zompist bboard

Posted: **Sat Aug 16, 2014 10:07 am**

araceli wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:This guy has smoked too many of the wrong mushrooms, it seems. I guess he's about 400 to 500 millinylands - twice as nutty as Octaviano.

He wrote:letters with very similar sounds had opposite meanings.
I had no idea the Proto-Indo-Europeans were literate. Does he know something we don't?

Indeed, the Proto-Indo-Europeans used the Latin alphabet, just as the Indo-Europeanists do. With superscript <h> for breathy voice, numeric indexes on the laryngeals, and all that. Steles found on the ocean floor around the Azores in ruins of Atlantis demonstrate this. Of course, THEY deny the existence of those steles!

Posted: **Sat Aug 16, 2014 1:51 pm**

Oh deity, look what I found! The same syllable meant "face", "bare", and "shiny"! It's a good example of website design, too.

Posted: **Sat Aug 16, 2014 1:55 pm**

Someday I will create a ur-proto-language with no words less than three syllables, that is the most logical way to equate all languages in my mind. This language group lost these syllables, that language group lost those, viola.

Posted: **Sat Aug 16, 2014 2:56 pm**

araceli wrote:It's a good example of website design, too.

Mm, it looks too blocky, and the contrasts are too high. Maybe with some subtler colours?

Posted: **Sun Aug 17, 2014 5:43 am**

araceli wrote:Oh deity, look what I found! The same syllable meant "face", "bare", and "shiny"! It's a good example of website design, too.

Ahh, that thing. Weird. Stumbled upon it years ago, when Geocities still was alive. So this thing is still found on the Web!

Posted: **Sun Oct 26, 2014 4:07 pm**

Come on now, why don't you post howlers?

Down with the double standards in linguistic reconstructions!
That guy's English is quite readable when you get used to it and it's worth all the fun.
The fun begins at the end of page two, to reach its culmination points towards the end of page four:

More: show

and

More: show

Posted: **Sun Nov 30, 2014 2:26 pm**

The concept of "Semitic" and "Indo-European" languages is a racist tool of oppression used to suppress the knowledge of the Black African origin of the Western civilization, apparently.

Posted: **Mon Dec 01, 2014 1:56 pm**

Tropylium wrote:The concept of "Semitic" and "Indo-European" languages is a racist tool of oppression used to suppress the knowledge of the Black African origin of the Western civilization, apparently.

Err... "dismantle and outsource the plausibility structure of the autochthonous people"?????

Posted: **Fri Jan 16, 2015 5:00 am**

Of course Taa was written with click letters and IPA symbols. That's the way they write it.

Posted: **Fri Jan 16, 2015 5:01 am**

Torco wrote:
Wattmann wrote:
Astraios wrote:
Vuvgangujunga wrote:Or is it "pure" as in it practices abstinence from hot language on language action?
Certainly not, Romanian's a whore. It's had Hungarian and Slavic and Romani as well as that filthy old Balkan substratum.
She certainly gets around a lot...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymo1GOH8REI

Is this those annoying Cheeky Girls song that counts to 4 in Romanian?

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:27 pm**

I once read something that basically called all linguists Nazis, over the so-called Afro-Asiatic languages, whose claim to unity, the author claims, is from the work of "Proto-Nazi linguists" who wished to prove their racist attitude of "inferior races" by saying that the Jewish and "Negroid" races are related.

Posted: **Sat Feb 21, 2015 6:16 pm**

I found this the other day and it made my head hurt. They even drag in the Lemnos Stele ... OMG!

http://dailywales.net/2015/01/29/are-th ... of-israel/

Posted: **Sun Feb 22, 2015 3:22 am**

That is absolutely hilarious.

Posted: **Mon Feb 23, 2015 5:39 am**

Hilarious, but not new.

Posted: **Fri Feb 27, 2015 7:22 pm**

This exceptional individual appears to have written a whole string of... interesting...reviews of grammar books. As far as I can make out, he apparently thinks the perfect tenses in English are wrong. As in, always.

