zompist bboard

That's what he is taking issue with. Tok Pisin developed from a pidgin, not a conlang. Conlangs and pidgins are fundamentally different, because conlangs are consciously planned and designed before they are put into use, while pidgins are develop from use without planning. Yes... I think you sort o...

Oh, and in English it's Ivory Coast, not Cote d' Ivoire (because most monolingual English speakers don't know how to pronounce that), but that's a forgivable mistake. Hold your horses. The official name in English for purposes of diplomacy, international conferences and any dealings with the Ivoria...

merijn wrote:It's called a portmanteau morpheme.

You learn something new every day

What the hell, man? I made a serious comment and added what I thought would be taken as a lighthearted, not very serious aside at the end of it. I know a lot of people in this forum are extremely fond of correcting people (myself included), but you're going pretty far. Yes, that was mean, now let u...

Doo hmm? and doo-dah yes look like they might be related somehow. Perhaps boo was originally a negative question marker, with doo / boo forming a pair akin to Latin num / nonne , and then supplanted *boo-dah because yes and no sounded too similar. Alternatively, it could be unrelated, like how a ca...

Wikipedia gives use the following: wee-tah-kah-loo-loo: Tell me a joke. wee-tah-kah-wee-loo: Tell me a story. wee-tee-kah-wah-tee: Sing me a song. u-nye-loo-lay-doo?: Do you want to play? u-nye-ay-tay-doo?: Are you hungry? u-nye-boh-doo?: How are you? u-nye-way-loh-nee-way: Go to sleep now. u-nye-no...

I don't think Welsh is a particularly attractive languages. (Burly, rugby-playing, South Wales) Welsh men speaking English is pretty hawt, though. Got a video link? A video link to Welsh men? Err... spend and afternoon watching Torchwood and Ianto Jones. Actually, most of Torchwood is cacky crap bu...

Haha, yes, I remember... Mine was called Cloud (but in Furbish).

When mine "died" it burped for about a minute then stopped still, with its eyes half-open. Low-running batteries are a funny thing.

French sounds like the language of savages. Language nerds are, well, nerds, and generally either male or rather masculine. The people who spread the line about French being sexy are generally either teenage girls or people thinking about what teenage girls would like, and teenage girls don't have ...

Tieđđá wrote:You can't speak German without sounding angry!

Have a German read you a children's book. Something rhythmical. It's like syrup on the soul.

You could use it for tense. She like me = Present Like she me = Past She me like = Future and how pray would one distinguish present and future in intransitive sentences Adverbs would do the trick. Today, we frolic! Tomorrow, we frolic! As Chibi said, ambiguity is not exactly uncommon in natural la...

You could use it for tense. She like me = Present Like she me = Past She me like = Future Or negation, or questions, or mood or emphasis any number of verby business. She like me = neutral Like she me = she really likes me She me like = she likes me Alternatively, you could use it to separate adject...

Well, the tarp has gone down to kill off a patch of rocket and weeds ready for next spring. The mulchy patch has hardly any weeds! Definitely going to get mah mulch on again next year.

I borrowed Fallout: New Vegas off my brother. I didn't play Fallout 3, but 1 and 2 were close to my heart for many years. It's very... Fallouty, complete with the "travel for hours across locations that are trying to kill you and not really knowing where to go or how to go there". But, it's still pr...

The National Archives site (of the UK) has a fairly decent looking guide to medieval Latin, which is what lots of our older records were written in, made by our government, no less. A thousand years of bureaucracy is a horrid thing to waste. At the History Centre near us, there was a day course in ...

I think this might be a better question for Yahoo Answers; it's unlikely many of us know enough about media studies to give any helpful advice. You haven't given us any clues as to what kind of thing you're looking for. You could look for persuasive language, jargon, sentence length, gendered use of...

Re: OP I call it an ice-cream cone. Also a "99er", since it cost just 99p when I were a young lad. Ah yes, those were the days, going for a day up windy and cold Ditchling Beacon, then going to the ice-cream van for a 99er. Except I'd have it with a flake. Pissfarts. A 99er has to have a flake. If ...

What is wrong with "they"? How do you pronounce "xir" anyway? If I had to make up a gender neutral pronoun it would be "e" /i/. Not sure what the accusative form would be - maybe the same? "They" has an uneasiness for some people because it can be seen as impersonal, and "he" has had a "he or she" ...

What non-existent verbs are you talking? Shampoo seems to be usable as a verb, as in, "I shampoo my hair and I soap up my body." Camp is not a common verb, but you go camping, we're heading up to the woods to camp (cf., to fish, to drink, etc.) "He camps in the backyard" is a perfectively valid sta...

Tomatoes that have at least begun to turn color already when picked, will indeed ripen if left in a brown paper bag. We do this every year. Check them daily and throw out any that have any sign of squishiness or mold, and otherwise leave the bag tightly closed. You're trying to hold in the natural ...

1) Chutney. 2) Fry them and serve them to your lesbian lover at the Whistle Stop Café. 3) Pickle them. 4) Salsa verde. 5) Allow them to rot slightly before hurling them at people you dislike. 6) Compost. I'm going to attempt a green tomato crumble tonight adapting the "Creole-style Aubergine" recip...

I have a couple of kilos of green tomatoes that are not going to ripen.

Any suggestions?

Laisser Tomber Les Filles by April March again and again and again.

That's a reasonable definition. I think I've seen it before, too. Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages. So then you have four genders in German, only one of which affects verbal agreement? Or there are ...