zompist bboard

currency traders with dollars buy more yuan, which means American importers buy more Chinese goods See, this is exactly the bit I don't understand. I'm massively thick w/r/t economics anyway, but I still don't get it: why do such financial speculations encourage imports? It's not as if currency tra...

I'm currently reading Stiglitz, "Globalization and Its Discontents". I find it vaguely interesting, although I know nothing about economics so I don't get around 50% of what he's writing about (e.g. what is the link between a currency being overvalued and drops in domestic production/rises in import...

I dreamt that I was looking at myself , around 12 years old, sitting on a skibus in skiing gear, and that some of my fellow schoolkids were teasing me. (Everyone was on the skiing trip.) I also remember seeing various pictures of myself as a child during the dream, although I have no idea why the li...

Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languag...

What? I was just genuinely interested in how things stand. Maybe I should have framed it as I suspect there is some way of degradation or expressions of frustration through words , rather than simply "I suspect there are swearwords". Or equivalents. I was just suspicious of a very shaky ethnographic...

What might be considered a swear word really depends on the context. Of course! Well, maybe I didn't make it clearly enough in my original post, but the basic idea touted by the guy I'm reading (namely, that there are no means of verbal degradation in Japanese because the Japanese physically beat u...

So yes Japan has swear words, but what is considered a swear word in Japan and how often they are used are different than most languages. Yeah, that's exactly what I "suspected" (it's self-evident for any reasonable person really...) :) I mean, it's kind of ironic when the guy I'm reading at the mo...

In the course of doing my undergraduate dissertation, I've come across a Slovene writer who claims that, in cultures such as the Japanese one where it is customary to channel your anger directly at images of people you hate, swearwords do not exist at all . Apart from the fact that most Slovene writ...

EB: haha.

gsandi: Yes - thanks! It seemed strange to me because I only ever heard of fricatization of voiced stops (as in Modern Greek and Spanish), but not of complete ellision. And I should have thought of août, really

Is this a widespread phonetic process? I'm asking because it seems to be happening quite a lot in certain Slovene speech styles, e.g. da bom > daum [da.Om] or [daO_^m] or [dau_^m] (ellision of b) pogledal > pogleu [po"gle.u[/i] (ellision of d) What seems strange is that it's limited to /b d/. It als...

I heard both ismuk and ismuka/i used in my MSA class. IME, nobody would ever say -uka/-uki in MSA. Most of our professors and tutors said it sounds extremely stilted, as does, actually, pronouncing most case endings outside the context of initial alif swallowing, etc. Kudos for the lessons! :D I re...

Viktor77 wrote: From my experience living with a Slovene, it's vowel reduction.

Oh, and that.

dab ti loh reku [dap ti lOx reku] from da bi ti lahko rekel [da bi ti lax"ko rek@u_^], etc. (People from Gorenjska, ie. Kranj and further north/west, have even crazier reductions.)

For English, definitely phrasal verbs... and unpredictable pronunciations. Many of my Slovene friends also have problems with aspects and articles, although I've never had problems with this myself (probably due to my excessive mileage in idiomatic usage through reading). And German word order is ea...

participle: šel And even iti and šel [S@u_^] actually seem to be related IIRC. I thought - read somewhere I believe - that *šьdlъ was related to *xoditi (though I don't grasp the ablaut going on here fully, ь?), which seems unrelated to *jьti at the PIE level. Ahhh, it was hoditi , probably... the ...

Bah, I can't think of any really interesting ones. The best one I can come up with is the Slovene "to go": infinitive: iti 1st person singular masculine present: grem participle: šel And even iti and šel [S@u_^] actually seem to be related IIRC. človek [tSlOv@k] (sg.) - ljudje [ljud"je] (pl.) for "h...

TheGoatMan wrote: Oil spills aren't very responsive to the subtle use of rhetoric. If they were, it would have stopped itself against its own self-interest.

[SIC]

OT: Oh come on, no more obscure words you can think of?

hezketl - currency bead. There are no coins in the conworld of Aptaye - most market transactions are done in a town market where beads are distributed to facilitate trading, so the currency is not a commodity in and of itself . eye Underlined: Topic for another thread. Marx and Smith are turning in...

cangára [kanga:ra] repeated, occurring once again

next: pillar

lungún [lungu:n] deep; depth; down below

Next: stunning (as in stunningly clever, or beautiful)

Guitarplayer wrote:Lo and behold, it's Skomakar'n without all his silly emo dress-up.

Except for the eyeliner. The eyeliner has to stay. Even in the shower.

linguoboy wrote: Is the English construction really transitive? Him can be an indirect object as well as a direct one. If it's an oblique object, then it's the equivalent of the Slovene dative.

As in "I gave him the book"? That would make sense actually.

In English you can say ( say , AFAIK, might not be acceptable for all in formal variants): I stared him in the forehead (for I stared at his forehead ) I looked him in the eye is perhaps more common, but structurally equal, since both look and stare are both intransitive verbs. In Slovene, you can s...

a place with a policy of ID'ing people who look under 25. this is bullshit and i hate it. it's only the supermarkets that do it and it only changed to 25, from 21, a couple of years ago. in practice they actually use their better judgement anyway. It varies from store to store as well (as far as my...

I had no idea a straightforward photo of me would generate such a response. Bonus points if you can identify the restaurant where it was taken, and a free phoneme to the first person who correctly identifies the type of pizza. It just seems like a normal funghi (or whatever) to me, with cheese and ...