zompist bboard

WORST book I have ever read, and not only because of being put off because of the painful "Irish". Only got half way through it. Everything was lazy: conlanging, worldbuilding, story, characters, writing..... When one of the main characters died but I didn't feel ANYTHING, I knew I had no interest i...

"I seen" seems to me a bad way to say/write "I've seen". Well, from a prescriptivist point of view, that's exactly what it is. However, I honestly don't think I've ever produced this, nor am I sure I've actually encountered it in the wild from a native speaker. Is it an Americanism? No, it's very c...

Tere! Miks õpid eesti keelt?

There is of course the whole kaksteist kuud 'twelve months' in Estonian and the -seks endings.

Terviseks! 'for health' is the traditional way of toasting in Estonian but sometimes we joke by saying tervis ja seks 'health and sex'.

I think Describing Morphosyntax might be a bit hard-going for an introductory class. Be prepared for people to not actually know what linguistics is , despite taking the class. During my linguistics degree, there were still some people a month in who were confusing the words grammar and vocabulary ...

Does Estonian count? I'm learning that...for my sins!

I realise as a graduate of French studies that the French state has a less-than-benevolent attitude to the presence on République soil of non-Francien languages, and in the past one of the roles of the the education system was to Frenchicize the population of France, to unify the people under one st...

Sorry that this post is a little off-topic, but anyway... The subjunctive is never mentioned, but will be recognized from prayers which the vast majority of Irish students will have learned off-by-heart in Irish and English at primary school. I agree. It's present in such such expressions as: Go rai...

Apologises if these were posted in the thread already. I love to annoy my Estonian family with the first tongue twister. Taken from the omniglot site: http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/tonguetwisters.htm Irish Ná bac le mac an bhacaigh is ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat! Don't bother with t...