The CBB

lurker wrote: ↑01 Oct 2024 22:51 Because yinirh eyes act like radio receivers rather than cameras, they can safely stare at the sun.

But how do they image? For imaging, you need some kind of "retina", and a focussing optical system, and that would most likely make staring at the sun cause damage to the eyes.

I have just found a paper that suggests that Chinese wáng 'king' may be a loanword from an IE language and related to Greek (w)ánax . I am not sure whether this really makes sense, though. But it doesn't sound implausible, and the author, Douglas Q. Adams, is a respectabe Indo-Europeanist. Thinking ...

HolyHandGrenade! wrote: ↑24 Sep 2024 14:33 Is there such thing as inflection for definiteness as well as case?

Romanian does it (though with a rudimentary case system), as well as Albanian, and AFAIK also Icelandic.

I have no academic background in linguistics - it is all self-taught from textbooks (which I checked out from the local university library), various web sites (including Wikipedia) and practical conlanging. In fact, it was my conlanging which got me into linguistics.

Ran across in silico , which context seems to indicate means simulated especially simulating scientific experiments. Coined presumably by analogy with in vitro and in vivo . The Latin nerd in me wishes to point out that the correct word would be in silic i o . Concurred. And if you really want to g...

lurker wrote: ↑09 Sep 2024 21:45 Ran across in silico, which context seems to indicate means simulated especially simulating scientific experiments. Coined presumably by analogy with in vitro and in vivo.

The Latin nerd in me wishes to point out that the correct word would be in silicio.

Concurred.

From me, too!

Hapy Birthday, Khemehekis, GoshDiggityDangit, Yiuel and Ossicone!

Arayaz wrote: ↑07 Sep 2024 17:35 It's my birthday today! I'm fourteen now.

Congratulations and best wishes!

Now I want to revisit the Crimean Saxon project I had, but something is bugging me. I wanted to lift vowel harmony from Crimean Tatar, which should be easy, but there's a vowel that doesn't exist in Old English that exists in Crimean Tatar and vice versa. (/æ/ is absent from Tatar and the language ...

Creyeditor wrote: ↑05 Sep 2024 13:08 That's not true. Mathematicians have come up with systens that allow division by zero. They just lack many interesting and practical properties, IIRC. It's called wheel theory.

OK. As I said. I am not a mathematician.

Do yinrih have numbers that humans see as forbidden, or vice versa? For example, yinrih can accept division by zero, but consider an infinity as unexisting. I am not lurker, but the laws of mathematics are truly universal - they hold in every conceivable universe. And these laws mandate that divisi...

Do yinrih have numbers that humans see as forbidden, or vice versa? For example, yinrih can accept division by zero, but consider an infinity as unexisting. I am not lurker, but the laws of mathematics are truly universal - they hold in every conceivable universe. And these laws mandate that divisi...

I once sketched (but didn't work out in detail) a magic system for my Elves, before I decided that there was no evidence that magic worked, so it is at least what the Elves believed how magic worked. The idea is that magic works by manipulating morphic fields (as proposed by Rupert Sheldrake) by mea...

Khemehekis wrote: ↑02 Sep 2024 05:47 Well, it happened. I tweaked somigos (introspection) to create soumoigz, a verb meaning "to introspect".

Kankonian is now at 100,000 words! Tied with Mmavvii! Woo-hoo!

Congratulations!

I don't watch serials, but I watched Dune and Dune 2 in cinema, and I read a lot of fantasy book (I'm reading Temeraire series today). In the scene in Dune: Part Two where Paul Atreides rides a sandworm for the first time in his life, I think I've heard someone shout "Timothée!" - which i...

TBPO wrote: ↑01 Sep 2024 15:48

lsd wrote: ↑01 Sep 2024 09:32 there are so many non-human races,
on earth, that are all sentient,
even if we're not interested in what they have to say...

What do you mean?

I think he refers to various animal species whose intelligence we tend to underestimate (or overestimate).

The verb "brinkiandjya" (lit: to have to occur) is one of those often encountered "agglutinations on-the-fly" in Itlani. It is unlikely to appear in any dictionary. 3SDL works exclusively like this, with a feeling of extreme freedom, that of being, at every moment of elocution, ...

To get back to the topic, my science fiction worldbuilding project "The Trellis", set a few hundred years in the future, will feature a "Celestial English", which, however, will not be much farther removed from today's English than today's English is from Shakespeare's English. T...

No really. I see this all the time in my conlangs (and I've seen a fair few of you guys complain about it too). LSD is saying that our own linguistic background can bias our conlanging. For example, I notice most conlangs here are VO. Three guesses why - we all can speak English. Surely, no conlang...