zompist bboard

I spent the day digging in more of the plants which I brought with me from the old house (mainly ribes, e.g. currants and gooseberries). I was going to wait until early Spring, but winter so far has been relatively mild here and a number of the shrubs I have in pots look like they're about to start ...

In the case of (2), I'm fairly certain that !(abc) = ab!c I could use "^", "~" or another symbol instead of "!", whatever avoids using up characters people already use. Thoughts? In my own SCA I use ~ as a suffix operator. I think that interpreting !(abc) as ab!c is confusing. If I understand your ...

Copied from "Phonemes you aren't supposed to use": Aspirates: pʰ tʰ ṭʰ cʰ kʰ Glottalised stop: pʼ tʼ cʼ kʼ ʔ (no retroflex ejective - does any language have that as a phoneme???) Voiced stop: b d ḍ g (no voiced palatal stop) Voiced nasal: m n ṇ ñ ŋ Voiceless nasal: mʰ nʰ ñʰ ŋʰ (no voiceless retrofle...

This was a bug in the initial release that was fixed, but I haven't gotten around to releasing the fixed version. I designed the rule application to avoid loops by moving a pointer along the word - when a rule is applied, it was supposed to jump ahead so that, after "aqa" is changed to "aqna", the ...

also for some reason the simple rule q > qn causes the program to enter in an endless loop or something Probably the tool reapplies the same rule from the beginning of the word repeatedly. This is necessary if multiple replacements needs to be made or if a rule feeds itself, e.g. if you have some k...

In Japanese, these are どこでも (doko demo/wherever)、何でも (nan demo/whatever)、いつでも (itsu demo/whenever). They're usually translated as things like anywhere, anytime. Doko, nan/nani, itsu, etc are the usual words for where, what and when. I'm not really sure what demo would mean on its own – sometimes it...

"Hij eet een Engels ontbijt waar hij ook heen gaat" 'waar+heen' is like whereto , and the 'ook' adds the element of unspecificity. If you just wanted to say wherever , I would say 'waar dan ook'. An example from the wild: "Lokaliseer je GSM, waar dan ook ter wereld!", literally: wherever in the wor...

Hebrew uses a construction '[interrogative] that-not': לאן שלא ילך le'án šeló yeléx... to-where that-not he:will:go wherever he goes... מה שלא עשית ma šeló asíta... what that-not you:did whatever you did... That's cool, although I'm not sure I understand the reason behind it. Is it because of my la...

I have been looking in dictionaries as well, although they tend to be poor for descriptions of multiword constructions. The following is 'wherever' in a Basque dictionary: http://www1.euskadi.net/morris/resultado.asp 1. ( non ) we'll find them ~ they are nonahi ere dauden, aurkitu egingo ditugu | au...

I have been working on some simple original folk stories in a conlang, and I am currently trying to decide what the equivalent of the English -ever series should be. A simple example might be: Wherever he goes, he always has an English breakfast This could be paraphrased as: It doesn't matter where ...

You're assuming that these languages have tense shifting in indirect speech. Not all languages have formally distinct indirect speech with shifts of pronouns/demonstratives/TAM, and of those that do the differences between direct and indirect speech can vary. For example, it is my understanding that...

Today I sowed seeds of leak and some sort of Japanese mustard spinach (don't remember the name). I'm getting obsessed with seeds, I keep asking my girlfriend things like "We can plant peas now, do we have any to plant?" or "Hey, that seed packet looks cool, can we plant it now? Oh, wait, March. Oka...

The corner where the ground elder is growing is quite shady and not ideal for growing most things. I have been vaguely tempted to just plant all the aggressive but useful plants and supposedly shade-tolerant plants I can think of in that corner (e.g. ramsons, members of the mint family, jerusalem ar...

Here's a picture of my veg patch. On the left there's some straw, which covers radish, rocket and spinach. On the right (no straw) there is garlic, lettuce and more radish, hidden by the grass that's already there. It'll be interesting to see how the two lots of radish compare. http://druidintraini...

It being the dead of winter here, I have little to say about gardening, other than that I'm looking forward to the beginnings of spring. But what you're doing is pretty cool. We have raspberries... and blackberries, but oh god I would not plant those. No, I spend dozens to hundreds of hours per yea...

Anyway, here's a link with info that inspired my experiment: http://libarynth.net/masanobu_fukuoka It comes from Fukuoka's book "The One-Staw Revolution". I've become quite enthusiastic about planting perennial food plants and more or less letting them get on with it as much as possible. We've just...

I understand your pain... lettuce is incredibly vulnerable to being eaten by bugs... Mint too... T_____T Mint?? Mint is practically indestructible... at least in the UK. People carefully keep it in pots because if it escapes it will spread by root and take over large areas without constant cutting ...

It's quite interesting that this seems to be the most common pattern for languages with very semantically flexible agreement. If a language has very flexible agreement without explicit morphology or syntax to mark promotion (i.e. without overt voice marking), it often seems to be that: 1. The langua...

I kind of adapted the approach used by Thompson.You're right though that it may be overkill, since the domain isn't likely to produce worst-case machines. When I was developing ASCA, I took an approach more like yours, only I did a terrible job of it. One reason I like Haskell is that it makes walk...

2+3 clusivity wrote to me asking about some info on Manambu that I used to have on my blog. Since I've moved house since then and the computer that was hosting the article is in a box somewhere, here's the info retyped from Aikhenvald's grammar. This is how it works. In 3.1, the S=A ambitransitive v...

So, I decided to actually look at the code for the first time in weeks and fixed that bug, so you can legally write unconditioned rules with or without a "/ _" If I have the time or energy, I'll see if I can continue working on getting negatives in the code. I refactored the state-machine code to a...

The thing that drives me crazy is that linguists seem much more likely than the general population to replace default / unknown gender 'he' with default 'she'. If you don't like to use 'he' for some reason, English already has a perfectly good alternative pronoun to use when gender is not known / ir...

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair to poor old Gregory, it's just that to me it doesn't make sense to write a book which contains lots of long lists of examples without much individual explanation or individual context, and that was often the feeling I got reading the book. Excessively long lists of examp...

Does anyone have any good resources on auxiliary verbs in a non-IE language? I don't *have* any good resource on it, but I know of the existence of Auxiliary Verb Constructions by Gregory Anderson (2006), which I haven't read yet but it's in my list of books to read. I have a copy somewhere. I woul...

For person, you can have different constructions become grammaticalised for different persons. It's not unusual to have a first/non-first split particularly with verbs of volition and perception (since you know what's going on in your head but can only speculate about others). Korean and Tibetan bo...