zompist bboard

@Soap: Is the conlang in your signature polysynthetic? The word lamempambo appears to incorporate two nouns along with the subject into one free-standing word.

I talked to the car rental place and they said the car was rented out again without bothering to clean it out beforehand. So whoever rented it after me has my W2 and thus the opportunity to steal my identity.

They said the office is closed now so I will have to call again later. Which means that whoever rented the car after me will have plenty of opportunity to steal my identity. Needless to say, I don't have the time or money to take something like this to court or establish a new identity. So whoever h...

So, I accidentally left my W2 and other stuff related to taxes in my rental car before returning it, and the car has already been rented out to someone else. What are my options if the people who rented it steal my identity?

Well, my car is wrecked beyond repair, leaving me with no means of getting to work and no idea how to afford a new vehicle. You weren't insured? I have insurance, but the policy won't give me enough to buy a new car because my current vehicle has little value in the first place. Even with whatever ...

Well, my car is wrecked beyond repair, leaving me with no means of getting to work and no idea how to afford a new vehicle. The best possible case scenario is bankrupting myself and sinking thousands of dollars into debt getting a car loan.

This is very largely just an experience thing, I think. If you spoke a language which left lots of things out, as many languages do, you'd get much better at inferring what is missing in a given context. But what if you infer incorrectly because the information you need is simply not present? There...

Salmoneus wrote:Heard. Especially: Japanese elides implied words. Never understood, practically. Me, seems every word serves functions; sentences hardly make sense, eliding.

Not sure about you, but I could hardly understand that post without looking at my original post.

Thanks, Qwynegold. I missed the bit about the comma. I'd change the translation, then, to the much simpler "Unlike big sister, I hate boys and such." "Unlike you" might be better. (The speaker is 16, and responding to a comment from her sister that the boys at school think she's weird, so in Englis...

What would people here consider the most accurate translation of the Bible into English?

While discussing the use of logograms and syllabic characters in Japanese writing, Zompist provides an example from a manga. Ignoring the native writing system since it's irrelevant to my question, the sample goes: Atashi wa oneechan to chigatte otoko nanka, daik-kirai na no. 1s topic elder.sister w...

finlay wrote:ur still banned frm this thread m8, specially if you're gonna write passive-aggressive stuff like that

Don't you think it's time to let old grudges die?

My bank canceled my debit card several weeks ago because they decided it was obsolete, and my new one doesn't have the same pattern. They just gave me a plain gray card, rather than the tie-dye one I had previously. So now I have to wait several years for the opportunity to get a card with the patte...

The thing about a switch to Cyrillic that I would oppose is that Ireland and the Irish language don't really have anything to do with Russian language or culture, or Cyrillic. An adapted version of Cyrillic may have the advantage of being more phonetic, but similarly, an adapted version of Hangeul ...

I have always wondered how the suffix -masu in Japanese originated. Presumably it developed from an auxiliary verb that became permanently attached to the preceding verb stem. But how did the sense "this whole statement is uttered in a formal setting" originate?

All Aspies on this site: Do you ever feel that you were immune to peer pressure? When I was a teenager, I had no interest in doing drugs, drinking, having sex, breaking curfew. My peers would tell me to do these things, but I didn't care. People with Asperger's syndrome seem to be the anti-rebels! ...

Pole, the wrote:I haven't seen a dentist in, like, a year or so. And even then it after another year or two of not seeing a dentist, and only because one of my teeth went unbearably wrong.

Sure, but I am flat-out missing a bunch of teeth because of my extreme negligence.

I am missing half a dozen teeth because I neglected to take care of them when I was younger. I knew that I needed to brush more often, get cavities filled, and so forth, but just couldn't be bothered. I know that many people despise me, and quite frankly they are absolutely right to. I am a horrible...

I am deeply angry about the fact that even if I make it to Seattle now, it will ring hollow given my current age. I will have wasted my entire youth, the best years of my life, in a place I hate with no opportunity to enjoy life as well as others.

My username is a function call from the C programming language, which I have always thought sounded like a possible name for a supervillain.

I have considered something like participles as one possible solution to my problems. Basically some suffixes which turn verbal stems into arguments while assigning them noun class and such. The resulting argument words would retain their original valence, with those derived from transitive stems ta...

Again, it has nothing to do with usefulness of the words, it has to do with the usefulness of the category. "Adverb" does not form any kind of cohesive grouping, they are formed differently, derived differently, have different functions, modify different types of heads, have different syntax. It wo...

So, what do people here think about claims that the Salishan languages have no distinction between nouns and verbs ? Assuming that the analyses making this claim are accurate, would you argue that the language simply pairs every noun with a phonologically identical verb meaning "to be NOUN"? For tha...

For what it's worth, Describing Morphosyntax describes nouns as representing the most time-stable concepts and verbs as the least. Sure, but one could easily treat the same concept as either a noun or verb without affecting its time-stability. Returning to my previous examples, one could take the s...

Looking at this issue another way, just what is the fundamental difference between nouns and verbs? Some sources say that verbs describe events and nouns describe things (although one can easily nominalize events without eliminating their nature as events). Others identify verbs with predicates and ...