Zompist Bboard Again

So, something even more wild than even I thought we could see has gone down over the past weel. This day last week, in a session of the House of Commons, Boris Johnson threw out an actual far-right conspiracy theory at the Leader of the Opposition. Some background here ( deriving from the BBC's fact...

Updates! First, some "patch notes" for what's changed about the language since I last posted. The number of adverbial suffixes has been stripped down, with most being expressed by other means (a couple of which will be discussed below). The following suffixes remain: -pan 'distributive'; -...

I've noticed a little theme in a number of Almean languages regarding the encoding of reference, namely that there seems to be no requirement for there to be unambiguous personal pronouns, something I've noticed with Munkhâshi, Bhöɣetan and Elkarîl, but which I can't see attested anywhere in IRL hum...

A position of that which I'm sympathetic to is the Kabbalistic Jewish idea of tzimtzum, which as it's traditionally formulated seems to me to allow so-called natural evil on the basis that in order to even have any kind of creation separate from the pre-supposed perfection of God themself requires c...

I suppose if anyone's been wondering where I've been recently, well I finally have some news - having completed my master's at SOAS and had a few months aimless wondering/wandering, I managed to land a PhD position with funding at the University of Surrey in the field of historical morphology. Obvio...

Our British members seem to have given up on this thread Some of our British Members have been otherwise busy... but just in case anyone still reads it: what do you think about Johnson's current situation? I mean I honestly am glad that the scales are finally tipping against him, because it's been ...

It perhaps might be remembered that proto-Basque seems to have been relatively "labial poor", I recall at least from Trask Historical Linguistics discussing an example of how internal reconstruction suggests that proto-Basque had no *m at least (it being largely confined to loanwords, abs...

In fact, for betagin → letagin , The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation. If I'm reading this correctly and *detagin isn't attested, that seems bad. Why would b- assimilate? Maybe there's reason to...

In fact, for betagin → letagin , The Basque Language Academy gives a fairly solid etymological explanation as original *betagin assimilating to *detagin before lateralisation. So it looks like you've pulled a bunch of different words which appear to present a regular correspondence but actually seem...

For example, many Basque words have a prosthetic l- replacing the original initial consonant, usually a labial one. Some examples: letagin < betagin lezoin < pezoin laino < Hispano-Romance paño lanka < Hispano-Romance banca lerma < Hispano-Romance merma Meanings please (we're not all fluent in Basq...

Upturned Microscope cartoons, while funny, do not go very far in advancing the discussion. Far better would be if you could explain exactly how WeepingElf has misrepresented your argument in such a way as to resolve the misunderstanding. This isn't the first time he recurrs to chance resemblance to...

Mr Talskubilos, have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? I feel like that would be a good check on some of the wilder claims.

Wasn't there a time when some of the more subdued of British patriots took pride in the fact that their country wasn't that much into this kind of stuff? I mean, some of us would still like it to be that way. But no, it's part of the current Tory trend of aping American political culture in order t...

PIE certainly had a phonetic contrast between *e *a *o, since laryngeal colouring preceded Anatolian's departure from the family, and hence was a feature of PIE. The convention of not writing it is both anachronistic and for morphonological reasons. Pre-PIE, on the other hand, if native PIE *a alwa...

Apparently, at least in standard Odia, words never end in a consonant, always in a vowel, and the default vowel is always [ɔ], so e.g. Bhuvaneswar (the capital of Odisha) is [bʱubɔneswɔɾɔ]. This isn't really all that surprising, I suppose this would have been the state of Magadhi Prakrit too, only ...

Hi all, I haven't been posting here in a far too long while, but the idea for this popped into my head last night and I just had to share something of what I've been thinking about. So as some IRL context, there's a bit of a debate with some languages families of the world, particularly Salishan, Wa...

I will note that English apical alveolar stops are frequently some degree of palatalised anyway, especially in British English. Often when you do the phonetic analysis you find that it's frequently better to transcribe it as something like [ts] than as [t]. Similarly, one can point to borrowing pat...

If thats so, then why would Dr. McWhorter (in What language is ) say that the periphrasic(sp) "do" is found in English and Celtic languages (as well as an Italian dialect)...but not in other Germanic languages? Whelp turns out I was slightly incorrect and there is some do-support in Britt...

My conjecture is that an English without the Norman and French invasions woudn't be all that different from OTL English outside of the lexicon. Like sure, Norse contact may have started the trend in some paradigmatic levelling in nominals, but what really killed the old case and declension system fo...

It should be noted that animal vocabulary in particular is one of the parts of the PIE lexicon which is most prone to somewhat idiosyncratic extensions and reformations. For example there's a relatively frequent -k- suffix which turns up on some words in a number of branches, seen in for exampe *neh...