zompist bboard

MisterBernie wrote:...
Episode 1 - An Introduction
...

That's pretty good IMO.

I have been using this ethnographical questionnaire to size up this culture in as concise a way as possible. I highly recommend using such a list. It has helped me think of things to do that I wouldn't have otherwise. All of the questions of the first section of the list are(or should be) answered ...

el flokratisson wrote:This is the kinterm of "Flokrati":
family = ela
....
woman = janima

Thanks, el flokratisson.

BTW Adpihi's kinship system is more Iroquois than Sudanese. I'll edit the post where I made the mistake.

You could look at M.H. Klaiman's book about grammatical voice, to find the types of voice-systems. Derived voice is one Basic voice is one Inverse/Direct voice is one Salience or pragmatic voice is one (topical or focal; at least one language has both). Also, consider voice-prominent languages like ...

Yes, I knew about the Hawaiian system. You're related to generations, rather than to matrilines or to patrilines or to individual people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kinship_Systems.svg might be even a nicer illustration. I was talking about "double descent" as in this . Some societies reckon ...

Having sat in on a class a few weeks ago at UBama about kinship systems, I'm tempted to give my IE-like Northern family a bit of flavor by adding in a Crow-Omaha system. Crow and Omaha both? Aren't they sort of "opposites"? I know they're both "diagonal" kinship systems. But, I thought: In one, one...

Tom: "Early Greek Philosophy", Jonathan Barnes (2001) Penguin Classics p.xxiii, p12 p12 "Thales...believed that the soul is something which produces motion ... he said that magnets have souls because they move iron" --Aristotle Thales, the "first philosopher" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales Tha...

Kereb wrote:

Viktor77 wrote:a 7.0 earthquake predicted to hit there within the next few decades.

well, "predicted" ...
there's no specific prediction regarding The Big One, it's just assumed to be inevitable.

Oct. 21 2011?

If we consider how it's used in ordinary English, many people use "animal" to mean "non-human mammal"; they wouldn't call a bird an "animal", nor a reptile nor an amphibian nor a fish, nor any invertebrate. Nor yet would they call another human an "animal", except as an insult or backhanded complim...

Are some people trying to translate
"I know that you know"
(complement clause)
while others are trying to translate
"I know what you know"
(relative clause)
?

If we deliberately commit the etymological fallacy: "Animal" means "has a soul". "Vegetable" means "useful for sustaining life (e.g. if ingested)". "Mineral" means "dug out of the ground (e.g. mined for)". If we use the word "animal" as used in (modern biological) taxonomy, an "animal" is something ...

Thanks, @serali.
Thanks, @sirred.

I promised in another thread that I'd post some information on agreement in the Ndu language Manambu. It's here as part of a blog post, now that I've got my blog working: http://chrisdb.dyndns-at-home.com/blog/page/role-insensitive-agreement The formatting of the side bar is slightly stuffed up for...

.... secondary cases .... 1) possessed .... 2) secondary subject .... 3) reciprocal object .... 4) definite .... 5) partitive .... 6) negativity congruence .... 7) suggestion marking .... [/size] This is very interesting! 8) (Obviously the parts I didn't quote are the most interesting parts. :roll:...

I am in college. I am over the age of fifteen. That's what I thought. I am really unsure why you guys think I'm so young... Not all of us did. Finlay figured out why he did and realized he'd made an easy-to-make error. I don't know about anyone else. It's probably not worth it to figure out who tho...

when you say something like "OBL-INTG" or "ACT-ACT", is one of them "case" and the other "bicase" or something like that? Nope, the bicase idea is for my primary conlang Rammy. This is my other conlang, the Choir Conlang. Those forms in CC can be seen as agreement forms, or they can be seen as voic...

chris_notts wrote:Similar topics seem to be discussed in this book by Givón:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qoY0 ... rb&f=false

That didn't work. I made a tinyurl instead;
http://tinyurl.com/3hvbj6w

How is that different from having voice for a participle or for a verbal noun (e.g. infinitive or gerund)? I'm not sure about the nomenclature here, but I think it's a little different. I don't know of any language that has that sort of parallel between case and nominalisation. There's no actual mo...

Once a sea level rises, is it up for good? Sea levels can't lower, right? Of course they can. Ice melts -- sea levels rise. Icecaps expand -- sea levels fall. Global cooling means lower sea-levels. --------------------------------------------------------------- If you speed up your geology by a fac...

I feel like I should answer some questions... I was wearing a wig for the photoshoot. My hair isn't quite that long -- it's a few inches shorter now, and I dyed it red. I'm a historical reenactor and avid cosplayer, meaning I have a lot of wigs. I am a lesbian, but I am not fifteen. I'm not exactly...

I had originally hoped to have the proto continent populated by early people, then have it split up, thus sundering them. I'm thinking about simply changing the time frame. Off the top of your head, what sounds like a reasonable number of millions of years for a europe[?] sized continent to split i...

I guess one of my favourite things in Rammy is "bicase", where you use a kind of second case inflection to tell the relationship between a noun and the verb which the noun can be seen as a nominal form of. So from "learn", with absolutive bicase you get "lesson" (as in "that which you learn"), with...

Astraios wrote:

TomHChappell wrote:Dessertization, not sexualization. This time, anyway.

That's creepier than sexualization! xD

I thought it might be.

Chibi wrote:Also I'm pretty sure Io was talking about pharazon...

Oh! Sorry.

Astraios wrote:

THC wrote:Queen X's (apparently delicious) character.

Oh, come on, enough with gross sexualization,

Dessertization, not sexualization. This time, anyway.