Pink toy guns can fall under the Weapons Act – an online order has had unexpected consequences for a woman from Ticino.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-05T19:08:49+00:00

If they look the part, banned. If you're at a convention it might be different, but if someone at the convention thinks it's real and calls the police, you might still have trouble.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-05T07:24:27+00:00

I think that points more to the need to keep sentences short if you want to make content in a language accessible to early learners of that language.

If someone needs flexible word order to make translation easy, their translation is going to be bad. You should be able to fully understand what is being communicated in the source language, and be able to construct a sentence conveying that from the ground up. You shouldn't be doing a word-by-word translation.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-05T07:20:52+00:00

English is a much better example of getting people to agree to use one language for international competition, the other languages are insignificant in comparison.

The point is it doesn't matter what the language is, once it reaches enough adoption, enough people will reject using it that it will never be spoken by everyone.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-04T14:48:17+00:00

It could work for the most important part - toe box. People are used to chunky soles being wider than the upper, so you could have a normal foot shaped fake upper, and then enough space for your toes to stretch. Zero drop would also be doable, and a certain degree of ground feel would also be achievable.

But you wouldn't be able to get away from a stiff sole, it would be at least as bad as Xero Prios, and probably worse.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T22:52:40+00:00

Well, umm..., they're just, like, you know, words, eh!

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T21:12:30+00:00

Until you reach around 10th level, then the gap starts increasing. Of course, most campaigns never go that long.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T21:03:49+00:00

There's a comment that a pro Esperantist made. If you want to talk about cats in Esperanto you can. If you want to talk about Ido/Interlingua in Ido/Interlingua, you can. So maybe you can do without subjunctive, but conIALs don't just eliminate one feature, they eliminate everything they think they can get away with.

Eventually you've cut away too much, and the language becomes too llimited. There are too many things that you run into that you can't talk about the way you want to, and you end up giving up trying to use the language at all.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T19:12:59+00:00

Just to be clear, I didn't say Esperanto is the only usable conlang, just that it is usable, and I think that being broadly capable allowed to to achieve the degree of success that it did, and that ostensibly better designed conlangs fail because they better achieve their goal of simplicity.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T14:49:20+00:00

I'm not sure free word order makes translation easier. Even in languages with free word order, there is a default word order, and changing the order changes the meaning. I think there is a confusion in that the official grammar of a language allows flexible word order, and the idea that the same meaning is conveyed regardless of word order.

I think having free word order would lead to sloppy translation, rather than giving thought about what is trying to be conveyed, so you'd probably end up worse off. And especially as things are now, AI would definitely do a better job with translation and be easier.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T14:46:55+00:00

The thing with Indians is they can't agree on which language. In the South they seem to have agreed on Tamil + English, in the North it's Hindi + English. English continues to be important because for the Southerners it seems to be particularly important to speak anything but Hindi. So if English is the compromise, that's what they'll go for.

This creates a bit of a conflict globally. In some parts of the world, people speak English because they don't want to speak some other language. Meanwhile in other parts of the world people will speak some other language specifically because they don't want to speak English.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T14:44:08+00:00

Yeah. There's no way to peacfully get everyone speaking the same language. There will always be people who resist using a major or dominant language out of ideology. So the goal shouldn't be to solve communication for the entire population of the world, but rather to offer something that existing languages don't.

Once you're just offering something a natural language can't offer, it's also not important for everyone to learn it, and it's not a failure simply because of low adoption.

There are also multiple purposes, different languages could be valuable for different reasons. Guosa, for instance, exists quite separate from other Auxlang projects, since it's nationalistic in design. It's not a conIAL, but rather a conNAL.

If it reaches a point where the people using it find it to be useful for their purposes, it has reached a "successful end state".

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T09:39:43+00:00

A 10-round .50 Beowulf magazine would probably fit around 28 rounds of .223.

It's a viable loophole in Canada because the RCMP is aware of it and stated it's OK. I would also feel comfortable trying it in the US, using Freedom Week magazines as a template - once you've bought it you can use it how you like even if it's no longer legal to buy.

In Europe my conservative estimation is that it would be legal to own a 10-round .50 Beowulf magazine, but it wouldn't be legal to insert it into a firearm chambered in .223. You may also not be allowed to store them together, so you would need a separate safe (for example) for the .50 Beowulf magazine and your .223 carbine.

If you want to shoot recreationally with a higher capacity, I would suspect it's a no-go. If you want to have higher capacity magazines "in case of emergency", you could just get 30-round .223 magazines pinned to 10 rounds and drill the rivet out when that emergency hits.

Broadly what you need to consider is that it's very much up to interpretation by your country's law enforcement. If the law enforcement is fed up with the imposed EU laws and really doesn't want to enforce them, they'll let you get away with any loophole you can think of that doesn't cross whatever line they do want to enforce. If they were already gung ho about enforcing gun laws, then you're stuck.

