zompist bboard

When I have travelled to other countries, I am often surprised when locals correct me for calling to animals using my native tongue. I was told in Switzerland that a cat will not understand my saying "here kitty-kitty" and they insisted I instead say "bis-bis-bis" or "mouche-mouche" or the Swiss cat...

Really, people shouldn't pick their noses.

Are you saying they turned their nose up at his research?

By the way, on the subject of smell... you remind me of this cool article I read last month that scientists claim to have isolated the 10 basic scents or categories of odor that humans can detect/discern . It occurred to me that this information might be useful for conlanging, for those looking to a...

That's actually a very cool idea. Would also be interesting trying to translate words for sensory perceptions that humans do not possess at all. For instance, fish have a sensory system called "lateral lines" that gives them an acute 3-dimensional awareness of water pressure, turbulence, motion and ...

I just remembered there was a Monty Python sketch like that. Something along the lines of a Hungarian to English phrasebook that translated innocuous practical questions to "My hovercraft is full of eels" and similar phrases that led native Brits to be very confused or upset with the unsuspecting to...

It might make for an interesting script to have someone sabotage the universal translators (with a computer virus perhaps) to interpret things subtly off, cause insult, or outright lie—but maybe only regarding a very narrow topic. For instance, my friend got a GPS for his car that had optional voice...

Sadly, Hoshi's skills as a linguist were mostly wasted. They set her up to be so cool as a linguist, and then never really used her to full advantage. Although they did establish that she invented something important called "linguacode" that improved the universal translator. (Linguacode is describe...

I must protest! The last season of Enterprise was wonderful! There was some amazing storytelling in that last season. That last season makes Enterprise worthwhile. And in the mirror universe 2 parter, the ship's linguist outfoxes everyone to become Empress of the Terran Empire. That alone has got to...

And as they are at it, they could have decided that this Vulcan auxlang would be a loglang. Of course, language change would be unhaltable and the language would soon develop dialects and drift away from loglangness. Is Okrand's Vulcan language a loglang? That's a really good question. At first blu...

I'm not sure that that's correct. I'm not an expert, but my google-fu informs me that Vulcan had a "High Command" that is described as the most powerful governmental body on the planet, and that it existed as early as 1957, and that it was a de-facto military government ( http://en.memory-alpha.org/...

Well, Star Trek was always more of a vehicle for allegorical storytelling than it was pure science fiction. It was Gene Roddenberry's way of holding a mirror up to the day and criticizing society, social trends, and the human condition. That said, they often tried to make the science part realistic,...

Amazingly, I have not been able to find anything about this on the Web. Leading me to suspect that Star Trek fandom has waned substantially since its heyday, or that no one was watching "Enterprise" in its last season (both very likely). In the 4th season of Star Trek Enterprise, episode 3, "Home," ...

There's apparently some poetry written on the walls of Krypton: http://www.empireonline.com/features/man-of-steel-secrets/p4 Including the following quote or paraphrase from Joseph Campbell: 'We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shal...

The linguist who designed the Kryptonian language for Man of Steel has been revealed as Christine Scheyer, a professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. There is a short youtube video up about her design of the Kryptonian language here: www.youtube.com/watch?...

So they apparently designed a Kryptonian language for the upcoming Man of Steel movie. Don't know if it will be spoken in the film or only written. But a fan has put out this breakdown of the Kryptonian writing system: http://kryptonian.info/about/news-feed.html/2013/05/24/break-down-of-kryptonian-w...

Here are perhaps some fun, unusual sounds to use in your conlang. James Harbeck at The Week wrote this amusing, yet informative article with phonetic analysis of annoying sounds that teenagers make: http://theweek.com/article/index/244460/a-linguistic-dissection-of-7-annoying-teenage-sounds There we...

Super cool!

I stand corrected! However, Dalgarno originally worked together with Wilkins on the language before they split over disagreements and went in different directions. Dalgarno did beat Wilkins to print by a few years. Dalgarno's Ars Signorum is criticized, though, for being incomplete. It supposedly ha...

Yeah, it's got a lot of issues that make it unworkable as a means of communication. But it's very interesting as a historical artifact. It's pretty remarkable given the time period. It was created only about 50 years after Shakespeare died. It's not necessarily the first conlang, but it's surely the...

I had been looking for this book for a long time: John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_towards_a_Real_Character_and_a_Philosophical_Language) It's a nearly forgotten classic of conlanging. Despite having been published i...

Oh, I don't think the NASA server was necessarily taken down because of the Warp drive paper. Sounds like they were making a lot of papers available to the public and they were doing an audit to see if any of it should be restricted. If you follow this link, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.nt...

I read this article on IO9 awhile back: http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive It's about a possible method for making the Alcubierre drive more feasible within achievable energy limitations. It used to link to a paper on the NASA website, however, the link now says tha...

I don't believe Chen's position is really that it's impossible for "futureless" languages to require a choice regarding time when using certain words or constructions, or conversely that languages with a future tense can’t have words and constructions that are neutral in regards to time. (And if Che...

So what questions of mine does he address in the video which he didn't address in this response of his to Pullum and Liberman ? Wait, you refuse to watch his short video, but you want me to read your opposition research, do a comparison between it and the speech, and then break it down for you poin...