zompist bboard

My father is from Michigan, and thus is a Detroit Lions supporter. I think this contributed to my zero interest in American sports. I can understand that. My father is a Giants fan, which isn't much better - mostly because they can play well sometime but still manage to lose to bad teams - I just n...

So, I decided to actually look at the code for the first time in weeks and fixed that bug, so you can legally write unconditioned rules with or without a "/ _" If I have the time or energy, I'll see if I can continue working on getting negatives in the code. I refactored the state-machine code to al...

It's called 100-yard rugby, or super-rugby, or "why are the buffalo bills such a bad team?"

Wrong, Torco: the core gameplay mechanic is bureaucratic tedium

I haven't really had time to type anything up or go over the data in great detail, but I'll just propose a question, and hopefully can look into things this weekend.

NEC gender/class markers kind of look like NWC pronouns/subject markers. Coincidence?

Also, somehow the cushions and dress and colours make me think of the late 1970ies...[/quote]
The orange (light, burnt sienna) couch contributes to that. I'm going for a Retro/Ottoman-harem look to my decor.

Torco, you may proceed.

For the weekend, you say?

I have mentioned this script here several times, but now I have an image of the alphabet chart to show you (I admit, poor quality). The script is written from bottom to top. The Elvish tradition ascribes it to a cultural heroine, which may be the truth as featural alphabets are usually developed by...

Just curious, will you ever be open sourcing this? I'd love to be able to play around with this a bit. At some point relatively soon, yes. It has always been my intention to provide open-source tools when I came up with idea of the Haedus* group. At the moment though, the SCA code shares a Maven mo...

Another specific indication that *o might not have been rounded is the de-labialization of the velars *kʷ *gʷʰ *gʷ only occurs with *u and not *o.

Despite this, I did have *o affect the labiovelars in Kuma-Koban, but it didn't sit completely right with me, and I may have to go back on this.

As all of you probably expected, any hope that Octaviano had reformed have turned out to be premature. Instead, he posted this gem: In my opinion, SETI is a complete waste of time. The main evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our planet lies in our own DNA. I think Homo sapiens is the resu...

In the mood for a little tech support? I'm trying to run a few changes, and I'm getting an error: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0 at org.haedusfc.soundchnage.commands.Condition.<init><Condition.java:49> at org.haedusfc.soundchange.commands.Rule.<init><Rule.jav...

Nikolayev & Starostin, A North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary (aka NCED): Preface This paper's complete lack of any comparative grammar was one of the things that convinced me that I was interested in NEC/NWC historical linguistics. On that subject though, I don't think I've really seen any lite...

Not to imply that take seriously the claim that the East and West Caucasian families are related, but they ought to be considered together, side-by-side due to their enduring proximity. Very little reliable historical and comparative work seems to be available (least of all in English), but hopefull...

Also, I'm considering getting as many papers together as possible and starting a North Caucasian thread. Please, DO! That would be most awesome. Ok will do, I'll get on that when I get home and can scrape together all my files. Also, I'll see if I can find the paper I wrote on patters of direct/obl...

Breaking news from the Substratumlanguages mailing list: Although I named my own blog and Yahoo group as "Vasco-Caucasian", I now consider the Vasco-Caucasian hypothesis to be *dead*, at least in the "naïve" version popularized by Bengtson. Not only most of his comparisons are worthless, but the fe...

How can it be Caucasoid? Is there any evidence of rounding and palatalization on non-velar consonants? Are those features of Caucasic languages? I'd have picked out pharyngeal consonants and pharyngealization. But that's kind of irrelevant - we really have no evidence for what NWC or NEC languages ...

What are the main objections to Szemerényi's reconstruction of PIE with one laryngeal /h/, five full vowels, and voiceless aspirates? IIRC: For the laryngeals and vowels, he can only do this because he basically handwaves a bunch of initial vowels in Greek as prothetic. I think a similar thing is t...

Wasn't it *g-series reanalyzed as ejectives? Yeah, my brain didn't work. Yes. And I don't think the PIE stops ever were all voiceless. Why should they? They aren't in the Caucasian languages. The *Dh set has voiced reflexes everywhere except Greek and Tocharian. But reinterpreting the "palatovelars...

Rather, I assume that what similarities there are between PIE and Caucasian languages are due to contact. But as I haven't seen what Colarusso wrote about this matter, I cannot judge his evidence. Yeah, contact seems WAY more plausible. I think I have a PDF of it somewhere, or at least I should be ...

Incidentally, has anybody managed to read the paper in which Colarusso argues that IE and NWC languages are descended from a common ancestor ? I have read this, though it's been a while. One issue I have is how much it relies on a reconstruction of proto-NWC that I don't have (and probably doesn't ...

Tropylium wrote: The guy is proposing that there was only one laryngeal, no laryngeal coloring, the stop system comprised only *p *t *k, etc.

Well that's ... special. I mean, a sufficiently sensible explanation would be interesting, but I kind of doubt he's going to be able to justify all of the proposals.

I recently started playing EVE, and am probably spending too much time just trading good and mining. Some people say that gameplay is like using spreadsheets, but I've been known to enjoy that. I also started playing Kerbal Space Program again now that the research mechanics are implemented, which h...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:The p.t. of 'hang [a man]' is 'hanged hung'

Unfortunately, this is not often the case