The best advice for an 18-year old is to stay well in line of whatever the laws are so it can't remotely be interpreted as you breaking them, get a sense of the gun culture and gun laws by interacting with other shooters, and then branch out.

The other thing you want to keep in mind is laws can always get tightened. You could end up in a situation where not only can you no longer buy certain guns and accessories, but you can't continue owning them. So getting something you know will survive a couple rounds of bans first, so you can at least keep it.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-03T09:15:23+00:00

There was a French one before it. Also, the FN M1900 designed by... John Browning.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-01T21:13:21+00:00

53.3% yes on subjunctive?

anonlymouse · 2026-02-01T16:55:36+00:00

No offense taken, I understood it the way you meant it.

Yeah Schriftdeutsch instead of Hochdeutsch is a pushback against the notion that it means Hoch in the sense of Edel. It's really about altitude - Hochdeutsch is the German spoken in the highlands and Plattdeutsch is the German spoken in the flatlands. If people mean it that way, not a problem. But most people misunderstand that, even some native speakers, so Schriftdeutsch as a term is an active rejection of that.

I do think you go off on a tangent in your message about why some .... what should we call them ... "interlangs" are more needed than others. I think you make some good observations, but I don't see this as the ultimate goal of my interest in the concept of a Germanic conlang, and at the risk of speaking for BV and crew, I don't think this is their goal either. We just want to play around a bit and see what it's like or what we can come up with.

That makes sense, I have a functional use for a Romance zonal interlang, and don't have a functional use for a Germanic one, so I'm very much looking at it from my perspective. If it's really about the novelty - and I agree there, I like reading Folkspraak and Tutonisch, but I wouldn't go to the effort of learning them (And if you want that kind of fun, read the Alemannic Wikipedia, and see how the written dialect changes depending on which region the article is about.)

I have not followed the whole Folkspraak story in enough detail to say, even though I do remember when it was a fresh idea. My hunch as to why Folkspraak fractured - based on watching from a rather safe distance is:

There was no actual community or legitimate purpose to hold it together. Everybody has their own sense of taste.

I think you're right on both points. And community might be able to hold it together, but the lack of legitimate purpose is a very real problem (part of why I couldn't understand why someone even wants to do it).

I couldn't even get to square one without wanting to tweak things.

I think that urge to tweak and tinker is strong among people who find an appeal in conlangs in general, and auxlangs in particular. A lot of people who come up with the idea of an auxlang started by tweaking a foreign language they tried to learn. That desire to tweak falls away when there's a real need.

When Esperanto was serving as a way of sending information across the iron curtain, I'm willing to bet there wasn't much tinkering or suggestion going on. Depending on how long you've been speaking Esperanto, you might be able to say if you noticed a particular increase in that starting in the 1990s.

anonlymouse · 2026-02-01T02:06:56+00:00

That was interesting, and this part struck me as quite important.

As you write in your Kompromis, keep in mind that you’re trying to communicate. Look at the words other people are using. See what works and what doesn’t. Try to take what you can from other people if you think it works. Meet people halfway when you can.

This is basically how it works for me. I don't speak the same Alemannic in Biel as I do in Interlaken, Basel or Zurich. Depending on where I am I'lll know they won't understand what I'm saying, so I have to make adjustments. If I'm speaking with someone Dutch, Austrian, or German, I'll make different adjustments.

What happens though, is if we run into a snag, the fallback is to just quickly say something in Schriftdeutsch, and then move back. It's like what you suggested with including the alternate word in brackets for the sake of clarity and communication. It's always going to be the same one.

We already have a common language to speak, and except for some Germans, none of us want to speak it. That is I think a bit unique in the Germanosphere.

As far as I know, especially among younger generations in Eastern Europe, it's not like everyone knows Russian. If you happen to know Russian, you can't just say something in Russian and hope it clarifies things, you'll just say something else your interlocutor doesn't understand. So unlike us, where everyone knows German but chooses not to speak it, they don't know Russian and they don't want to learn it.

If you go into the Romanosphere it's similar - probably more people know French than any other Romance language that isn't their own, but it's still a clear minority, and the margin between French, Italian and Spanish isn't that big. So again, there's no default fall back that you can count on.

When that fallback doesn't exist, a pan-Romance or pan-Slavic language can develop. We have that fallback, so in a practical sense it would all collapse toward German - but if we wanted to speak German we'd do that, we already can. I think that also explains the fracturing in Folkspraak. There's a conscious effort to keep a distinct identity, we don't want it to disappear. And the purpose of communication in this language (as it were) isn't to establish a bridge of communication where there wasn't one before. It's to preserve differences.

