zompist bboard

I realised this morning that the only colour words in English which take the (inchoative?) -en suffix are "black", "white", and "red"; you don't find *"brownen" or "*yellowen", for example. It can't be a coincidence that these are the first three colour words predicted by Berlin and Kay. How product...

I did some guided deep relaxation the other afternoon, and I think I fell asleep. I'm not sure that's how it's meant to work. I dunno, sounds pretty relaxed to me! Yes, but there's a difference between feeling nice and relaxed, and not being conscious enough to be able to. I didn't actually want to...

After spending the last month or so being too freaked out by weird cardiac symptoms to feel safe riding my bicycle, I finally said fuckit yesterday and went out for a ride, and it went fine. That's good news. It's often the way with anxiety-related symptoms that they go away for a while if you occu...

So what happens now with what's going on in London right now? Cynical viewpoint: Every party except for UKIP gets cowed into suspending campaigning for a couple of days. More realistic viewpoint: Every party except for UKIP suspends campaigning for a couple of days out of respect for the victims, w...

Zaarin wrote:I have a sudden strong desire to learn Basque, just so I can make cooler conlangs. :p

Well, you can certainly derive languages from it with interesting and unusual grapheme-oriented principles...

I did some guided deep relaxation the other afternoon, and I think I fell asleep. I'm not sure that's how it's meant to work.

One thing that's unclear is why May called for an election at all (Commenters over here mentioned she wanted a stronger majority; but if party discipline is good, why should it be an issue?) As well as anti-EU MPs, she also has to keep the right-wing newspapers and what's left of UKIP happy, and ne...

Very helpful, thank you! My apologies if some of these are stupid questions, but I'd rather ask a stupid question than not understand out of fear of embarrassment. I'll offer my answers here, but Sal's will probably be wittier and more correct. The poor lad's put a lot of work into this, so he dese...

Can't someone create an IAL or something for this purpose? Businessese?

alice: fortunately, you don't really need a car in the lake district, or at least not in the areas where there are parking charges. That's what walking's for! Plus, the great bus service. (What part have you been in?) Ideally. But when many of the places you or your partner wants to go aren't reach...

A pertinent question might be: are there any languages with grammatical gender in which at least one noun with a male referent is of female gender, and vice versa? In German, Weib and Töchter are neuter, which is as close as I can think of right now. There's nothing inherently "feminine" about /-a/;...

Risla wrote:The giant bugs in this country are terrifying.

Warning: extremely lame joke follows:

That's nothing; you should see the software I write!

Something rather more banal: parking charges in the Lake District are ridiculous, very few machines take the shiny new £1 coins, and so very few shops actually have any of the old ones. Don't you just love this country? Have you had one of the new £2 coins fall apart on you yet? Not yet. But I did ...

Something rather more banal: parking charges in the Lake District are ridiculous, very few machines take the shiny new £1 coins, and so very few shops actually have any of the old ones. Don't you just love this country?

1. Are the vowels in "vînmes" and "tînmes" nasalised?
2. If so, are these the only examples of nasalised vowels appearing directly before nasal consonants in the next syllable?
3. Besides "vîntes" and "tîntes", how many other words have a circumflexed nasal vowel?

(lots of scary stuff) No, really; that's terrifying, and I'm very sorry to hear that it's affecting you so badly. I actually think some of the symptoms are probably anxiety (which I mentioned like last week in another thread), like I'm trapped in some kind of autonomic symptoms>anxiety>autonomic sy...

Ars Lande wrote:Le Pen lost. That's a happy thing.

The number of commenters on the appropriate page of the BBC website who aren't happy is slightly less happy, however.

Alternatively, if you're too lazy... you have nine phonemic vowels, eight of which represent the eight possible combinations of front/back, round/unround, and high/mid, while /a/ is neutral. So you need to require the vowels in the suffixes to agree with the vowels in the roots in one or two of thes...

That deserves a PhD on the basis of the description alone :-) haha, i guess. lots of technical stuff in there. but there are some decently widely applicable generalizations. No doubt. I'm still trying to work out the difference between structural essentialism and essential structuralism, and how th...

cunningham wrote:(snip)

It all makes sense now.

alice is enlightened

Turned in my dissertation to my committee!!! If I can defend it in a month, then I'll be DOCTOR kodé! Well, THAT's really cool! Congratulations! What's it about? It's about how cyclic computation of words in morphosyntax can result in recursion of prosodic words (a.k.a. phonological words). It's an...

To put this idea into perspective, I've been trying something similar just for phonology, and even that's proving to be a major headache.

Well, if what you want to achieve politically involves killing unarmed people, it's wrong. Whatever it might be that you want to achieve. I misguidedly used to take cunningham seriously, as if he really believed all the shit he spouts, but now it is clear that in this case he is just being over-the...

Yes, I interpreted "exploding moose" as "the type of moose which has the potential to explode." Hey, Risla! Welcome back! Of course, it's not clear if it's "population of exploding moose" or "exploding population of moose"; the kind of distinction which gives designers of IALs headaches. Even so, h...