zompist bboard

Salmoneus wrote:Fortunately, climate change is a fairly minor problem on the large scale, and one we'll have solved long before any serious issues emerge.

You've had a *really* good Christmas, Salmoneus, haven't you? Or was it the cricket?

I'm incredibly alone and I'm drowning in it. I don't know how much of this people here are aware of, but I was emotionally abused, neglected, and profoundly isolated as a child. I was "homeschooled," which in my case meant that I was locked in a house my entire childhood and never provided a basic ...

So Hammond just got fired? Yes; not Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but Stephen Hammond, hitherto unknown party vice chairman. And this is apparently the first time May was unable to ensure support from her own party on a vote in Parliament, if the news is to be believed. No "apparentl...

Who thought it would be clever to show 74393 when I asked for 74390? Now I've had to order the damned things all over again.

Obvious, really, if you put it that way. More restrictively: are there phonemic diphthongs written <uy>, not just sequences of /u/ + /j/?

Salmoneus wrote:As it's been demanded of me in the 'nag Salmoneus' thread, an explanation of why the border issue is an issue:

Hahahaha! It was worth it.

A thought-experiment: where would this issue be if, for whatever reason, the support of the DUP wasn't important?

Aside from Dutch, where it's something of an archaism, are there any languages which use this?

Returning to the orthography of Irish for a moment: is there *any* sort of orthography, in any script at all, which would work better than either Roman or Cyrillic?

And finally, Grammy Award categories may look like genres, but they aren't. They are just named after them. There is just one reason why an act A is in category X: because someone nominated them for it. This may sound like begging the question, but it is the only way to explain how someone like Lad...

Purists will probably tell you that anything sufficiently commercially successful and well-known to be nominated for a Grammy stops being "Alternative" or "Indie" by definition. It's important to note that this constitutes one variety of "selling out", which can be a very effective way to destroy y...

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Never mind, I'll let it stand. Here are some more ramblings. Perhaps it might be useful to consider a genre, or style, of music to be a collection of specific tropes . Then it's easier and probably more useful to describe the differences between genres in terms of the pres...

Since I had at least a stab at trying to explain different sorts of classical music... could somebody help me with the reverse? I'll give it a bash. I won't try to be objective, since that's not really possible anyway; much of the difference between genres has to do with perception and attitude as ...

1. Does /f/ have any sources other than loanwords and aspirate mutation of /p/?

2. How well would it work without mutations?

From the front page of today's edition of not-the-Daily Mail:

MIRACLE BLOOD
PRESSURE PILL

Imralu wrote:

Pole, the wrote:Sleeping cycle? What is a sleeping cycle?

It's this thing that neurotypical people claim to have that makes them sleep at regular times, generally in the night.

No it isn't; it's a new type of bike.

We recently hired a car for a week's holiday. During this time the battery cut out twice, and we had had to go to a garage where the problem turned out to be a dirty earth connection. The car hire company promised to refund the bill along with the deposit, but after six weeks and several phonecalls ...

"Britain-hating Labour forces Government to show all its cards in Brexit negotiations".

It was a typo in the Basque dictionary, people!!!

Here's something inspired by something I read in The Complete Plain Words of 1976. Assuming you speak English, is it typically British or American English? (Or something else?) And do you interpret: "It is important that we have a good supply of bombs" as 1. "We do not have a good supply of bombs, a...

Risla wrote:I have a threshold for stress above which I start getting suicidal thoughts, and I'm passing it.

We're all here for you too if you need it. They're just thoughts; everyone gets them.

I'd like to be able to offer more than just platitudes, but I don't know how.

Reading Maximum City, following Zompist's recommendation.

That reminds me of that old anecdote - a German, an Englishman, and a Frenchman are tasked with writing about lions. The German locks himself in a library for twenty years and writes a ten-volume universal history of the lion, compiling and evaluating everything that has ever been written about lio...

This isn't strictly linguistic, but I don't know where else to put it. Bear in mind that I'm quoting from my memory of something I read nearly twenty years ago. Different cultures have different ways of presenting information in handbooks and instruction manuals. Here are the three I remember: The A...

Intervocalic /d/ is often elided in spoken Dutch. Is there any evidence of it weakening to something else, such as /ð/, before disappearing?

In the interests of accuracy, might it be worth either renaming this thread, or starting a new one? It could be called "The British Politics Thread" or similar. Sal's last post was certainly about *a* British Election, but there's little more to be said about *the* British Election...