zompist bboard

I was teaching in a high school, that didn't look like any high school I've actually been to. One of my students was making a weird, convoluted experiment involving an alkali metal in front of the school director (a woman). Then everything went wrong, and the ceiling caught fire.

Marble cake?

Currently listening to the soundtrack to Amélie. Bizarrely, I like this soundtrack although I didn't like the movie.

[səlɥi la] if I'm careful, [sɥi la] otherwise.

[kɛlkæ̃], possibly [kekæ̃] when speaking quickly.

I had a very weird dream last night. I was with a group in a bungalow, in the middle of a jungle. There was some sort of war going on. There was a guy who was basically Kenshirô from Fist of the North Star (same looks, same techniques) but with another name. Then we went to our rooms. There were som...

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "/f/ surface only in something like short /æ/". It seems that in Polish, there is some voicing assimilation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology) ) that turns /f/ into /v/ before a voiced consonant such as /g/. This is actually very commo...

I found in a bargain bin an obscure 70's hard rock record : Gospel According to Zeus by Power of Zeus, for only €1.40; I even asked an employee to know if it wasn't a mistake. I had been looking for this record for ages.

My headphones are malfunctioning: the right speaker has no bass frequencies whatsoever. Fortunately, I have another pair of headphones (the ones I use with my computer). Unfortunately, this one has a very short lead, too short to go from my hi-fi system to my bed.

My cousin and her fiancé had their bachelor party yesterday. Both are fans of zombie fiction. And their friends had prepared a cool surprise: a real-life zombie game! So we were a dozen people dressed up as zombies. The couple had to explore a house they had never been to, equipped with dynamo torch...

The post office guys in my town are idiots . Every time a package is sent to my house, they don't even try to call me on the intercom (the website says "recipient unavailable" even when I was home all day ), and they don't even leave a message as they're supposed to. The last time, I went to the pos...

I'm currently playing Baldur's Gate. The question on my mind is: why did it take me so long to play this game? I had heard about it when it was released, and I had a decent gaming PC, so why didn't I play it at the time? 1999-me would have loved this game.

Thank you for this great series! I've been thinking about getting into classical music for ages, but never really managed to do it... maybe this will help me. We can think they sound pretty enough, to be sure, but we don't really "get" them in the way the original audience would have, because they'r...

Currently listening to N.W.A., which is surprising for someone who never liked hip-hop.

*This is how I would phrase it but it would be best to have a native speaker chime in here. Raises hand. Quand j'étais toujours à l'université, j'avais de l'énergie pour apprendre de s nouvelles langues, mais dernièrement j'en ai oublié presque toutes . Quand on vi t dans un pays où il faut utilise...

Another example: for electric guitarists, a "cocked wah" means a wah-wah pedal that has been turned on and raised half-way (acting as a band-pass filter).

This week in Extreme Word Reduction : I heard myself saying very weird stuff. - "Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait de mes clés ?" (what did I do with my keys?) as [kʃʃe fɛn me kle]. - "Quand ça sera le moment" (when the time comes) as [kz̃ ʁɐl mo mɒ̃] with something like a syllabic nasalized fricative! (which...

I had a neat idea for a hand-made guitar effect, bought some parts... then realized that it can't work as I expected.

I did a 10 km race this morning. But my time was so awful that I won't even mention it.

I realized alarmingly late that the P is actually pronounced in baptist and baptism. I assumed that it was silent, an etymological letter that nobody pronounces, because it's silent in the French cognates baptême and baptiste. I should have know better because, you know, French.

In French, the -ir suffix can go with several colors. White ( blanc/blanchir ), black ( noir/noircir ), yellow ( jaune/jaunir ), red ( rouge/rougir ), blue ( bleu/bleuir ), green ( vert/verdir ), brown ( brun/brunir , although not with the more common marron ), pink ( rose/rosir ). It also works wit...

Moi aussi, je voudrais que j'aie avoir plus de cours des langues étrangères - je pense que je suis doué de l' habileté linguistique et je me gaspille en apprenant les vies des musiciens classiques. Your French is good, but I wanted to point a frequent mistake. In French, after vouloir , we don't us...

We also used barraki which is the Belgian equivalent to un beauf I suppose. Lowerclass people who often dress in tracksuits and act very "lower class." Think chavs in England. Lower-class people who dress in tracksuits? That sounds like the racailles which I mentioned in another post. Beauf is a bi...

I often hear about Basque being a "weird language". But is it really weird? I don't know much about Basque, but some of you certainly do. I mean, the weirdest fact about Basque is that it exists at all: a language isolate in a place where you really wouldn't expect one. But apart from that, what's w...

This is great. You're missing a few though. Again, that's not a complete lexicon of French slang. Which would be the size of a dictionary, because the French have a slang word for everything . Putain de merde is perhaps the most common swear word I heard in Belgium (and among my French colleagues) ...

finlay wrote:Tabarnak!

I said that Canadian French was very different!

finlay wrote:Also I had a kid's French book that literally taught you how to say "fuck you" (Vas te faire foutre or something)

I hadn't thought about Va te faire foutre! I've added it.