The Official ZBB Quote Thread

[dhok]

Daniel Suslak, an Indiana University linguistic anthropologist, is compiling a dictionary to record the existence of the language.

Anyone else get a kick out of the wording here? Yeah, I think we've already pretty well established the language's EXISTENCE... what Daniel Suslak (and other field linguists) are doing is something else.

Unless...

"After three years of living with the Ayapaneco and learning and meticulously documenting their language, I have at last sufficiently demonstrated, in my estimation, that the Ayapaneco language does, in fact, exist." -- Daniel Suslak's PhD thesis

[Imralu]

Let's not derail this thread in a hotsauce debate people, it's a quote thread.

[Legion]

<pthag> all i can think of is that maybe american linguistics tends to be full of lumpers
<pthag> or the people who compiled the american dataset for WALS were lumpers
<pthag> or the people who came across the bering strait were genetic idiots who could barely keep five phonemes in their head at once and so were rightly genocided
<pthag> well i mean lumpers specifically w.r.t phoneme lists
<pthag> it seems like a plausible sort of institutionalised how-to-train-linguists thing?
<pthag> when you kids go out and start doing fieldwork, remember to bear in mind the complex and beautiful nature of allophony and keep your phoneme lists tight and controlled
<pthag> MEANWHILE IN EUROPE
<pthag> chaos, anarchy and totalitarianism reigns, nobody has any discipline whatsoever and compiles huge phoneme sets

[Lleu]

[quote="linguoboy, in "The Welsh Copula","]Any time I hear rydw I'm like "OH NOES! Cymraeg Byw claims another victim from beyond the grave!"[/quote]
Maybe it's just me, but I really enjoyed this reaction.

[alice]

Because no one likes hearing their work cliticized.

(I suppose that belongs in the Jokes Thread but oh well).

But it's good enough to be kept for posterity.

[Aurora Rossa]

To provide some context, of course, I was saying that in response to this thread: why are clitics of such interest to Indo-Europeanists?

[TomHChappell]

.

[alice]

To provide some context, of course, I was saying that in response to this thread: why are clitics of such interest to Indo-Europeanists?

I would imagine anyone who ever hopes to have sex with a woman would be interested in clitics.

Clitorics???

[Grimalkin]

Asterix and Clitorix

[Soap]

There was a king named Clutorix, though he seems to be mostly known today as Clodri (a Welsh form of the name).

[tezcatlip0ca]

Shit is delicious.

[Arzena]

The danger is that, over time, the usage of our generation will grow so different from the usage of previous generations that we will find their works impossibly foreign, as though we essentially speak in another dialect.

Hahahahaha, oh they're serious...

"Akhmed, what did you learn in madrassa today?"
"Sheet, mom, it ain't nothing but a bunch a' hamzas and qaffs in that book they got."
"Are you talking about the Qur'an? But it's the backbone of our literary heritage!"
"Yeeuh, bitch. I'm all like, 'I can't read none of that shit, yo,' and they be goin' crazy over it."
"Alas, how could we have allowed our language to change so much over fourteen hundred years! Oh Islam, how I weep at your passing."
"I cain understand a word yo sayin', mom."

[Lleu]

A mysterious, unknown language he's been spontaneously talking in since as long as he could speak?
...

Well, Phrygian of course.

HE DOES NOT SAY BEKOS

YOUR ARGUEMENT IS INVALID

Herodotus.

[Travis B.]

What's the difference between a banjo and a trampoline?
You take off your shoes before jumping on a trampoline.

Right on!

[Matt]

I find that exchange all the more funny because I had specifically included a note to Eddy in that post, explaining that it was just a joke and not a political statement.

[Legion]

And my vote will have a lot of weight

no, it won't. except in the sense that one of the many lead atoms hanging around in your nervous system has "a lot of weight" compared to a randomly selected carbon atom.

I fucking love this man.

[sirred]

Errata:

What about the handful of plutonium atoms brought over from the Fukushima event? (Of course, they'd be radioactive and experience radioactive-y things like half-lives, but...)

Plutonium-239 decays to Uranium-235, which decays to Thorium-231, which decays to Proactinium-231, which decays to Actinium-227, which decays to Thorium-227, all of which are heavier than lead. So yes.

the chemistry is a metaphor

[Viktor77]

I had such an awesome time in St Louis a couple weeks back. The first thing I did when I got back was catch a cold.

I think I got that cold from you. Despite there being an internet in the way.

They're called computer viruses. Haven't you heard of them?

[Jetboy]

Language Contact with Victor Friedman and Lenore Grenoble.

That means you were quite literally in the very same classroom as me.

Well, that's life for you.

[Viktor77]

Translation from Salmonish to English: "I have no idea what metal is, except that it's not Classical music, nor played with a didgeridoo, bougarabou, or noseflute."

[linguoboy]

How exactly do you "bury someone at sea?" Did they cremate him first and dump his ashes? Did they dig him a grave in the sand at the bottom of the ocean? What does it mean to "bury someone at sea?"

you put them in a box and throw them into the sea

That hardly seems effective. The box could just float back to shore. Unless it was meant to sink, which still seems ineffective.

[Bedelato]

But Bedelato, why are you so ambiguous about where you are from here? NAE varieties are not nearly as homogeneous as you may think they are; saying you are from the US is not saying much here at all.

Because, clearly, we are all stalkers who only want to find and CENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCENSORED with rivets.

Um... with rivets?

[míkl]

Anyway, lesson learned - don't have sex in weird carpet rooms.

[Viktor77]

I was going to call you but you didn't answer.

How could I answer a call that you were going to make but didn't?

Try to wrap your heads around the first sentence!

[Shrdlu]

The fun stuff is that the phrase is perfectly understandable to me.

Btw, just posting to say "Yay, for being quoted!".