zompist bboard

Shm Jay wrote:I’d like to teach the world to sing.

Probably only gsandi and Legros really remember this, though. Maybe Legros even bought the record. No, it’s the exact opposite of realpolitik.

Amazing. I bought the record in 1972, in Germany. I was 15 and vacationing there

I've always been a bit unhappy with Mark's reluctance to put irrationality and madness in his fantastic Almean mega-project. I like a little holocaust with my progress. Are genocides irrational? I'm not sure. Criminal, yes, but irrational? The idea of a Rwanda without Tutsis has a strong, rational ...

But of course history is long, and ktuvoks can have their own dramas. A female might induce the male to drop his sperm packet, and then refuse to take it up-- a highly aggressive act since he's just wasted a year of effort, and a dangerous one since he cannot be poor or inconsiderable if he develop...

But of course history is long, and ktuvoks can have their own dramas. A female might induce the male to drop his sperm packet, and then refuse to take it up-- a highly aggressive act since he's just wasted a year of effort, and a dangerous one since he cannot be poor or inconsiderable if he develop...

young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses

Elephants raping rhinoceroses? I'd like to see pictures

ils wrote:

Legros wrote:AFAIK rape is not an animal trait. Only homo sapiens commits rape.

I don't think that's true. See, for example, this article (also recently posted in Ephemera).

I found no mention of rape in the article. Can you post a relevant quote?

AFAIK rape is not an animal trait. Only homo sapiens commits rape. Perhaps the behavior of ancient ilii was closer to man's than it now is. What is the survival value of the labial scales? It looks non-existent to me, unless the rapists used to kill their victim after the act. Perhaps the ktuvoks (o...

Off topic, but... There's an urban legend in France (I don't know if it exists elsewhere) saying that East Asian women have teeth in their vagina. I don't know the origin of this legend. I suppose that the French soldiers who conquered Vietnam in the 19th century were surprised by the smallness of t...

zompist wrote:A cynical answer would be: and that contrasts with art when? When was the golden period when no artists cared for fame, power, and money?

Fairly recent - when Eskimos carved ivory for themselves

That one's easy to answer, at least: the Sha languages of the Koranax are written in a derivation of the Xurnese syllabary (they didn't bother with the logograms); the Chia languages of Luduyn are written in Gurdagor script; and Tei is written in Jippirasti script. Eh eh... like Serbo-Croat, which ...

Voyageur ("Traveller")is fortunately gender-neutral, and that's how the protagonists are referred to in the first paragraph Not for me: I say voyageuse very often. Of course, if there are one hundred voyageuses and one voyageur among them, it is grammatically correct to refer to the whole lot as le...

Very nice. I hadn't noticed all the differences, although I look at the new picture all the time: I use it as wallpaper on my office computer :) I showed the picture to a friend. He told me that the style resembles Herg?'s Tintin drawings. I hadn't realized it before. This picture has always been my...

In colloquial French " il est ? l'ouest " ("he is in the west") means he is crazy. I don't know the origin of the expression. I wouldn't use it in front of Bretons or any other natives of Western France, for instance. In fact, I never use it, but I've heard it. Perhaps it has something to do with th...

Verdurian. When I discovered it, I understood why some people fall in love with the French language!

Everytime I hear people speaking in Portuguese, I think that Verdurian must sound half Portuguese, half French.

Close second: Barakhinei.

I thought of something similar for a con-planet. I figured that the atmosphere would have be much richer in oxygen, and that there would be no birds and no flying insects.

I translated a Buddhist prayer, the Three Jewels, in Verdurian several years ago, and I studied a little Barakhinei. I presently use Mark's picture of a Verdurian street as a wallpaper on my desktop computer in my workplace. I always had a liking for the picture. To be fair, I also used Salmoneus' a...

skrivihop wrote:My guess would be that Zamenhof made Esperanto IE because when he lived, the Europeans ruled the world and almost noone at thet time wound ever dream of that the colonial rule would fall...

Those were the good old days
*waxes nostalgic*

Do they need to learn it in primary school like we do? You learn it in primary school? Wow, that's a good idea. We never did. I wish we would have had to learn to swim(I don't know how). My children learnt in primary school. I didn't. At 14, I was the only boy in my school who couldn't swim. I look...

WHat about the other culture? If to you Flora is the gentler side of Britishness, what is the less gentle side? Britain and France have been rivals for centuries, very much like Verduria and Kebri... remember Trafalgar and Waterloo! :) That was centuries ago, of course, but it left traces in the Fr...

Kebri and Flora = the UK (Kebri is Verduria's chief rival at sea, the Kebreni are daring merchants and colonialists; Flora is the gentler aspect of Britishness), In what way? :) I'm always interested in how people we (people from the UK) are percieved abroad, since of course the picture is differen...

I always thought that Verduria = 17th and 18th century France (something in the atmosphere, even in the multiplicity of geographical and social dialects, the refined but snobbish aristocracy in the capital city, etc), Kebri and Flora = the UK (Kebri is Verduria's chief rival at sea, the Kebreni are ...

I pretty much agree with you, Legros, but I think 400 might be a small overesimation. About 150-200 seems more likely to me. Not that I base this on anything... If you actually did some estimates, ok. I remembered the number from Michel Malherbe's " Les langages de l'humanit? " - and I couldn't fin...

(Now that gives me an idea for a conlang based on the Chinook Jargon -- there's already Saiwosh , I know.) It was a surprise to me when I realized that nobody else had made a conlang based on the Chinook Jargon. Perhaps other conlangers did, but AFAIK they didn't post their creations on the Interne...

I don't believe it! I'm criticized for supposedly wanting to make everyone alike and Legros posts this and doesn't get any criticism. :roll: Eddy, you didn't read my post! *sighs* Try again: A single language (preferably English, which is already quite widespread) should be taught to all the school...

bicoherent wrote:I'm not sure about ease of access to information, but I prefer access to a good life.

If you don't have access to information you don't have freedom, and without freedom you can't have a good life