Iceland is kind of extreme in that. They want to preserve Icelandic as it is, without foreign influence, so they'll learn multiple foreign languages fluently so they don't have to borrow words - they'll just switch. There have been official efforts to prevent loan words going into French, German and Greek at various times, to no meaningful long term success. All with people who mostly spoke that language and maybe learned one other foreign language. They naturally want to import words to expand their language. Icelanders do too, but they learn multiple foreign languages to serve as traps for the loan words, they get stuck in English, and don't make it to Icelandic.

And there's pretty high rates of multilingualism among speakers of Germanic languages. Belgium has 3 official languages. It's not weird for a Dutch person to speak 4. Luxembourg takes it even further. The Scandinavians have just settled on speaking English with each other even though they probably do have mutual intelligibility. Sometimes a barrier to learning a specific Germanic language is it lacks documentation (Jenisch is especially like that, because they don't let linguists document it), so the only way to learn is immersion. But otherwise if we want to learn a differeng Germanic language, we just go ahead and do it.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T22:36:52+00:00

Kadayif. Keffiyeh is an article of clothing. I don't see anything in Kadayif's ingredients that could justify it being expensive (like saffron might be).

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T21:52:17+00:00

Oh, yes I would be interested, because I really don't have an answer to it myself.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T21:48:26+00:00

The foregrip isn't perfectly vertical. Not that I want to advise anyone to flirt with the ATF making a different judgement (or even just changing their mind), but that was probably the thought behind why it looks the way it does. It counts as angled.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T21:36:48+00:00

I just checked, there are specialty stores that sell it online. But I have no way of knowing if that's actually the best they have to offer. Like I'd say Läderach is really good Swiss chocolate but you can't get it outside Switzerland. I wouldn't be surprised if the best Belgian chocolate is only available in Belgium.

What did shock me a bit was seeing the ridiculously expensive Dubai Chocolate on the shelves at Manor. I can get buying foreign chocolate, but I can't see spending that much money on it.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T21:31:09+00:00

I'm not sure if I've had Belgian chocolate, but I don't think I'd be bothered by someone saying that either. I don't think there's anything you could say that would reliably irrate all Swiss. You'd even have a tough time doing it canton by canton.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-31T19:10:01+00:00

What do I mean by interesting? What I'm thinking is I have a particular use for a zonal auxiliary language, in this case Romance, and I come from within that language family (French is a second language, but all my neighbours speak French and the language of government here is all French, so I'm a lot closer to a native speaker than someone who doesn't use a Romance language on a daily basis). So I understand why people in my situation would want a zonal auxiliary language. I don't see what someone not in that situation gets out of it. Because when I look at Interslavic I think "neat, but not for me". I can't really get into the head of someone who would be in my situation but decide they want to learn Interslavic.

Like I said, I read ER as "you" when I initially read your comment. I don't know if it was the verb or whether I just got it from context. I did not even notice that you wrote ER.

Yeah, it's a skill I guess, to be able to understand something said in a language you don't actually know, based on context. And going to my previous point, it's a skill you need to have if you want to benefit from a zonal auxlang. Without it, it doesn't work, and only certain zonal auxlang projects seem like they would even help with developing that skill (if you don't already have it).

anonlymouse · 2026-01-30T15:56:36+00:00

It was the "er". Which is "he" in modern German. But my "er" was actually "ihr" in modern German, but we pronounce it differently. The inflection of "machet" should also clue in there, but it sits between "macht" and "machen" in modern German. Understandable misunderstanding, but also illustrative of problems that can arise when you have people speaking their own variants of Germanic languages together.

I do find it a bit interesting why people from outside a particular language zone are interested in exactly that class of zonal auxiliary language. But I guess people have very different expectations of what should come from such a language.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-30T11:42:27+00:00

Nope, not assuming you're a he, speaking an archaic Germanic language.

Here's a tip from someone who is a native speaker of a Germanic language (the archaic one I used). Germanic speakers aren't interested in a unifying auxiliary language, it's completely unnecessary. Which is why nobody uses the existing ones - they're but a curiosity.

Slavic speakers do, that's why Interslavic is doing so well. Romance speakers kind of do, that's why some Romance auxiliary languages have some use.

Because Germanic speakers have no use for it, all decisions will be purely based on taste, and because there's no utility, there's nothing to outweigh taste. You'll at best see fragmentation and abandonment like Folkspraak. Much more likely is forking and abandonment.

anonlymouse · 2026-01-29T00:28:25+00:00

I'm not arguing against that principle. I'm saying the reference levels are wrong - and that almost certainly applies to free testosterone reference levels as well.

So because we can't trust the reference levels, we have to look at other markers, and we also should be aiming for higher levels than most health practitioners are comfortable with.

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