The CBB

Oh for... do you never even look at the pictures you post, Ahzoh? This isn't the first time you've done this. The picture you posted quite clearly says secondary wing feathers , i.e. the short ones. If you instead look at the picture of primary wing feathers on the very same site , you will see: htt...

The thing that seems odd to me: why would America grant it independence after the war, rather than just making it part of the empire? [Like the Marianas, the Ryukyus, Wake, Midway, Micronesia, etc] America didn't start surrendering its conquests until the 1970s, and in some cases then only due to Vi...

...seriously, we're arguing about this now? In standard English, the two original sentences are completely different in meaning and largely unambiguous (though colloquially the first sentence might sometimes be used in place of the second; the second really is unambiguous). They can be parsed very s...

Accepting that, I don't think there's anything wrong with maintaining a simplified 2D map, if only so we can get an intuitive sense of where things are relative to each other. ...my point was that a 2D map would give you no sense at all where things were relative to one another. It is, quite litera...

...hate to break it to you, but the galaxy is not flat. It's, what, 10 to 40 thousand light years from top to bottom?

Just for a sense of scale, there are one thousand four hundred star systems within a mere fifty light years of earth.

I'd say "the Earth" is just another artifact of the orthographic tendency of English to add capital letters everything. I'd say it really just is, literally, "the earth", capital letter or not, synonymous with "our planet". In Swedish too the planet is literally called...

Why do any of you think there are any restrictions on the use of articles with proper nouns in english? The rule seems to be 'they should be used when appropriate'. It's just that in most cases proper nouns refer to something there is only one of, so articles are not appropriate. Anyway, the logicia...

Could an empire last thousands of years (~3000 or ~4000)? Are there tactics/factors that could help make an empire last and endure such a long timespan? Like geography, cultural unity, etc. This is an unanswerable philosophical question. All things change over time. Stasis is impossible (and appear...

Since it comes up so often, I thought it might be helpful to give a fuller explanation of 'what is gender for'. First things first: most things in language are 'for' a lot of different purposes. Gender has many advantages. In some languages, only some of those advantages are made use of - not all ge...

Thanks. The whole getting people to question my logic and make me work out all of the kinks. I greatly appreciate it. So say that they are humanoid but at the same time their muscles are strong and lean, their bones and total body weight are say only 90lbs at an average of 5ft tall, 5ft 5in max. An...

I don't really understand your intentions. Is this just anime stuff, or do you want it to make sense? If it's meant to make sense, how is a leading power in the galaxy having half its male population continually stolen? [and why none of its females?] That's like imagining that America is still Ameri...

What on earth is this nautical obsession for? If you want a conworld about ships and aeroplanes, why not put it on an ocean, rather than in space? What possible reason could there be for every alien culture to design all their spaceships to look like early-20th-century battleships from earth?

Proto-Tocharian was centum. Tocharian B then further merged in the labiovelars, while Tocharian A may or may not have done so, or may have done so with exceptions.


And yes, a nom/acc case is called either 'nominative' or 'direct' (particularly when contrast with a single 'oblique' case).

You will not get cities of pastoralists in an arid climate.

Well, you won't get cities of pastoralists anywhere, but certainly not in an arid climate. The more arid, the fewer plants. The fewer plants, the more you need to keep moving to provide fresh food for your animals.

There are a lot of animal words in most languages, so 1 is almost certain to be true (enough animal words and enough non-animal words and sooner or later there will be homophones). And all cultures need to talk about some things more often than other things that could be given a similar description,...

Nothing that radical in this one (I'm planning a few more - but don't wait up for proper grammars or anything): Padra indie, q’anasti cial, Indó vie asti saupte bizon U prazjid vie ve bizon Vul vie fare bizon Qio e cial, tsio sur ter ango. Doude pa indie ciudauge. Ka partoude pegi Qio indí partó ea ...

... I don't know what kind of religion you want to write about either. That's... really something you need to decide for yourself. I suppose one factual starting point would be time period. Pre-civilisation, they're unlikely to have much 'religion' - animism, shamanism, numinalism. Rituals develop, ...

Are there any English examples of a direct object not being a patient? "I saw the man". Or even more so: "I imagined the man". "I ran all the way". "I remember you". "I cheered the parade as it passed" "I celebrated the birth of Jesus" &qu...

Do more rivers form on the side of a mountain that receives the most moisture (that is, the side facing the prevailing winds, opposite of the rain shadow)? Yes, in general places that are wetter have more water. Conversely, it's generally true that drier places have less water. Places where there's...

masako wrote:

Khemehekis wrote:See the problem?

Yes. You didn't use your deductive reasoning.

The problem is, grammar is not derived from deductive reasoning. That's why different languages work differently, grammatically speaking.