zompist bboard

Looks really cool. I guess it'll be a lot of work if you're going to make 4373 symbols, though.

Yes, moving information seems like the most obvious choice. As I understand it, there are natlangs that do topic fronting... food ate dog = as for the food, the dog ate it dog ate food = as for the dog, it ate the food ...and there are those that do emphasis fronting... food ate dog = the food is wh...

Japanese way cooler than the others, among people I know. For making conlangs cool, using them in fiction is the most obvious way - Tolkien and Star Trek are still considered a little geeky, but they're pretty mainstream these days.

Another question: looking at what's on Wikipedia's "Swedish grammar" article, is björn 'bear' always common and is lodjur 'lynx' always neuter? If the answer is yes, then we're not dealing with purely semantic agreement anymore, but something closer to what you find in Arabic/Spanish/French. There ...

Sure, but that's just a few words being of ambiguous gender. What I mean applies to basically all words, at least insofar as they can represent anything which has a physical gender. I don't think it's the same phenomenon at all.

The problem with that analysis is that the pronouns - in English, Swedish, etc. - appear not to agree with words, but with entities. The same word can be, in some sense, both masculine and feminine.

I'm taking a course in Denmark at the moment. Being Swedish, I can sort of understand Danish, but it's a little tricky. I try to enunciate, so that we can understand each other, but the more clearly I pronounce things, the less it sounds like Danish. It seems that English and Danish have something i...

2) No. Except in the rare cases where you have a neuter noun denoting a person, such as statsråd 'member of parliament', where using the grammatically appropriate neuter det would sound very stilted. Altho, to argue against my own strange point, there are some more common examples, such as barn , "...

I've moved from southern Sweden to northern Sweden, and people automatically speak English to me. It's quite peculiar.

That's a reasonable definition. I think I've seen it before, too. Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages. So then you have four genders in German, only one of which affects verbal agreement? That strikes ...

That's a reasonable definition. I think I've seen it before, too. Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages. Some would also consider the pronoun agreement in English (he/she) to be gender, so it's all a litt...

True, there is more to it than just the definiteness forms. There's definitely more difference between neuter and non-neuter than between any other potential genders. It seems that the four-gender system is to some extent historical, a tradition with not much basis in reality. But there's no reason ...

Is anyone familiar with it? Apparently he divided languages into reality-oriented, speaker-oriented and hearer-oriented. It sounds kind of pseudo-scientific, but interesting. I'd like to read more about it, but googling only finds me a book, which I'm not really in the mood for paying for. Perhaps s...

So even from things like Sanskrit, you say? Seems odd that people in Europe would even know anything about gender in Sanskrit. But then again they would kind of have to know the word in order to import it, so I guess they might know the gender too. In Swedish gender is largely determined by the endi...

If I understand my old Swedish teacher right, there is a tendency for Swedish loanwords to keep the gender of the original word. Obviously this would only apply to certain languages, including German and Latin. Could this be true? Are there similar tendencies in other languages?

I'm finally almost finished with Skyrim. Just a couple more things left to do. And I've managed to install Supreme Commander on my mac. It's kind of nice, but also kind of messy. And I'm sort of working on creating some sort of mix between Battle for Wesnoth and Magic the Gathering. Don't know if I'...

From what I've heard, foreign universities often teach the Nordic languages as one. So it should be possible to find some sort of textbook or something that does that. It would probably make it easier, if it explicitly points out the differences, so you don't have to get confused about that. Such a ...

Indeed. I think it's based on blogs, but I'm not sure exactly. Maybe we have several corpses. Will check. My project is supposed to be mainly dealing with syntax, so it would be nice to find some good syntactic features. But "different to/from" could perhaps be seen as a syntactic feature, sort of, ...

Feel free to let me know what your job is, and maybe I can do that for you in return. :) It seems that a very important factor is choosing features that are common, otherwise the statistics aren't effective (unless you have huge amounts of data, but that's rarely the case). So bound morphemes could ...

Gulliver: Those are some great examples. Punctuation use - or at least punctuation frequency - has bee used with great success. Those synonyms are exactly what I'm talking about - I just need a big list of them. I wonder if there is such a list available somewhere? The idea is to compare a given wor...

To me, a cracker is a variety of hacker. But I was raised on the internets, I guess.

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:I think the real reason that "point one miles" sounds wrong but "point three miles" sounds right is that you're used to "one" being followed by a singular and "three" by a plural.

I agree.

I think I would also use plural for anything that isn't one, basically.

Same thing? What, they were all the first?

A bug? In Skyrim? Surely you jest. :P

See if you can spot what's wrong in this picture:

Remember, too, that one highly desirable attribute of a flag is being easy to draw. Those fractals are not easy to draw... at any rate, not quick to draw. Yeah - if you think of them as the actual idealised fractals, they would take infinite time to draw. And be 100% white. :D And the Kasharlam fla...