zompist bboard

Hmmmm... If I had a time machine I would go to the time of the Minoan eruption. I would take a linguistic tour through Crete and the Cyclades and, for sure, I would admire the fateful eruption. Make sure you are close to your time machine while admiring said eruption, though, in case you need to us...

Curiously, many of my favorite-sounding words tend to start with B. - barley - bracken - barracks - belligerent - brisket - blogosphere I similarly like the sound of the French Revolutionary Calendar month Brumaire. Sadly, my birthday falls in Frimaire , which doesn't sound anywhere near as pleasant...

Izambri wrote:Yeah, it has an interesting curriculum:

Died on July 7th, 2005.
Resurrected on June 26th, 2007.
Died again on July 7th, 2007.
Re-resurrected on October 15th, 2011

This thread likes to die on July 7th.

How the heck are we supposed to keep it alive for nine more months?!

Chuma wrote:That all makes sense, except, before cars? I would have thought by the time cars became common, the US would already have pretty much caught up with Europe in terms of urbanisation.

Not quite, I don't think. Particularly not in the interior.

Huh, both motorway and speedway?! I've never seen this in Europe so far (though I haven't been to too many countries) . Public transportation also isn't as prevalent, especially outside of the Northeast. Also, in America it is often absurdly easy to get a driver's license (at least compared to how ...

I love the verbability of basically the entire English lexicon.

Were I unaware of the word's meaning, I would assume "skyping" someone involved a pointed implement of some sort. Nope, that's shanking. Concur with "rural", also "rare," "registrar," and in general /rVr/. For me, /lVl/ also isn't very pleasant, largely because of my dialectal (idiolectal?) propens...

vampireshark wrote: And something you might not want to see in your passport.

I'm guessing that's a "Forbidden from Further Entry" stamp?

Theta wrote:It's padawae actually.

Yes, and if you use it in the plural genitive, it's padawarum.

I started doing it because a website about lucid dreaming suggested it. I don't write in it every day, or even every other day. Just when I remember the dream once I wake up. I need to do it, because I want to lucid-dream, but would probably forget. That and I typically want to sleep more than I wa...

The Runge-Kutta method works SO much better. Still get a 15-m per year orbital radial increase for the innermost planet, but over the 200-year period I'm running it that won't be an issue. (Heck, I could run it for a million years and it probably wouldn't be that much of an issue. Of course, then it...

Trying to do an orbital gravity simulation, but I keep getting an increase of 120 five-minute timestamps between successive periapses, even though it's a two-body problem. Perhaps my parameterization is off... ...edit: Yeah. I was using an Euler method rather than a Runge-Kutta and so truncation/flo...

Soap wrote: If your bathroom is just behind a tree or something then that space should count as living space if we're comparing against America.

But by that token, since one can theoretically urinate anywhere, one's living space would be 5,490,369,310,000,000,000 square feet i.e. the world.

Guitarplayer wrote:NEXT WEEK: NICKNAMES OF AMERICAN RIVERS FROM YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!

All of them: "Riverbed."

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Lyhoko Leaci wrote:And my view of the Midwest, which most likely isn't representative of the average Ohioan.

The Eddy part is the best IMO.

My personal thoughts on the matter are that someone is bothered that a large chunk of America doesn't agree with the European mainstream on certain issues.

Viktor77 wrote:Collage I've created of all 50 US state capitol buildings. The US had quite the obsession with domes haha.

Yeah, as I understand it many of the state capitols emulating the federal one, which of course is domed.

You can hardly have a rotunda without the dome.

those things half-full of sand that you turn over and watch it flow down...etc) Hourglasses. To the original poster: How movable do you need the clocks to be? Because if they can be stationary, making one with the level of technology you described would likely not be a problem (especially if you ha...

I had a dream last night involving some sort of Japanese class. It was difficult to erase the chalkboard, and I was trying to figute out how to say "difficult to erase" in Japanese, and couldn't remember whether the "difficult to X" suffix was ～やぎる or ～まぎる. (It's neither, it's ～にくい, but in the dream...

"John gave me it" is grammatical for me too. I live nowhere near Vancouver.

I decided that Ephemera could really use a thread where people can post random thoughts and fun facts. The thread will hopefully be an interesting one that's fun to read (unlike the venting and Eddy threads)! Does anybody else think this thread belongs in NOTA? It seems to be lasting too long to be...

Go back to 3270 and give a Kebreni military leader 1,000 wheellock muskets and the appropriate ammunition, as well as a guide on how to use and manufacture them painstakingly translated into Kebreni.

Salmoneus wrote:Kind of surprised to see posts about linguistics and philosophy of language in a sociology thread...

A sociology thread on a board about linguistics and languages?

I believe the fourth line reads "Ditmor Clara" and the sixth "Bertram John". The writer's t s' horizontal strokes seem to drift a good deal rightward. Agree re: Bertram. The writer's H 's kick upward immediately after the downward stroke of the letter (i.e. look more like katakana "re" レ), rather t...

I was in some sort of fortress wherein apparently part of it was a volcano. At any rate, I was working on my laptop in an area on one side of the volcano (it was full of scaffolding, like the Goron Mines in Zelda: Twilight Princess ) for whatever reason, and had to leave to talk to someone, and perh...