zompist bboard

Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh by French band Magma. They play a weird mixture of rock, jazz and classical music. And they actually sing in a conlang! Kobaïan is supposed to be the language used on the planet Kobaïa, though it's not a fully featured conlang: there are pieces of vocabulary, but no ful...

I have my record collection on a spreadsheet. Just for fun, I added genre tags to each album. I had some decisions to make, such as what to make of Hendrix, whose music is equal parts blues, hard rock, and psychedelic rock... I went with "psychedelic rock" as the least bad option. For the Rolling St...

I've just received the results for the TOEFL. I aced the reading and listening tests, but the speaking and writing parts were less than stellar. This may be because I didn't have time to prepare for the test at all; when the speaking part came up, I panicked and my mind went completely blank. Beside...

I claim to have a religion at all because liberals said they didn't like my New Atheism. Well, this is the best I can do. Take it or leave it, motherfuckers. Wait, seriously?? The reasons why many people dislike New Atheism are complex , but they have nothing to do with atheism per se . They have m...

I know, I know. My previous attempt to do an intro to classical music was insanely long and pedantically detailed and nobody really cared Hey, I cared. I enjoyed it very much, and learned a lot. I also didn't have the time to listen to all of your links, so I didn't comment on it. But it was very i...

I just added the Book of Mormon to my personal collection. The infuriating part is that I had to order it online, even though there's an LDS church two blocks from my home, since they don't have it in English.

I have (in no particular order): - two translations of the Quran - one version of the Ramayana - the Gathas - the Analects of Confucius - the Tao Te Ching (now that's a confusing book if I've ever read one) - the Catechism of the Catholic Church - the Golden Legend by Jacobus da Varagine - the Gospe...

I think putting Malachi last is important for Christians because it ends with the prophecy of the return of Elijah, the forerunner to the Messiah. True. I once thought that both the Old Testament (in its Christian order) and the New Testament have a similar three-part structure: past, present, and ...

Well, that's partly a Protestant vs Catholic thing. For a long time, it was actually forbidden by the Catholic Church for laypeople to own a Bible. The idea was that, without the proper context and training, it would be too easy to misunderstand the text and to become a heretic. Less charitably, the...

Oh, that's too bad: those six dogs were rescued from a car park, but later a fire eviscerated them! Or someone eviscerated them with fire, I don't know.

Actually, the sequence (well, its analogue/-ɥij/ anyway) occurs word-finally in aiguille . True, but it's still not /yj/. You'll also hear the same sounds when people pronounce verbs in -uyer in a nonstandard way with -j instead of -i, again with /-ɥij/. That alternative pronunciation is probably t...

Are there any cases at all where /e/ or /ə/ occurs before a word-final consonant in standard French? Nope. There's a clear phonological constraint against that, reflected in morphology: - geler /ʒəle/ -> il gèle /ʒɛl/ - céder /sede/ -> il cède /sɛd/ I didn't want to bring up the nuance that /o/ and...

My brother has a French translation called La Bible des Peuples . It's supposed to be written for uneducated people, which is hardly unique by itself. What's more interesting is that the translators chose their own order for the Old Testament, different from both the Jewish order and the traditional...

I can confirm that there are no words with the sequence /yj/ word-finally. The words in Zompist's list are either written -ouill , or have another vowel afterwards so the sequence is /ɥijV/. I thought about it some time ago: I was trying to explain why French maille can be analyzed as three phonemes...

It doesn't to me, and I live here. You don't. And you don't live in Europe. One point each. I've been to the US, and in three weeks, I had more people talking to me about the Bible than in the past twenty years in France. A hostess tried to convince me to get a Bible; I told her I already had one. ...

Probably not most of them, but in no country on Earth do most people care about details of translation. To give an example: the King James Only movement was born in the US, and it made lots of people care about "corrupted translations", about the Textus Receptus and the Alexandrian text (disputes th...

Maybe American Christians aren't generally as invested in Bible translations as other Christians are? Idk. Maybe American Christians aren't generally as invested in Bible translations as other Christians are? Idk. American Christians aren't generally as invested in Bible American Christians aren't ...

Why do all those American translations have such bland names? American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New American Bible, New American Standard Bible, American Standard Version, Revised American Standard Bible, New Revised Standard Version (quick, find the one that doesn't actually exis...

[The Bible de Jérusalem]'s still my go-to Bible, but that's mostly because it's the first one I bought. Edit: actually, no, I had bought a Segond 21 before that. Actually, scratch that (stupid unreliable memories). The Segond 21 was the first complete Bible I've owned , but I didn't buy it: it was ...

Here's my take on some French translations of the Bible. In my hopeless quest to find the best version, I have bought and sold a number of them. This is a brain dump more than anything else. Historical translations For a long time, I was looking for the French equivalent of the King James Version: i...

Thanks for all of your replies. I forgot to ask a few questions about these versions. - Is it linked to a particular religious branch? is it supposed to be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or a compromise? - In particular, does it include the Deuterocanonical books? - Which order are the books in: the ...

Of course I have to continue. OK, so I get then that metal has "heavily distorted guitars", raspy/harsh singing, minor scales (interesting!). A few clarifications, though: - I thought heavily distorted guitars were a characteristic of 'rock' (or 'pop') from the '60s/'70s in general? Beatles, Stones,...

I also had a children's Bible when I was a kid: this one, called The Bible in 365 stories. It's still at my parents'.

I remember thinking at the time that I had read the actual Bible. Well, at least it gave me an overview. A

Although I'm an atheist, I have an interest in the various translations of the Bible. I've mentioned the ones I have in this post . I don't know much about any version in English other than the Authorized Version (a.k.a. the King James Version), but I can do a quick survey of French variants if anyo...

By the way: I finished reading Hamlet ages ago, and forgot to share my thoughts on it. Mostly, I'm puzzled. Sure, it's very well-written and endlessly quotable (the number of lines from this play that became cliches is astonishing). Some of the soliloquies cut pretty deep. But the plot seems weird a...