zompist bboard

This reminds me of the scene in "Catch me if you can" where the one intern, after being grilled by DiCaprio's fake doctor says to himself "Why didn't I concur?"

Maybe from this: But I will say this: narratives do seem to be more common in works of fiction than works of non-fiction. That doesn't mean they never occur in non-fiction at all, only that they are rare. And no, I don't mean narratives happen automatically, they just happen to be the way people or...

Maybe from this:

Mashmakan wrote:But I will say this: narratives do seem to be more common in works of fiction than works of non-fiction.

And no, I don't mean narratives happen automatically, they just happen to be the way people organize things when they write.

For the record, I never said a non-fiction story could not have a narrative. Autobiographies are narratives based on actual occurrances in the author's life. Historical dramas that actually happened can also be narratives because they can be told like a story. As long as it is factual and none of i...

I've actually been interested in swearing for a while (and rather than start another thread, I thought I'd hijack this one.) I remember getting just rumor of the Russian Mat thing from a TA. It seems like most swear words in English are one of two things - taboos for biological functions, and blasph...

After yet another thread where somebody goes 'hey, did you know that English's periphrastic 'do' comes from Welsh, lol?' and me yet again explaining that that's highly unlikely if anything, I decided to ask what the enlightened folk of the ZBB what their own theories were. Also, I've heard that oth...

From the other end, when I was learning Russian, palatalization was the single hardest thing for me. Especially because, at the time, I didn't have a teacher who could explain it like that - she was stuck on the "soft sign" and kept trying to explain that it's the same sound, just "softened." I kept...

A lot of Russians have trouble with the use of articles in English and will either leave out "the" when it is necessary, or insert it when it is not needed. Czechs do this too. They do it all the freaking time haha. They also forget to use contractions and mix up strong verb forms in my experience....

The best: The lack of a single useful device developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.[11] This stands in stark contrast with every verified theory...

Pointing to Conservapedia and Andrew Schlafly, then laughing is really too easy, but his recent decision to deem through it the theory of relativity to be a liberal plot is exceptional even for that august personage. Then again, they offer so many counter-examples . The best: The lack of a single u...

For anything short, I use IPA. That said, IPA has some shortcomings that drive me nuts (mostly involving affricates). I would prefer some sort of hybridized IPA/Americanist system.

Yeah, I think the way I phrased it was inherently contradictory. Sorry For what it's worth, this has been extremely helpful to me: /fp'/ is indeed a possible preposition. So, that's cool.

MrKrov wrote:

xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓

Case closed.

You know, I even remember reading that one on Wikipedia, now that I think about it. I'd still want to hear someone pronounce it - I would definitely stick a few vowels in if I tried.

Is it possible to have a word with no vowels? I''m not talking about syllabic consonants like nasals functioning as the nucleus - the example I was thinking of was more like using /p'/ as a one syllable preposition. Would this be more likely to be analyzed as a prefix, which would attach to the foll...

As a baseball fan, I'll say the usually terminology I hear is "Flew out to center." As a fellow baseball fan, I more often hear "flied". We'll settle this objectively by comparing the number of World Series victories for our respective teams. Just thought of another batch of examples: compounds wit...

English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology: fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.) "The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which w...

I'm so happy with the direction my thread has taken.

Let's not forget emotive conjugation I am firm, You are obstinate, He is a pig-headed fool. I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing. I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word. Actually, Paul Krugman had one of thes...

I checked it out - it basically says that Biblical Hewbrew is the original garden of Eden language, My favorite is the guy behind it all - you see his bio page, and all his degrees are in English lit.

English has at least one verb that conjugates differently for different senses: hang (hung/hanged). Not a valence alternation, though. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it; all you're really talking about is having valence marking fused with other verb markers, right? When you say it l...

I've had a thought kicking around for a while - what if you had a verb that conjugated differently in different situations - for example, as a germanic weak verb when used transitively, but as a strong verb when intransitive. So the past tense of "I see you" becomes "I seed you" but past of "I see" ...

Saving the language means going to where it's spoken. And it only works if the community is on board. Once the community is on board, they're the ones who have to learn the language, and they're the ones who have to use it, and teach it to their kids, for the language to really live. So what about ...

See, I don't really see Anglophone culture becoming more homogenous. English is in the process of breaking into several distinct shards - it may be a family of languages in another thousand years. And earlier about language death - I wasn't saying we should never try to keep someone alive. But all l...

Language death is an emergency because with every language that dies, we lose a completely unique viewpoint on the universe. We lose insights--not just about linguistics, but about things in general --that we will never be able to get back. This is true of every human being, and has nothing to do w...

I'll be using a bad word, but I don't intend to insult you with it, but that's being pretty much egoist . I've been called worse. :mrgreen: My problem is, I already have a cultural identity, coming from a particular place and group of people and way of talking. I understand preventing language deat...