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Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Me too. It manages to be both one of the best and one of the buggiest games ever. I think I like the Empire, but I might pick the rebels first only so that I can play the game again and do the Empire thing. Unless it's possible to do both, but I suspect not. I'm ...

I'm trying to think of examples in Swedish. Here's something vaguely similar: fråga (v) = "ask" fråga (n) = "question" ställa en fråga = "pose (ask) a question" frågeställning = "question-posing", i.e. "question" Some would argue that there is a tiny difference in usage, but often it's just a bureau...

I'm working on a research project about automatic author identification. There's a program that looks at a great number of texts by known authors, and then uses machine learning to guess who has written other texts. There are all sorts of features the program can look at in the texts, but the ones c...

barely anyone was playing them in 1995 either! Adjusted for inflation, that's about 4 times more money in 2007 than in 1995. Four times less is hardly "barely anyone". Also, each person who does play them is likely to play a larger number of games now than before. The increase in number of games pe...

My dad works in the food industry. My granddad was a mechanic. I'm a computer scientist and physicist, but that hardly matters, as I was seven at the time. The only one I can think of who fits your description is my other granddad - he's was a chemist and a CEO - but he's also the only one I can thi...

In 1991? I hardly know anyone who didn't have a computer in 1991.

Even my granddad had a computer by the mid-eighties. He had the original DOS versions of Pacman (from 1983), Tetris, Space Invaders, and a remarkably advanced golf game known as Golf. On a machine with no hard drive.

the modern era has sadly focused on appearance at the expense of all else. With Minecraft and similar indie games, though, we're starting to see a backlash... True; it's nice to see inventive game concepts and not just graphics updates. But it's also kind of sad that there is a trend towards simple...

My favourite is Super Mario World. It's like they were finally realising that they were designing a console game, not an arcade game. (I don't know, maybe there's an arcade machine version too, but that's hardly the main title.) For example, you can go back and play a level again. But they still hav...

I've been playing a lot of open source games lately. I want to recommend 0 AD, which is still in development but playable. They're looking for people to spread the word and to help out, and it looks like it's going to be really great. I've just discovered OpenArena, the open source clone of Quake 3....

Oh, sure, if you want to bust out "it's not the same word it just happens to look identical", then you can show that every language is Swedish! Both ways of analysing it could be correct. There are after all many cases where a word separates into two different but related meanings, and it's hard to...

It seems to me that English works basically the same way as Swedish (not unexpectedly, since they're closely related). If a transitive verb is given only one argument, it is assumed to be the agent, so if you want the patient, you have to either use the passive or another verb. Sometimes there is an...

I write a lot of music in various styles. Lately I've ended up playing with a folk music band, so I wrote some folk music for them. Previously I've played with a jazz band, so then I made some jazz. When I'm not writing for anyone in particular, I make all sorts, often quasi-classical or rockish, us...

There will always be some sort of semantic categories, of course; some words represent actions, and some represent objects. (And some are in between; "alive"/"live", for example, can just as easily be a verb or an adjective.) But treating them as the same lexical category is quite possible. We can t...

Isn't that kind of what I said? Or am I misunderstanding you somehow?

Yes, it depends on what you're trying to do - make them as good as possible, or as good as is realistic.

Yeah, they look really nice. Some of them don't really follow the classic good-flag-guidelines - looking at the Abervon one, for example, yellow against white is generally not recommended, and yellow against other shade of yellow would be a big no-no. Nonetheless, it looks like a flag one could easi...

linguoboy wrote:The Dutch closest to England were the Netherlanders, so it's not surprising that the meaning of the term narrowed until it applied only to them.

I've heard that they were at war, and the English called them "Dutch" as an insult.

Merijn: Good point. Is this universal? Apart from languages like Japanese, which apparently don't have proper pronouns, is it the norm that you can't use adjectives etc. with pronouns? One might imagine saying "tall he" for "that tall guy", or "you ready" for "those of you who are ready". Come to th...

Astraios wrote:Because of what it can do, i.e. stand in for a nominal phrase.

But surely a nominal phrase can also stand in for a nominal phrase?

Bob Johnson wrote:Or can't: you can't say "the red me" in English

But you can say "the new me".

So how can you tell that something is really a pronoun? In English, I would say, because they have object forms etc., but generally?

According to Wals , Most scholars working on agreement include the control of anaphoric pronouns by their antecedent (the girl ... she ) as part of agreement. If this is accepted, as we do here, then languages in which free pronouns present the only evidence for gender will be counted as having a ge...

That one is quite nice, but I wish it could have gone further in avoiding rare words. I don't have words for "embroidered" or "mite".

In Swedish it is also "girl name".

I would probably go with "former surname".

From what I've seen, drink sizes are considerably smaller in Europe... as are food sizes in general. A "large" drink at a fast food restaurant here in France (and also in Germany) is 500 ml compared to a small being at least 21 oz./620 ml in the US. That sounds pretty big for something small. From ...

I'm not sure what you mean by not sex-based; the German system certainly is. But that's all irrelevant anyway, since neither of those languages distinguish gender only in pronouns. I don't know any Dutch, but in Swedish, there is a he/she distinction which is completely semantic, and independent of ...