zompist bboard

I feel stupid asking this, but what's TM&T? Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. And yeah, what you describe sounds like my experience, too: everybody agrees that Altaic is nonsense and pseudoscience and bunk and nobody believes it anymore... until you read stuff written by people who actually study tho...

Reindeer are not horses... I'm sure they provide more sustenance than foraging, but do they provide any military advantage? Does it have to? I am confused, because to me, you seem to be going back and forth over whether pastoralism's advantage-- the advantage that lets people form into large, spraw...

But only the Dene-Yeniseian were hunter-gatherers! Everyone else has (or are descended from those who had) reindeer herding pastoralism. Why should that not benefit them like goat/sheep pastoralism did the Indo-Aryans & Tocharians and cattle & agriculture did the Bantu? Because if it does (and accor...

Yes, I also have that book-- it's where I initially found mention of "Suffixhäufung". But whether you call what Basque has Suffixhäufung or Suffixaufnahme, my point is that "surdeclinaison" seems to be hardly used in English-language publications.

Honestly I don't know much about reindeer herding, but for discussing language group expansion, the question is whether it allows empires, as horse nomadism does. I don't know much about horse nomadism, but isn't it the prevailing theory nowadays that the Indo-European expansion was driven more by ...

That post is also by the same Christophe guy, who seems to be an engineer and not a professional linguist. Just because he says it doesn't make it true-- and he seems to be the only person saying this! This entire "surdeclinaison" business seems be being pushed by him and no one else. Are we to star...

Can't we just call it suffixaufnahme? That LCC talk is literally the only place I've seen anybody call it "surdeclinaison" in English. Everybody else just uses the German, and I think it's basically a loanword at this point. The Christophe guy seems to be trying to convince everyone else that both t...

The Paleosiberians were hunter-gatherers, fishermen, and reindeer herders . So it's best to look at other areas where hunter-gatherers predominate... the weird thing is single language families taking up whole continents. To get that you have to have agriculture or pastoralism . Your explanation se...

Even without getting into the debate of how pointless or not such definitions are, you can't deny that those are still commonly accepted definitions. In my opinion, they are only "commonly accepted" by people with sloppy thinking. Take the racism example: I am aware that some people wish to tell ot...

Because there are varying definitions for both fascism and racism depending on who you ask. Yeah but that doesn't make them all equally valid. Definitions of "fascism" that only refer to race-centered fascism (as opposed to, say, nationalistic or religious fascism, or just fascism-for-fascism's sak...

Why?

Politics: hard left socialist with a dark, twisted fascist fantasy Knowing you, though, I'd just note that I find "fascist" a bit of a misleading term (not trying to fault you here, just pointing this out for the benefit of anyone who might happen to be curious) since racism is commonly considered ...

The other day I learned "midden" because a book I was reading kept using it and I'd never seen it before. Then literally the very next day I was reading another, completely unrelated book which used it twice.

There's a word for that, isn't there?

There doesn't seem to be any such thing as "Proto-Turkish" anyway, but it seems Proto-Hungarian was indeed in contact with Old Turkic (which included Old Turkish) as the Hungarians were ruled by the Göktürks after the Huns left, and Old Turkic was the language of the Göktürks. What do you mean ther...

It doesn't look blue to me at all. It also doesn't look green either. For this reason I consider cyan to be a basic color term.

Why not just reduce the number of stages by one and have Gufferdk translate straight into English? It's better than having the last translator already know what the original text was, which ruins the entire idea of the game.

Does it not occur to anyone else that having the same person translate from English in the first stage and then back to English in the last stage completely ruins the entire point of this game?

You have this? https://www.dropbox.com/s/587b4yoh41im1 ... 9.pdf?dl=0

Basics Username: Name: Xephyr Personal shit: Not sharing Pets: 1 cat Identity Gender: male Sexuality: straight Relationship: single but thanks for asking Nationality: American Ethnicity: standard ≈5th-generation-immigrant Germanic mongrel Religion: nope Politics: nope Measurements Age: Why the Heig...

Imralu wrote:Whoah, I didn't know that about mountain dew.

http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bvo.asp

Omaha-Ponca?

Also, I'm not sure what you mean about complex contours being unusual with respect to strict CV syllable structure; you mean they don't allow consonant clusters but allow complex contours (presumably the mixed voicing combinations and the contour clicks) which might have developed from them? I mean...

Talking about it in terms of sonority isn't very useful, either, since Khoesan languages are unusual in that area as well. For instance, they allow complex contour-segments that resemble (and probably descend from) consonant clusters in word-initial position despite elsewhere having strict CV syllab...

Khoesan languages are very restricted when it comes to what consonants are allowed where. IIRC none of them allow word-final consonants, and very very few consonants are allowed intervocalically. Initials, however, are often very complex even when talking about non-clicks. So the reason clicks have ...

karst - a type of landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum
tack - to change course by turning a boat's head into and through the wind
jibe - change course by swinging a fore-and-aft sail across a following wind