zompist bboard

Kepler's 2nd law, or rather its derivation from Newton's law of gravitation, gives us... I don't think I can do equations here very well. (Since the orbit's elliptical, there's no one distance. This formula gives the semi-major axis a , which will be the radius in the case of a circular orbit.) a = ...

There's a thread somewhere on the board where some clever whippersnapper took a Mercator flat map and mapped it using a graphics program onto a sphere. This is probably better than having a physical globe, since you can more easily export views of it; but it does mean you have to draw the planet in...

I suppose no-one on Almea has proposed the theory of continental drift yet, though? Or have they? Maybe the Ilii?

There's something my browser dislikes about the second page. It's displaying the whole thing in an obnoxious all-caps font, which resembles the display on one of those flat-panel displays from the later Star Trek series, or maybe the credits to Battlestar Galactica. This is a bug is my browser, whic...

So Haleza Grise wrote:In an effort to have more non-IE tidbits . . .

Australian languages generally have something like double-case agreement in some constructions - there's a technical term for it, but i can't find the entry in my linguistics dictionary where I first saw it.

Suffixaufnahme?

keda ziunte mygu the ox in the house keda ziunte te mygu the ox that's in the house I'm not sure I understand the distinction - I don't understand any semantic difference in the English versions, at least. Let's say you have the sentence "Kick the ox in the house". Ignoring the possibility of "in" ...

Your information is out of date, I'm afraid! It used to be maintained that the Aztec system was limited, but progress in decipherment has been explosive in the last couple of decades. And the Maya decipherment was directly linked to reconstructions of proto-Maya. A good introduction to all this is ...

they have written records going back 15,000 years. Did they invent a featural system entirely on their own, or did the script evolve gradually? Given that they are elcari, it wouldn't surprise me if the script was created pretty much ex nihilo. Maybe Khemthu-Nor taught them that, too. I don't know ...

Butsuri, I got the Japanese example from Anna Wierzbicka, but she got it from R. Miller. I think I must have got it from Miller - I don't remember the author of the book I think I read it in, but I know I haven't read Wierzbicka (although I intend to, at some point). Searching, there's a book by Mi...

I've seen that Japanese example before. What book is it from?

Does anyone know if there are any more constructed worlds out there on the web that are of the scale of Almea? I've looked and not been able to find one quite like it. There's M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel which, while not as detailed as Almea in every respect, is pretty well realized. It has some detail...

Elkar?l is the language of the elcari of the Elkarin Mountains west of Eretald. It is the best-known non-human language of Erel?e. What do you mean by "best known"? What humans would actually take the time to learn this rough, Klingon-sounding language, and who would actually take the time to write...

Okay, here are a couple of things which look like errors, or maybe I just don't understand. To indicate movement, two prepositional phrases can be adjoined, source then destination: put q?l-ggud tul-geth `walk from inside the forest to the top of the mountain'. If it's desired to give only the desti...

This is a marvellously inhuman language. The action/purpose duality I like particularly. I look forward to seeing the script.

Staying with the perfective - if you look here , it seems to me that the Kebreni perfective is more of a perfect than a perfective aspect (it's similar to the English "to have verb ed" but uncoupled from tense, yes?). Describing this kind of aspect is certainly an attested use of the word "perfecti...

First of all, the counters. Some of you might know this, for those who don't: all Chinese nouns are uncountable. Yes, that's right. To count air in English, you need to measure it by liters or something, you can't say "two airs". This applies for all Chinese nouns: Wow. I knew about counters becaus...

A few more points on the Kebreni online grammar and lexicon: on the formation of the subordinating form: The subordinating form is used when there is another verb in the sentence. It's formed by moving the final vowel of the verb before the final consonant and adding -te. A labial stop becomes denta...

This is great information to have, and I think I do understand what he means. "Gu(li)" seems to be a separator between two concepts, to show that they're not to be seen all as one. Blue+green, not bluegreen. It also seems that Newari explicitly marks several degrees of oneness between two concepts....

Ah, I've been trying to construct a tree diagram of Kebreni verb conjugation, and it looks like the grammar and the conjugation utility appear to disagree over whether there is, in principle , such a thing as a polite subordinate form. ... I told Philip that a polite subordinate form didn't really ...

Ah, I've been trying to construct a tree diagram of Kebreni verb conjugation, and it looks like the grammar and the conjugation utility appear to disagree over whether there is, in principle , such a thing as a polite subordinate form. "polite" and "subordinate" are mutually exclusive, so I put them...

Ah. Compounding. There's a bit in the paper I linked to above which, while I don't completely understand it, appears to be talking about the same type of distinction (in Newari): It turns out, not surprisingly, to be impossible to specify in formal terms the precise conditions under which gu(li)-ser...

(or should it be iceriri Kebri ? Or possibly Kebri yceryru ? Assuming the volitional can even be used that way.) Assuming you mean "I (or someone) want to know Kebri", that's correct... at least, that's what Philip's conjugation utility says. Good... is there any way to reflect the distinction betw...

Anyway, yeah, Kebri is a rather interesting place. Geographically and militarily it's similar to England, religiously it's like Japan, Geographically not unlike Japan either, as they're all islands off the edge of a large landmass. But since Kebri's in the southern hemisphere, it's closer to the eq...

Well, then I'm not sure that I understand. Possibly I'm simply being dense - I don't really understand intellectually what the perfect means in English, and I've been using that all my life. [edit: changed "perfective" to "perfect". English doesn't have a specifically perfective aspect, unless you c...

Ah - I think maybe I see now. It's something like the difference between: The house which is red and The house (which is red) In the first, the particular house is specified by the relative clause; in the second, which house is being talked about is already apparent. English sentences like this are ...