To quote a couple blokes in IRC: "that is the weirdest kind of grammar correction I have seen", and "it's not one I've heard before but it sound exactly like the sort of thing prescriptivists would typically do".

(P.S. please don't reply to him-- I already posted comments to two of his reviews, and I don't want him to be ganged up on.)

Posted: **Sat Feb 28, 2015 5:31 am**

Xephyr wrote:As far as I can make out, he apparently thinks the perfect tenses in English are wrong. As in, always.

Yes, really weird. What's next, a guy thinking the "the" doesn't belong to the English language and going on Amazon commenting on every book that contains examples of the definite article?

Posted: **Sat Feb 28, 2015 8:53 am**

...but the really weird thing is that he's doing it to grammar books.

I mean I can sort of get complaining about it regarding other books, in the bizarre but still sane misunderstanding that this was something that was officially "wrong" according to grammarians. But this guy is actually reading every single grammar book and language guide he can find and complaining that they are all wrong about grammar. How? What? But?

Posted: **Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:33 pm**

Surely at this point he qualifies as some sort of conspiracy theorist. I almost applaud the man for the levels of devotion it must take to read book after book and marvel at the neverending errors. I mean, there is a sufficiently large word count n, and it's not even that large, for which any published English work will be wrong according to this rule of his. As in, every single book in the adult section of a library. Either he ~~has~~ never stepped in one, or this is quite a conspiracy indeed...

Posted: **Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:50 pm**

There were a couple where he said like "actually this one's fine", but I can't work out what criteria he's using. I caught something about requiring a context, but it didn't really make sense.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:59 am**

In the first 21 pages of "Last Days [in Shanghai]" the word 'had' appears 99 times, of which 21 are used correctly as the past tense of 'to have' or in the past perfect or in the subjunctive, leaving 78 in error and giving an error rate of 79%.
Of the 78 in error ...

Posted: **Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:08 pm**

finlay wrote:There were a couple where he said like "actually this one's fine", but I can't work out what criteria he's using. I caught something about requiring a context, but it didn't really make sense.

I think that he thinks it's never right to use a perfect except in contrast. Like, you can say, "I had washed the dishes by the time she arrived" but not just "I had washed the dishes." So short example sentences (of the kind you find in, well, grammar books) are always incorrect because they have nothing to contrast with.

Posted: **Mon Mar 09, 2015 5:56 pm**

It sounds like he thinks the only perfect is the pluperfect.

Perfects are hard to describe, but the weird thing is that he doesn't seem to object to the present perfect. E.g.

John has arrived.

From his remarks, he has no problem with this. And yet what does he think the past tense of this expression would be?

The point being, if he thinks the only valid past perfect is the pluperfect, then what he really doesn't understand is the present perfect.

Posted: **Sun Mar 15, 2015 5:38 pm**

Neon is on point. The guy says that 'I had eaten" is NOT past perfect, not without context', so what he wants is an explicit reference to the more recent past. More specifically, 'The past perfect is commonly introduced by "when"', and it really does have to be "when":

I had had my textbook for two weeks when school started. Right.
I had had the idea for a long time before I wrote the book. Wrong.

Sic.

As for the present:

"Look, they have painted the door." WRONG. Look, they PAINTED the door.
"The Captain has swum. (present perfect)" No, G.G, NOT present perfect.

So whether present or past, no 'when', not perfect. Whatever you say, Brad; preach it, brother.

(No, really. I've read so many of these damn things that I think I'm actually starting to believe him. I need to take a break and return to reality.)

Posted: **Tue Mar 31, 2015 6:07 pm**

Quackery either way.

Posted: **Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:23 am**

This is old, but a connection between Indians (?) and Norse people:
http://www.thelocal.se/discuss/index.ph ... 10851&st=0 (the weird stuff starts at post #12).

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