Zompist Bboard Again

Acknowledging that the precise phonetic difference between vowels and semivowels my be debated and/or language dependent, does anyone have thoughts on the phonological question that initially sparked this?

To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than i . OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.) Why? Vowels are more open than consonants generally (indeed, that's pretty much the defining characteristic of vowels). Almost defini...

When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realiz...

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

Does anyone have a sense of what the sociolinguistic situation of Malay/Indonesian is? There are two mutually-intelligible standard forms (Standard Malay and Standard Indonesian), plus various dialects whose exact level of diversity I am unsure of. And I know that most speakers of Indonesian are L2 ...

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. Obvi...

I am back from my self-impose exile, born of shame at totally failing to deliver anything at all for the relay. Yknow, I could say I've had lot going on in life, which is true but it's also always true so... Anyway, I'll presumably try to finish my language anyway, even if uh, the date of relevancy ...

Do you have any other features of the conlang completed besides this sample text? Any phonology, grammar, vocabulary, internal history etc.? Any of those details would help us help you name it more easily.

The discussion above reminds me of something. Many years ago (probably a decade), I was browsing YouTube and came across a small channel on the topic of classical languages. It was this guy who I think had been self-studying Latin and Ancient Greek, and made videos about different study methods etc....

In the language learning thread: I think the year abroad was crucial for cementing it in my head and I’d like to do study abroad courses for all my other languages, too. Travel helps, but not that much if you don't spend a lot of time with monolinguals. (I figured my response was better suited for t...

I'm rather surprised you didn't open the thread with a particular topic or question. If I recall correctly, I was going to but then got distracted and forgot. I'm not sure what it was but I have a different one now. As I mentioned in another thread, I've had a lot of trouble keeping up my Japanese ...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:43 pm

Qwynegold wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:38 pm How would they end up in Hokkaidō?

Teleportation, obviously.

Or the Northwest Passage, if the maximum disbelief you're willing to suspend is very moderately lower.

Well, there's a linguistic miscellany thread, but as every linguist is all to painfully aware , language learning and linguistics are not the same thing. And a lot of people here (myself including) seem to be very interested in language learning in addition to just linguistics and conlanging. So hav...

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:38 am

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:40 pm Can anyone recommend a book on the history of English (especially from 1066 to the early modern period)?

If you're looking for a one-volume monograph, I'd say go for Haruko Momma and Michael Matto's A Companion to the History of the English Language (2008).

Thanks!

Can anyone recommend a book on the history of English (especially from 1066 to the early modern period)?

The Ming-deng / Mindong language of Min (Chinese) has synchronic consonantal assimilation /t, tʰ, s/ -> /ɾ/ medially after a vowel or /ʔ/ (along with /p, pʰ/ -> /β/, /k, kʰ, h/ -> zero, /ts, tsʰ/ -> /z̞/). I'm not sure how it developed, but missionary works in the 19th c. didn't note this phenomeno...

Sorry for the dumb question, but I am reasonably bad at computers; is there a way to run this on mac? Do I have to compile it from the source?

Since we're all talking about the stops, and bearing in mind that this sort of thing is completely out of my depth: has anyone suggested Th T~D Dh for the stop series? As in... something like modern English + a breathy voiced series? Grimm's law seems more reasonable if T was actually Th, and it's e...

[This is a moderately edited version of a question I posted on the linguistics StackExchange some time ago and didn't get any kind of satisfactory answer to, so I thought I'd post it here] I am certainly not the first person to notice that a number of features of reconstructed PIE are typologically ...

Yes, it seems you forgot to include a link! But I have to say, I've been waiting for this for quite a while, and the list of features looks very exciting! I had been holding off on SCAs in general due to many of my conlangs making heavy use of stress and SCAs generally not handling that well. I'd re...