zompist bboard

That's true, of course. But from a practical standpoint, tubers and seeds have a lot in common: in both cases you need to harvest or collect plant parts in the fall, store them properly in the winter, and re-plant them in the spring.

In gardening, "perennial" is often construed not in the botanical sense of the plant's nature, but in the contextual sense of how it's best to treat it in your garden. For instance there's an old trivia question that floats around the internet: "what are the only two garden vegetables that are peren...

To be clear, I can use "dice" as both singular and plural as well. Sometimes. If I were rolling one, I would certainly say I was "rolling dice". But I don't think I can quite bring myself to use singular determiners or verbs with it; *This dice is purple sounds horrible. However this could be due to...

Went to a game night yesterday evening and everyone there but me (including the real gamer geeks) used dice as the singular of dice . the 40s called they want their innovation back Does anyone in real life say 'die' as the singular except prescriptivists who want something to correct other people o...

I certainly don't have it. In English as I know it, "by" requires the third party to be a location - that is, it means you are telling someone to go stand next to the third party and then think about you.

I have to agree with Goatface. You said "the news stories", not "news stories", which makes it seem like you thought his link was a news story, since there were no other "stories" being discussed. That's one possible reading, but he may instead have meant "the news stories (on this topic that have ...

Though I can't speak to the details of the study, it is not implausible that such a study might be able to rule out all of the kinds of non-language that could be expected to matter. It would be nice to see some commentary about this from someone who knows more about the topic than we do and doesn't...

subject assignment - rarely ergative verb agreement - occasionally ergative case marking - often ergative but still mostly accusative noun incorporation - always ergative Neat, but a little confusing, as I believe your descriptors are universal, rather than relative to the next rung down. That is, ...

Also, I wouldn't be so sure of that "always" on noun incorporation, in light of such English terms as employee-run, moth-eaten . That was silly of me - what I should have said was "never accusative". Obviously subject incorporation is possible. There just aren't any languages where subjects but not...

But as for why it may be that there are no languages with overt ergativity and accusative subject agreement, my guess right now is that ergativity forms a spectrum across languages. Ergative syntax is very close to the extreme end, where you find a language like Avar with ergativity in both morphol...

Split ergativity is always interesting, yes. I have not previously heard the term "pivot" used that way, though; usually I see "pivot" used as short for the syntactic pivot . Aside from that, what you've given is the classic description - that "split ergativity" involves a split based on either of t...

I am rather fond of the name of the linguist Balthasar Bickel, who sounds like he just escaped from a Harry Potter book. Were his brothers Gaspar and Melchior, by any chance? Incidentally, one of the best names I've ever encountered on a real person belongs to a ZBBer, but I'm not about to name a b...

One question I have that I do not see explicitly answered: How does the proportion of ejective languages near high elevations compare to the proportion of all languages near high elevations? It says 87% of languages with ejectives are near a high-elevation region, but if someone told me 87% of all l...

...Found it. That was fast. It turns out I'd misremembered the book; what I actually have is the sequel, which is called Even More Remarkable Names . At any rate: - Comfort and Satisfy Bottom (twin sisters) - Anil G. Shitole - Pupo Shytti, former vice president of Albania ...but enough of the bathro...

Somewhere I have a book called Remarkable Names of Real People (by John Train), with, going by memory here, such entries as: - The aforementioned Nicholas blah-blah Barebones - Immaculate Conception Finkelstein - Lotta Crap, whose father owns the Crap Bakery - Abderazzaq S. Abdulhafafeeth - Ophelia ...

Speaking as a moderator: Zontas, not cool. If you're going to say something that nasty you seriously need to know the person well enough to correctly judge that they're not likely to be bothered by it. That's a social skill, and on this board you need your social skills. It's in the house rules, al...

I can write with quality, but not in quantity. This does reflect a certain type of nonfluency on my part, but rather than merely being bad, it lies in the fact that I'm pathologically dissatisfied with everything I write and constantly edit and re-edit and re-re-re-re-edit, sometimes taking ten minu...

It certainly less absurd with the vest and bowtie than it is with a plain white t-shirt. Clearly better. You appear to be only one pocketwatch and one cigar short of having mastered the look.

Don't eat the newcomers. It's in the house rules and everything. Not to mention the argument is utterly vacant. If I really must do this, then: "observations" become "evidence" when you are weighing them for how well they support a hypothesis; otherwise they are merely observations. You make observ...

Anguipes wrote:If this thread could be moved to C&C, that would be great

Ask, and thou shalt receive.

Sal, you missed "copse".

Mmm, karst.

Also: lien.


You came up with "creche" yesterday, did you forget to post?

A cousin of mine has colorectal cancer. 2 - 6 months to live. This is the cousin who, 15+ years back, started a company to make and sell an invention his friend came up with, and who solicited family members for investment and got it. A total somewhere around $60k, as best they could figure later. T...

I've come across two pretty good examples. The first one is Elkarîl, the other is Fith . I've got a side project myself, where syntax would rely on descriptive phrases ordered according to causation, though I'm still unconvinced by the results. Ah, Fith is cool. Thanks! And I'd forgotten about Elka...