zompist bboard

2) Only the right half of Papua New Guinea is part of Australia. I'm not sure if this one is too egregious. You're referring to the right half of the island of New Guinea , which is part of the country of Papua New Guinea (here grouped with "Oceania"). The left part of the island of New Guinea is p...

宋捷 - 我会想起你 Finally, I've found a song in Mandarin that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out at how fake it sounds/is. Even though they cut off half the song in this vid (you can tell by the fact that it sounds like there's supposed to be more but then the video cuts off), but actually it just ...

hæmənɛks ~ ham and eggs in English, but nothing at all in the Nijmegen dialect of Dutch. So ... why is that funny? Or do you mean it means 'nothing at all'. I would guess the German cognates would be "haben wir nichts", which can also get reduced to something like "hammer nix" in some dialects whic...

English itself has a richer tongue-twister potential than we normally make use of. Consider the classic "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" - repeating a basic stop over and over? Is that really the best English can offer? Hardly: there are some very nice fricative-confusion tongue-twist...

This makes me really want to try one for Chinese characters like the guy earlier in the thread, but I don't know what the individual words mean because of my lack of Latin knowledge.

The whole 堡 thing reminds me also of 圣 sheng4 which means 'holy, sacred' and is used for transliteration of 'Saint' and 'San(ta)'. It almost sounds similar, too.

Edit- so I'm an idiot and didn't finish reading lb's post before posting this, ha...

What about Hungary? Does it contain a character for Hun, or is that just pinyin? Huh interesting. The first character of Hungary is 匈, and all my dictionaries say is that it's an archaic version of the character 胸 which means 'chest, breast' and is pronounced xiong1 . The interesting thing is that ...

Speaking of poetic and/or quirky Chinese literal readings, can anyone validate this map ? Yes, except they got Sweden and Switzerland (瑞典 rui4 dian3 'auspicious scholarship' and 瑞士 rui4 shi4 'auspicious soldier') confused and they got lazy in some of the "translations". By that I mean: * There's so...

preposition: 前置詞 zenchishi "word placed in front" (incidentally these don't exist in Japanese) I don't know how Japanese handles adpositions, but in Mandarin many words that fulfill the same role as prepositions in English are actually verbs (or nouns in cases of locatives like at, on, in, between,...

It was a thread in ephemera, that's why you couldn't find it

Well you got 2/3 right, WeepigElf! The Chinese word for movie is indeed 电影 which literally means "electric shadow"

On the topic of "electric" though, I have always liked the way the Chinese come up with new terms of things involving electricity, mostly 电影 (as previously mentioned), 电脑 ("computer" but literally "electric brain"), 电池 ("battery" but literally "electric pool") and 电话 ("telephone" but literally "elec...

Same in Chinese, which may possibly have borrowed calqued it? I'm just making stuff up now so ignore that part. But it really does mean "name word" (名词 for those interested.) Japanese uses the exact same word, 名詞 meishi . míngcí in Mandarin While we're at it, here's the rest of the traditional part...

Same in Chinese, which may possibly have borrowed calqued it? I'm just making stuff up now so ignore that part. But it really does mean "name word" (名词 for those interested.)

Hon is also the counter for long things, which I guess comes from its origin as scrolls. Whoa, that's interesting, 本 is the measure word for books (of all kinds), 条 is the measure word for long (skinny) things in Mandarin. The Mandarin word for book is 书 shu1 , which is the simplified form of 書. Ac...

Basics Username: Chibi Name: my real name is Eric, I've probably given my last name here before but no need for that now Birthplace: New York Place of residence: Currently have no permanent address, but technically my home is in Connecticut Occupation: as of 2 weeks ago, traveler (that counts right...

Another American here, born just outside of New York City (the town that inspired where Jay Gatsby lived, actually), lived in NYC for the first 4 years of my life and then grew up in SW Connecticut until college, which I attended in Rochester, NY. I've lived in Beijing for the past year, and also sp...

Is this a thing? I'm not sure if I recall ever seeing something like this before, and like din I find it to sound extremely odd. Do you have some examples from articles or papers you are referring to? (Edit- I realize that's a dumb question since you provided some in the OP). Thinking about it more,...

In the spirit of Mid-Autumn Festival: 王菲 但愿人长久

Guailo (Cantonese) used to be pretty strong, but I don't know if it still is. 老外 (laowai) used to be kind of offensive in Mandarin, but it's kind of losing its edge now too I think (but it's still not a preferred term for foreigners, and pretty much on the decline). On the other hand, I did see a v...

Try imgur.com You don't even need an account to upload pics. That's where I uploaded mine from a few posts back. edit: And also a question for the OP: is this map a map of the whole conworld, or just one section of it? So if I was to create a country near the southeastern edge of the map, it would t...

"Piece" seems hard to apply to more modern styles of music, e.g. "Did you hear that new piece by Daft Punk?" I guess people tend to say "track" in that case. Yeah, piece to me implies orchestral, usually from the classical (in the broad sense) era, but can apply to soundtracks too (John Williams, f...

Linguifex wrote:influence reached their maximum extent about a century ago; ever since they have been in decline, with the neighboring Kingdom of Gaznia a frequent belligerent.

Heh, is that a reference to that little bit of Gaznia that sticks up long the eastern coast?

Well I couldn't add an attachment (same quota issues) so sorry for the huge image on this page too...(also I'm terrible at conworlding other than having an interest in maps, so sorry for the awful country description) The Kingdom of Gaznia has one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world, with...