Zompist Bboard Again

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Tue Jun 18, 2019 4:21 pm I just realized i accidentally made the words for to die and to exist phonetic palindromes -___________-

In one language family I'm working on, to die and to live alliterate in most of the daughter languages.

Everywhere I see desert, I see a native culture utilizing agriculture. Even Atamaca desert. Isn't the point of desert is you can't easily grow a plant? The only place I see a culture without agriculture in desert is Australia and South Africa. Southwestern US is partial answer, because you can get ...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2019 9:57 pm I've heard the true Boston accent, but its declining and often misidentified as something else. I grew up thinking of it as uneducated

There's definitely been a stigma attached to the Boston accent, albeit not quite so strong as the one attached to Southern accents.

The stereotypical one--the non-rhotic accent that merges COT-CAUGHT as COT. No one I've known or heard from Boston has actually had that accent, though. It seems to me that this stereotype may come from New York specifically. The Boston accent is famous for merging LOT into THOUGHT, as a rounded vo...

I'm sure if you had "bought" and "boat" written on paper and asked various Americans which word had the same vowel sound as in "bore" most would say "boat", not "bought". There are Americans who use the vowel they have in THOUGHT in "aural"...

If I heard someone say "ch[ɑ]colate," I'd assume they were from B[ɑ]ston. Otherwise I've never heard "chocolate" with LOT. What Boston are you thinking of? The dialect there - the one I hear when I'm up there, at least, and from the people I know who grew up there (aside from th...

I'm from Florida and have the same vowel in "chocolate" and "lot". I have the cot-caught merger and so there's no difference between the LOT and THOUGHT sets for me. What part of Florida? I haven't noticed much COT-CAUGHT merger in my area, but my area is also made up predominan...

Also, since I ended up having a very sane and basic phonemic inventory with my latest changes, I'm trying to think of a way to spice it up with something crazy without resorting to the usual suspects (i.e. ɬ, ejectives, pharyngeals and so on). To this end, I'm probably going to go with /ŋ/ in onset...

The lot-cloth split is universal among North American varieties that lack that cot-caught merger as far as I know. Also North American English extended the lot-cloth split to positions before velars in "long", "dog" and "chocolate" which never occurred in the British v...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 10:20 am Today I spent a dumb amount of time trying to determine whether I normally say "cilantro" in two syllables or three. Still not sure.

Definitely three for me: [sɪ.ˈɫɑn.tɹ̱ˁəʊ̯].

microwave [ˈmɐɪ̯kɹ̱ˁʷɵˌwɛɪ̯v]
microphone [ˈmɐɪ̯kɹ̱ˁʷəˌfəʊ̯n]
infrared [ˌɪnfɹ̱ˁʷəˈɹ̱ˁʷɛʔd̚]
children [ˈʧʰɪɫdɹ̱ˁn̩]

hydrogen [ˈhaɪ̯dɹ̱ˁʷɵʤn̩]
nitrogen [ˈnɐɪ̯tɹ̱ˁʷɵʤn̩]

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log! This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from get...

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log! This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from get...

Not exactly what you're looking for (maybe exactly what you're not looking for), but (some?) Semitic languages have aspect-marked participles that occupy a very nebulous space between adjective and verb (in Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew, probably other Semitic languages as well, they can be a claus...

Max1461 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 2:54 amOn another note, how does lf ls lx ll > ɬ(ː) look?

Perfectly plausible.

The elves might be immune to a lot of diseases that hurt humans, so long as the pathogens carrying the diseases can survive at 98F but not at 105F. (That's what fever is for, after all.) So they might never get a flu. On the other hand, if their biology is the same as Earth's, they have less room t...

In my fantasy IP, elves have a higher average body temperature of ~105°F (or 44.5°C), with a correspondingly higher metabolism. Biology not really being my strong suit, are there other implications of this that I should be thinking about? A few things I have considered: Elves require a higher calori...

Akiatu has a fairly consequential pride concept, kaɲi , which currently has glosses pride , honour , strength , power . Nothing so far for love , words in that semantic neighbourhood are waiting for a fair bit of work on Akiatu society/culture. One of the unnamed languages I'm working on also has a...

What about the interjection of disgust "ew"? I know for me the nucleus is tends to be drawn out expressively, but plain [iu̯] is certainly a possible realization, especially in certain contexts. (Granted, that's an extra-linguistic word, which tend to have phones not present in a language...