Well, yes, it’s agglutinative. But the dipthongs are regular and there aren’t too many of them, and letters have pretty-much constant sound values and generally aren’t silent or dependent upon their position in the word for their sounds. A Welsh place name like that one you gave can be sounded out, maybe not quickly,…

Spanish is very rational in its spelling and I don’t recall too many irregular verbs.

It’s difficult to relate the spelling to pronunciation for the Goidelic branch (Irish and Highland Gaelic) of the Celtic languages. However, the Brythonic branch languages (Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx) aren’t so bad - at least Welsh isn’t. Cornish is extinct, so that’s not a consideration, and I don’t think that…

Yes. Someone taught the Erse to write about 1500 years ago, and they took to it like fish to the trees. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told them about spelling for another couple of centuries.

“Consider, then, the modern soul as the unique neuronal-synaptic signature integrating brain and body through a complex electrochemical flow of neurotransmitters. Each person has one, and they are all different,”

Wouldn’t that be funny. Peramorphosis is not actually your friend.

Yeah, a real tendency towards dualism here - the body is fallible and decaying, the mind is pristine and potentially immortal.

That really depends upon what you mean by “a significant answer”. There’s plenty of purely curiosity-driven research going on, that might never have any commercial applications.

So logical once you think about it. Thanks.

That’s how I feel about native pharmacoepia - how did they ever discover what these plants did, and how to prepare them? Northern Eurasian shamans apparently isolated the effects of fly agaric by eating the mushrooms, converting the precursor into the active component in their livers, pissing into a cup, and then…

I imagine that their primary motivation was to let something that was causing pain out - true, they would have no idea about pressure, but you can imagine all sorts of entities causing havoc within the skull of someone suffering from, say, a subdural haematoma, and in giving it a route to leave the sufferer’s skull…

No telling for sure, but the custom would have died out pretty quickly if it hadn’t yielded some positive results.

No, trepanation just acts to relieve pressure on the brain - it’s not for removing brain tissue. At least when pre-industrial cultures did it.

They were roundworms. And no, they were found when he was in surgery for his perforated intestines. I imagine that they’ve put him on a vermifuge, though, or will once he’s recovered from his surgery.

Plus they shit on my lawn and rose beds.

Consider this to be a form of cat eucharist.

My parents used to feed the cats just before bedtime, then shut them in the rear of the house. With me.

The chances of a Charles and Di reunion are even smaller now.

We live in the Age of Brass.

Barnes also wrote a couple of good alternate history novels (a duology), a lot more recently, if that’s something that you like: