatening to call the kid [xiq].

I'll mark these directly: A: *He ate lunch before Noam Chomsky fainted B: *He ate lunch before I met Noam Chomsky C: *The sheep bit him before Noam Chomsky fainted D: *The sheep bit him before I met Noam Chomsky And then: E: Before he ate lunch, Noam Chomsky fainted F: ?Before he ate lunch, I met No...

They're both British. Might be irrelevant, but the syntacticians I've been reading are American.

Kath, can you say what's wrong with the Chomsky example for you?

Oh come now. You might think you don't use these constructions, but I wager you would if you weren't thinking about it. Isolated sentences can look weird, especially if you're focusing intently on whether they are weird or not. In case this was a British thing, I checked some British sites and easil...

Should be fixed.

I also fixed the Verdurian city neighborhood maps. (Mostly case errors.)

And while I was at it, I put the Uyseʔ logograms page back up again.