zompist bboard

Everybody who has suddenly become very concerned about religious freedom , what about these cases? -- a Muslim group wishes to build a mosque in your neighborhood -- a Muslim group wishes to build a mosque in the US near the NY World Trade Center -- a Muslim wishes to speak Arabic in a public place...

Dude, genital mutilation is wrong. It's not oppressive Western colonialism to say it's wrong. This is not a controversial issue. And it's not because of some nebulous determination of who the "bad guys" are. Glad to see that we agree that genital mutilation is wrong. But why on earth is that not at...

That sound sample doesn't sound at all like a (normal) dental click to me. Like I said earlier, it might be an egressive click, or it might be ejective-- v. hard to tell from a recording.

Might be an egressive click. But without sound recordings or a better articulatory description we can't say.

Update: I haven't looked at how well-seeded the torrent file is in months, but in case anyone doesn't want to deal with torrents, Grammar Pile 3.0 is on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9QDHej9UGAdcDhWVEllMzJBSEk We haven't really worked much on expanding it much since July, bu...

I'm not saying that there was no migration direct from Beringia, just that not all of the migrating groups need have come via that route specifically at the time. migrants along such a route would also probably have been very similar to the inhabitants of Beringia genetically as well, as there woul...

"Possible" sure, but it seems odd to suggest that people didn't use the incredibly-conspicuous land bridge when the genetic dates for their departure and subsequent divergence match so well the known dates for the appearance and subsequent disappearance of said land bridge, don't you think? If it wa...

Life words will often be related to breath words because breath is the most obvious sign of life; ghost words may also be related to breath words because it's common to see breezes both as breath and as the work of spirits. One reason I ask is because I think I remember-- but am not sure-- reading ...

Just how widespread in languages/cultures is it to associate spirit or life force with breath or wind? The only example I know of off-hand outside of the Semitic and Indo-European languages is Xhosa umoya "wind; spirit", but for all I know that could've been adopted from the Dutch. Anyone know of la...

(I also posted this in the Random Thread a while ago I think, but...)

The Brows Held High episode on Klingon Hamlet does a surprisingly good job of covering Klingon, Marc Okrand, and conlangs in general. He's not quite part of "mainstream media", but he is Internet Famous.

Insane is kinda-sorta a subcategory of mentally ill. Charles Manson is insane. Hannibal Lecter is insane. David Icke is insane (or a conman). If you object to calling those three people "insane" because you think it in some strange way is harmful to people who don't really resemble them at all, tho...

I spend an awful amount of my free time on the internet watching or listening to debates. Moderated debates, unmoderated debates, debates where the audience is polled; debates about religion, about politics, about science, about social policy, about whether The Force Awakens is just a retread of A N...

Kinda a shot in the dark here: have you considered looking into Eastern religion/spirituality and meditation? There are sources around about the more purely psychological aspects of practicing it, if you're not into religion or are into some other religion and don't want to actually start believing ...

I just did a Search. The last time someone called someone else stupid on this board was December 20th. The perpetrator was thetha. The recipient was Pole, the.

inb4 the same people are rude and condescending in response to that comment. On the flip side, I also don't have a clue why k#y made that post. The "rude and condescending" people were me and Travisb not believing in the American Languages Are Conlangs Invented By Basque Monks Hypothesis in the Na-...

a) Yes , it is . Oh for goodness' sake. :roll: Biting retort, Vijay. We're all very impressed. b) That still requires that a segment of a population adopt a conlang/ritual language/whatever and then diverge into its own language family, which is also completely unattested in the known history of hu...

The phenomenon is completely unheard of: No population has ever abandoned their previous language and adopted a new one invented from whole cloth. The comparison to sign languages is not valid: deaf people did not all abandon a previous, perfectly-functioning sign language and start speaking in a n...

I kind of think multiple language families originally developing from ritual/avoidance/other context-specific constructed languages is a less parsimonious explanation than them developing from existing full languages Why? Positing a phenomenon that is completely unheard of and implausible, occurrin...

So you guys' answer to language families not being demonstrably related-- when their point of common origin would, according to nonlinguistic evidence, be further in the past than is accessible by the comparative method-- is "Maybe they all independently decided to start speaking conlangs".

8Deer wrote:First, a population of less than "a few tens of thousands" hunter gatherers could potentially speak several languages, even languages of different families.

While isolated in glacier-bound Beringia for 5,000 years?

Presumably languages can coexist peacefully even if their speakers don't. Otherwise you'd never get New Guinea.

Is that a problem? White elephant, elephant in the room, whale of a tale, to parrot sth., head in the sand ostrich, 80 pound gorilla, the lion's share, straw that broke the camel's back, etc. are all named for animals not found in the British Isles.

oops

The Chukotko-Kamchatkans managed to expand to cover a large area despite being hunter-gatherers - the reindeer were only introduced later, from the Yukaghir, and only adopted by some groups. Iirc Chuckchi legends frame the Yukaghir as the murderous invading bastards taking their lands from the west...

The term suffixhäufung (it seems odd to capitalize it in English) Agreed. I further move that we pronounce both words with /sʌfɪks/- rather than /zufɪks/-. In another publication, Plank (the editor of the book on suffixaufnahme) uses "surdéclinaison" in quotes for the Basque hypostatis or inflected...