Zompist Bboard Again

Sadly, those scrolls turned out to be ordinary Greek. Aside from unpredictable discoveries of inscribed pottery in a field somewhere, I think there is a decent chance that PIE languages around the edges of the classical world will have more attestations some day, simply because there is undoubtedly ...

Superficially, sure. But it is used to introduce any information considered pertinent, whether there is a clear causal relationship or not. Basically, law makers use it at the beginning of a law as bullet points, to list their motivations for making the law or beliefs about the law. The semantic con...

Do natlangs tend to give names more leeway in regards to phonology and their syllable structures than other nouns? Or maybe less ("only endings 1 and 2 are used for names, everything else is a normal noun")? I assume you mean borrowed names. Native names usually just pattern as ordinary n...

Perhaps we could add to the heap the practice of US legal English using "whereas" to mean "here begins a sentence."

They're probably referring to the fact that English pronouns are (approximately) "nominative," "possessive," and "everything else," with the everything else being all kinds of objects, plus isolated uses like clefting and exclamations. English pidgins always, AFAIK, ana...

OK, but again, whatever mining it's doing of abstracts, I have to replicate it to get the actual paper. It's basically performing a search, then giving me hints about what I should be typing into the search bar in my other browser tab. No link, no title, not even a DOI! Why did they design it like t...

If I have to go to academia.edu and type "African pleistocene migration" to get the paper, how is this saving me any steps? That's what I was doing before.

Faz com los Scotes, e ecrív Z.
[fas̻ kɵ̃m los̺ ‘s̺kɵ.te e ek.’ɾiv s̻e]
Do like the Scots, and write Z.

Can you even be precise about how many registers a language has? I would have thought whether a language has, say, three or four registers is a matter of interpretation. This is especially true of a language like English which does not really have grammaticalized registers. 'snot true. Elipsis of f...

Well, of course it's a matter of interpretation. Joos interpreted the English data as falling into five categories based on a set of criteria. Different criteria would probably produce two registers, or a hundred. It's like asking how many colors there are. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean ...

The migration of Y-DNA haplogroup I may be the earliest back-migration that leaves large-scale evidence in modern populations of North Africa. https://genome.cshlp.org/content/18/5/830.full.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1181996/ I haven't found anything specifically dating the mig...

How many distinct registers do you all build into your conlangs? I've done up to three, but most often zero. Martin Joos believed there were five registers in English, but I've never worked out that many for a conlang in any detail.

You're both right. The noun and the adposition together form a unit of meaning. One preposition can mean different things with different cases, and one case can mean different things with different prepositions. A good example is Latin in tabernā . The preposition means location in, not motion towar...

Europe does indeed have a paucity of examples to look to. Latin used few prepositions with the genitive and dative, and most modern languages in Western Europe don't have a separate dative anyway. The best example is probably German, which uses in differently for accusative and dative. We get more e...

Yet una lengua Romana de Uest, deisde las vessances de los Pirineos de nord. Cre que yet levemént avoreda. /jet `un.na `lɨ̃g.gwa ɾɵ.`man.na de wɨs̺t `deis̺.de las̺ vɨ.`s̺ã.s̻e de lɵs̺ pi.ɾi.`ne.o de nɵɾd... kɾe ke jet lɨ.vɨ.`mɨ̃t a.vɵ.`ɾɨd.da/ It's a Western Romance language, from the slopes of the...

OK, I have a question for any French experts out there: when and how did mathématiques become plural? And is it related in any way to the English phenomenon? As I understand it, the original word in Latinized Greek is mathematica, in the neuter plural. This neuter plural was then reanalyzed as a fem...

Well, surely that's true for any version of any language? Whether PIE had uvulars or not, something came before it. PIE usually means the PIE that was spoken the moment before Annie Anatolia and Steve Steppe parted company. It could have lasted a day. If you're interested in internal reconstruction,...

If I had a precise enough laser that I could target individual neurons, I would delete the phrase "Celtic Substrate" from the minds of every linguist in the world.

EDIT: actually, "Celtic" is optional.

"That argument pretty much can be summed up as "the less typologically plausible phonology should be favored specifically because we don't see it any daughters", TBH." I think a more fair paraphrase is that a stable situation like /k q/ would be more likely to survive, so it stra...

Otto, you know there is no such thing as "official status" in the US, right? As for the rest of it, I'm not sure who you think was coming across the Atlantic who didn't sound like a freak. I already mentioned Ulster Scots, who were an absolute majority of settler colonists in many areas. T...