zompist bboard

In its origins (at least according to my sources), it was a type of army well suited to part-time campaigning without drill: so long as experienced soldiers were placed in the front and rear, the average soldier didn't have much to do but keep moving. Battle between the Greek hoplite miltias of the...

ah, I see. What aobut submarines? :D Just an interesting interjection. There were a few submarines in operation in the American Civil War. Over all they killed more crew than enemies. On the whole, "18th Century Europe" and "no major wars for two centuries", I'd lay a bet significantly against subm...

The glottal stops are kind of awkward to pronounce, but then again I'm an English speaker. Either way, it has a very unique sound. Are the [r]s alveolar approximants or are they trills? There's a third option, which is actually what I would assume given no other information. It could be an alveolar...

They're admittedly not a very dramatic people. Curiously, I've found myself in the last week or so working on Flaidish. So that may lead to more information about them. This reminds me, I've been meaning to ask. Do you have any historical information up on how first contacts between kinds progresse...

If anyone's interested in the anthropology terms, this is technically ambilineal ; so called for fairly obvious reasons. I didn't know the term, so thanks. Others might find this explanation of different descent strategies with diagrams useful. I second the endorsement. In fact, I would have linked...

One of the lineages will formally receive a newly marriage couple, and the children will belong to it. This involves giving the couple substantial gifts, tools, animals, and a place to live, so it comes down to which lineage is most willing to make the investment. In extraordinary circumstance, thi...

One was mentioned earlier, actually; though not labeled as such. Rodinia was the last supercontinent before Pangea, it was around about 1.1 to .75 billion years ago. Named after what, the sculptor? :D I never thought of that. Yeah, didn't you know Rodin would only work with stone that was at least ...

It's not the rocks. Whoops :oops:, you're right: the good fossils are the more critical part. I wasn't thinking. Thanks for correcting me. Now I'm going to return the favor :wink:. The reason we are able to date these things is due to molluscs. Yep, snails. Well, not just molluscs. Trilobites are a...

Man, I really envy some people. Hey, i sometimes wish that I was the urban planner who got to name all the new streets around the place . . . meanwhile some people are scrambling to find names for landmasses, bodies of water, lunar seas, extraterrestrial formations, which no human has ever seen wit...

Raphael wrote:Witnesses only have to take oath after their interrogation, and just if . . . the court thinks what they said is believeable enough.

Laughing, laughing.

There's the Pan-African orogeny, the Permian Mass Extinction, Rodinia 1Ba ago... the list goes on. Ooh, ooh! And don't forget bodies of water! There's the Panthalassic to balance Pangaea, the Iapetus Ocean, the Rheic, the Cannonball Seaway. . . . And my personal favorite, the Tethys. Now there was ...

The mention of the meeting of U.S. and Japanese culture above reminded me of something I was told by my American colleague who lived for twenty years in Japan: an example of "compartmentalized" vs. "universal" morality. In Japan, he said, many people compartmentalize the different elements of their...

Similgu, Simillu, and Simiriu: The three stars of the Southern Crown The Silmarils, the three celestial lights, that at one time adorned Morgoth's iron crown. Not sure where you get the notion that the Silmarils were "three celestial lights." ("Three celestial lights" is a famous phrase found in th...

Jaaaaaa wrote:When you said IE at first methoughtyou meant Indo-European XD

He-heh!

I forgot I was posting on a linguistics board, when I used that abbreviaton. That does bring some interesting new interpretations, doesn't?

micro$oft be evil, ne? Every once in awhile, I think, "Oh it's just the band wagon/just american iconclasm, to call microsoft evil". But then I remember, no they really are . What they've done with the way IE handles various things, for example, is either evil, or incredible incompetence. My brothe...

Does anyone know why, when I print anything off from IE or Netscape, the ā , etc. (but not the Greek and Cyrillic) show up as blank spaces (and the t', d' show up as t<space>, d<space>)? Well, the simple answer is that you're printer doesn't know those unicode glyphs. It's not a very useful an...

I like the rationalistic explanation of the Almean sky! Hmm, I'm not sure I do, entirely. I don't think that something like that had to have actually happened, for the story to exist as it does. And it seems highly unlikely that such a extreme dis-aster (:wink:) would have left any witnesses to tel...

Neat! I really like Ecaias' strategy of sowing death as disruption into the world long in advance of his fears. He's crafty :). Not, that is, I like his strategy, I like the idea, the story of it. I also really like that community and cooperation come after evil. Without evil, there is no true good....

And I, at least, pronounce "utile" as /jutil/, that is, not starting with a vowel. I think "utile" is correctly pronounced starting with a rounded front vowel, not an approximant. I've made that mistake myself, surely because its English cognate "utilitarian" is pronounced starting with a velar app...

Mon fran?ais, c'est moins que utile. [coup] (oh, and my intuition says there shouldn't be elision between que and utile?) There's always an elision between que and a word beginning with a vowel. Yeah, but why I thought there might not be in that case is it doesn't matter if it's written starting wi...

It's really interesting that modern French is now tending to drop the "ne", which was originally the important part of the negative construction. Reminds me of the evolution of the 2nd person plural pronoun in English. Eep, but right now I really need to go, I'll get back to my thoughts on that. Oh...

While talking about this issue, and the other conbiology thread, I was reminded of my tree-climbing octopods , of which there is one sentient species of. An aside, before I go on, in my world, there's a certain region and set of cultures that are supposed to be the "viewpoint". One of the ways I fos...

Je crois que la voyelle dans "de" est normalement moins distinct. C'est possible que j'ai tort. Mon fran?ais n'a jamais eu parfait, mais il est utile. C'est vrai, mais je pense que les voyelles sont plus pres de la m?me quands ils sont dit normalement. Mon fran?ais, c'est moins que utile. J'ai un c...

Biologically speaking, their pair-bond is stronger than humans-- so their lessened sexual dimorphism is actually in line with that. They look less pair-bonded because of two things: a) their extremely long lifetimes, and b) their honesty. Ah, okay. But it brings it back to my idea of elcari being a...

I've heard that French started with just ne before the verb, and eventually grammaticalised several idioms like "I have not a drop of water" and "I have not a bit of food", ending up with only pas (which still means "step" as well). Eodrakken is right, I'm afraid... negative pas does derive from 's...