SamanticsThree polemics against linguistic descriptivism
I used to spend a lot of time on r/linguisticshumor, doing what every grown-up on Reddit inevitably does. (That is, disagreeing with everything, but smugly.) Recently I got it into my head that shouting at the never-ebbing tide of first-year linguistics students was a waste of my life, so rather than continue piling bricks in an ever-eroding wall, I'll just post them here, and you can throw them through your own window (or your enemies' windows) at your leisure. […]
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27 days ago
On the fittedness of computing environments
Lately I've been on a retro-computing binge, revisiting some past nostalgias (and borrowed nostalgias) with fresh eyes. I don't usually think highly of nostalgics in the purest sense—I've always thought of rose-tinted glasses as an obstacle to true appreciation of history rather than a justification for it—but this time I took a long, hard look at the technology of my own childhood for once, particularly the quirks of 90s Windows, from 3.0 through 2000, and in the midst of this I've come to realise that the standard terminology we use to describe the experience of using old computers is missing an axis, one that's worth defining. […]
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27 days ago
Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine
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2 years ago
Please purify every single last dram Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine I'm begging of you, bind to all that you can […] Ex foris
There was some missing code in how the related words section was displayed. It should be spiffy now. in thread: Bugs, Requests, and Changes
Looks like a good start. This is called a philosophical language; you might be interested to see how others have approached the problems inherent in philosophical languages, like how to organize concepts, or how referring to specific objects can require really long words. Many languages of this category are designed to seek absolute, canonical names for all things, and they run into some special problems—like how to avoid cultural bias, how to refer to unknown individuals, how to deal with numbering sequences that contain spurious or lost entries,1 and how to refer to paradoxical objects.2
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1. Are you still the third child in your family after your older siblings die? What about step-siblings, or illegitimate children? Even if you come up with a strategy to solve these problems—which would require making a culturally-based value judgement about what constitutes family membership, and is hence not neutral—how can you possibly account for miscarriages your parents never told you about? Only with total knowledge of the universe can all sequence-numbering issues reliably be avoided. 2. Everything good in life can be ruined by a carefully-constructed diagonal argument. in thread: Money Thread
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 Rhetorica Your Writing System Sucks last seen: 27 days ago posts: 1292 Kelatetía send message find forum posts
Creator of Lilitika and co-creator of Thet.
I started this site in late 2013 to give the conlanging and conworlding community a specially-tailored way to showcase projects. I don't do quite as much administrating any more, and sometimes I can be scarce because I have so many other big responsibilities, but I try to maintain and improve things whenever I can. See my profile page elsewhere for more information about me. | ||||||||||||||||
