zompist bboard

Terra wrote:the United States's solidarity

No such thing.

Here are some: (Word or phrase — literal meaning — metaphorical meaning) asperge — asparagus — tall and thin person banane — banana — moron bœuf — ox, beef — jam session bonne poire — good pear — gullible person canard — duck — false note carne — low quality meat, bad horse — low-life, low-life woma...

Granted, US libraries are heavily overrepresented in this database but (a) most of the ZBB is based in the USA and (b) the USA still publishes more new titles annually than any other country. (Moreover, many "new" publications outside the US are translations of works originally published there.) Th...

I don't. It's always there, never lurking far, so I got used to it.

Torco wrote:

Legion wrote:

Torco wrote:there's a difference between judgment of speech acts and censorship.

100% of censors agree with you.

100% of censors also agree that drinking water once in a while is good for your health

I am pretty sure this can be proven false.

Torco wrote:there's a difference between judgment of speech acts and censorship.

100% of censors agree with you.

Today I started to write: I promised my better half to pick up some bread... and swiftly changed that to: I promised my better half I'd pick up some bread... The first version shouldn't be ambiguous in context, but sounds quite awkward. I guess there's a rule in English to take the nearest NP as th...

Also the only French people who know what "zain" is, and to whom it will have positive connotations, are horse affictionados.

To everyone else it will sound like "zinzin" ("loony").

As I see it, it's a narrative equivalence. In English, in a narrative present frame, verbs that are unmarked for any other parameter will take the simple present if they're stative, and the present continuous if they're dynamic. French has a similar phenomenon, but in a narrative past frame. That is...

Serafín > I think you're confusing things pointlessly; we're trying to observe morphosyntaxic behaviour triggered by dynamic/stative difference. So we need to put the two verbs in the exact same conditions, with no other changing parameter than the dynamic/stative contrast. In English, this is done ...

A good test to see this is to see which French tense is used to translate an English preterit: dynamic verbs will use the perfect (or the preterit in some literary context), whereas stative verbs will use the imperfect, so we get: He killed a man > Il a tué un homme He became sad > Il est devenu tr...

For instance English generally treats "to see" as stative and "to watch" as dynamic, whereas French treats both "voir" and "regarder" as stative. What sort of formal test we could use in French and Spanish to know this? Actually I think I spoke too fast: while French doesn't make a contrast between...

Well, you have the basic sentence structure of French, so say: "Marie aime Mozart". Then you have the so called "dislocations", where an argument of the verb is moved around, and ends up removed from the verb position. When this happens, the rule is that whatever element has been removed must be re...

Stative/dynamic isn't that a solid and objective distinction anyway. In two languages that morphologically or syntaxically contrast dynamic/stative verbs, you can have the same verb be stative in the first language and dynamic in the second. For instance English generally treats "to see" as stative ...

Well this depends how we analyse those verbs and what polysynthetic languages can do, which is like I like Whimemsz to tell us: can polysynthetic languages have transitive verbs with null object, used as a generic statement like in Indo-European languages (eg "He's eating" vs "He's eating chicken")...

Freud is only about penis, poop and being in love with Yng's mom. Anyone who claims otherwise is part of the Global Psychanalist Conspiracy To Take Control Of My Wallet.

Though I realise there are also cases of direct object dropping outside of ditransitive verbs, very common sentences like "Mozart, j'aime" (for literary "Mozart, je l'aime") or "Il est venu hier, je sais" (literary "je le sais"). Out of curiosity why do you analyze these are direct object dropping?...

The "je vais le lui donner" > "je vais lui donner" change is almost systematic, however I wonder if that wouldn't be a case of phonemic reduction. (The schwa in le ought to be dropped, leading to something like [llɥi]. It doesn't seem unreasonable that it would get further reduced to [lɥi]. The sim...

8 - How Does Polysynthesis Arise? That article on French just blew my mind, thanks! I've said it before, but the main obstacle to analyse French as polysynthetic is that it doesn't satisfy the "morphological visibility constraint". Not only all arguments are not marked on the verbs, but in fact, mo...

GreenBowTie wrote:Disclaimer: I don't know a goddamn thing about anything I'm talking about

Yeah.

Done.

A not unsane vowel system in English :O???

(It's more likely than you think)

In my experience female dogs are generally more manic than males. You meet a female dog for the first time and she's like, super double extra happy to see you man!!!

Fun fact: when giving out a Canadian phone number, politeness mandates that you arrange the numerals from the lowest to the highest value.

[ɛsk izõpa skə ty ʃɛrʃ] and writing Est-ce qu'ils n'ont pas ce que tu cherches? That's a bit disingenuous, written French is at least capable of more faithfully render this as Est-ce qu'ils ont pas c'que tu cherches? (and "ne" is occasionally, though inconsistently, maintained in speech). And futhe...