zompist bboard

my idea I've had for ages: an underspecifying alphabet/abugida [...] So, for instance, if you wanted to spell 'bat', you might rebus it as BIRD-AIR-TERN (for the winged animal, using the 'flying' alphabet), or as BRICK-ANVIL-TRUNK (for a cricket bat, using the 'heavy blunt objects' alphabet). [...]...

I say it as un-deen - both syllables stressed, not sure which is primarily. I've heard the un-dyne pronounciation as well, though.

Wolff was asked about rival teams allegedly suggesting the change, which will also apply at the resurfaced Silverstone and Paul Ricard circuits, was made to help Mercedes

I was surprised visiting Albuquerque that people use true Spanish pronunciations for many names. I heard Jemez with monophtongs, not normal eng vowels. Perhaps it's a function of how familiar the speaker is, though .... The person speaking was familiar with both Spanish & Navajo. My local informant...

To me, it's a grammatical error: needs to be 'said to be' or 'has said he was'. Or switch to a different verb, like 'reported' or 'believed'.

On reflection, I think what I might have been going to point out there was the more direct sense in which Beethoven was Liszt's "predecessor": unlike most composers (who early on were often private teachers, and later often had academic teaching positions), Beethoven taught very few people - but one...

LISZT FERENCZ (Franz Liszt), 1811-1886 If the 19th century was determined to construct a new Beethoven, perhaps the closest it got was Liszt. Like Beethoven, Liszt was a passionate piano virtuoso* – in that regard, he surpassed his predecessor**, becoming a bona fide megastar. The mere sight of Lis...

And Britain and Germany have had similar "alpha male shit" with Thatcher and Merkel, two female leaders. [Thatcher, in particular, was way more "alpha male" than any male British party leader in a century] Merkel? "Alpha male"? Wow, things really look differently from outside the country. In German...

everyone knows the superior writing system is a syllabary-logogram mix, all else is shirking one's duty as conworlder Nonsense! Alphalogography all the way! [my idea I've had for ages: an underspecifying alphabet/abugida (so, say, KATINU could be 'katinu', 'kateno', 'katemo', 'gadengu', etc), but t...

Hey, let's revive the thread a bit. The really fascinating thing about French politics these days is how Macron has utterly destroyed all opposition. I can't even tell who's supposed to be the opposition party. The natural question is: is this the result of the election, or its cause? On the one ha...

Why not both? I think this reflects two different "problems" in English. One problem is that /{/ is a very high-frequency vowel in English, but it's also a comparatively unusual vowel quality. The language goes "huh? why is this weird sound so damn common!?" and finds ways to either lower to /a/ or ...

So I'm trying to render the Irish name Ó Catháin in Primitive Irish, but my knowledge of Irish in general is pretty weak. According to Wiktionary, the ó is from PI avi 'grandson', the cath is from PI cattu 'battle', and the -áin is from the PI -agni , genitive of the diminutive -agnas . Firstly, wh...

Sheep biting someone is mundane to you? Where do you live, Appalachia? ;-) For the Chomsky sentences, the point seems clearly to be not mundanity, but whether the cataphoric pronoun is in a fronted subclause (legal) or in the main clause coming before the subclause (illegal). Except that Zompist se...

A friend of mine has been going through a really rough patch with her mental health. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and that more or less convinced her that she's not ever going to get better than she currently is and I think that sent her into a depressive spiral. She seeme...

Was Raphe his name or short for Raphael? It was in a context where I'd have expected a full name, or at least as full as he ever goes by. It's possible it was short for Raphael, but given that Ralph is much more common than Raphael, and I've not encountered Raphael being abbreviate to Raphe, it see...

Is /reIf/ still standard in the U.K.? I knew someone with that name, but he spelled it Rafe and I didn't think of it as a variant of Ralph at the time. ÷÷÷÷÷÷ I've done /Z/ for x, too.... picked it up in my early teen years and seem to have mentally stored it as the default foreign pronunc until I ...

There's also X as /ɨgz/ in "Xavier", at least in my midwestern U.S. accent. I wonder if the people who came with that were the ones whose baby alphabet books had X-Ray instead of Xylophone. I'm hoping it's just X-Men fans? Although that creates a chicken-and-egg, of course... I actually personally ...

There's also X as /ɨgz/ in "Xavier", at least in my midwestern U.S. accent. Yeah, I hear that here as well. +1. Plus I've heard this with an unvoiced cluster. I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who called their child /EkseIvij@/. Needless to say, that's the kind of hilarious baby-na...

TIER 4 Fourteen composers in, there are still plenty of names to consider. In my opinion, however, four further names stand out for their significance. Each of these composers was at one time arguably the pre-eminent, or at least most influential, composer in the world... ANTONIO VIVALDI, 1678-1741...

[Shostakovich] may at his most approachable in works like the 2nd piano concerto – a work he himself felt had little value, in which he is essentially imitating Rachmaninov (while being just as good as Rachmaninov), but which has had lasting popularity. Never heard this piece before, but I really l...

I agree with Kath that none of those lines are troubling. [well, except the 'see them hitting' example, where the lack of clarification over 'them' may be a little galling, but the real issue is treating 'to hit' as though it could be intransitive. But I believe this is American sporting jargon of s...

Yes, they're cataphoric pronouns. Although I'm sure there are other names as well. I would note, however, that there's a potential difference between cases like: After she ate, Lynne walked home and those like: I heard it: an octopus! and those like: He told me this: all cats are blue and those like...

Review: The Tina Turner Musical

The musical is in fact called 'The Tina Turner Musical' (I think?), and this is a review of it. Rather than the musical being called "Review" with "The Tina Turner Musical" being a subtitle, which I originally assumed.

A cookie tin. Even if there are no cookies. Woah! Generalised 'cookie' in Britain!? I'd call it a tin, or specifically a biscuit tin. [to me, it couldn't be a cake tin even if it had cakes in it. A cake tin is the tin you make the cake in. That may be specific to me as someone who grew up with expo...