Zompist Bboard Again

I don't dispute that usages can become idiomatic by common usage: I already gave the example of "could care less" as a clearly established idiom where it's the compositional breakdown is irrelevant. I'm not saying that it's impossible for "divide by half" to mean "divide in ...

I would not take Google Books as a good measure of whether something is idiomatic or not, considering that books tend to largely be written in either literary language or, even when made to sound informal, with a degree of influence from the literary language with a smattering of local color added....

To me, "divide by half" means "divide in half," and any other interpretation is just misunderstanding the idiom. It's like if you asked people to "go to town on some french fries" and they used the snack as a vehicle to travel to the central business district. If you w...

How do you interpret the expression "divide by half"? What prompted this is a post that says "Divide 500 by half and add 90. What's the answer?" For several respondents, the answer is ambiguously 1090. For others, it's tentatively 340. I'm in the latter category. I have a confli...

Here's a little thing I've noticed in the speech of some other individuals here (seemingly not myself though): sporadically realizing /uː/ as the diphthong [i̯y] or [i̯ʉ] after coronals. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this in any other English-speakers' speech. Fronting of /u/ is documented to...

peel /pil/ [ˈpʰiə̯ɫ], also real [ˈɹiə̯ɫ], ideal (feels mostly like one syllable, but closer to being "sesquisyllabic" than pill is) - contrasts, but not very distinctly, with /i.ə/ in peritoneal [ˌpeə̯ɹɘtʰɘˈniː.ɫ̩] pill /pɪl/ [ˈpʰɪˑɫ] or [ˈpʰɪə̯ɫ] (also really /rɪli/ [ɹɪˑɫi]) pull /pʊl/ [...

What about austerity and severity ? I have /eː/ there too. (Well, I perceive it as /eː/ because /eː/, /æ/, and /ɛ/ merge completely[*] before /r/ IMD.) [*] Always I have taught myself how to produce /ær/ for personal names which require it. I have the marry-merry-Mary merger and definitely pronounc...

juvenilia: [ˌdʒʉvɘˈnɪliə] That supposedly normative pronunciation you mention (from Wiktionary?) seems very wrong, looking like an excessive classicalization by someone who loves Classical Latin vowel lengths too much. As if from the same kind of person who'd pronounce Cicero with /kɪk/ while speak...

Quick question about PIE: in a lot of reconstructions that I can find, like *múh₂s "mouse", there seems to be *h₂ when (as far as I know) there's no evidence pointing to *h₂ specifically instead of another laryngeal. Is this just convention or is there a good reason to do so? I cannot see...

In the acrophonic principle, we use the first consonant or vowel of a word or sign; such as taking "duck" in English, and using a duck's picture as a sign for [d]. Do any natlangs use the opposite of acrophonics,* wherein we would take the duck's picture to be the sign for [k] ? thank you...

Does anyone know how Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician gato , Asturian gatu , Catalan and Occitan gat (but also Occitan cat ), ended up with initial /g/? Voicing of initial /k/ to /g/ is fairly common in Iberian Romance (or in some cases Western Romance more generally): compare golpe and graso. I d...

The usual hypothesis is actually that /ui/ merged with original long /i:/, while /Oi/ remained separate. Previous posts seem to have got this reversed. Compare the general unrounding of short u that occurred in nut etc.

(BTW. the reason I say "pseudo-Portuguese" is that the standard European Portuguese pronunciation would be [ɐˈsoɾɨʃ], which would likely not be understood by the average English-speaker.) Interesting, I was confused by the [s] and then found out that Portuguese uses the spelling Açores. I...

masculine, feminine or neuter. Q : Does the plural form of Blatt have any relationship to its gender or to the double "t" at the end of it? das Blatt: leaf; Blätter I am wondering if it's a sub-formula out of this one: der Sack: sack, bag; pl. Säcke der Baum: tree; Bäume der Sohn：son; Söh...

Apparently "flense" is supposed to rhyme with "tense", not with "cleanse". I think I have only encountered it in writing and I always though it was [flɛnz].

I've never really thought about it before, but why do European languages with cases tend to use a case with adpositions? Some even label the case prepositional case . For example, Irish uses the dative with prepositions (also known as the prepositional case), German uses the genitive, dative, and a...

says "bomb" with only one b my whole life? I thought that was nearly universal in English. No one ever corrected me when I pronounced it like "bom." If so, then let me revize my earlier pronunciation guides: phoTOBom(b)y, with a silent b, since I apparently have some weird word-...

I gave the example of “photobomby,” which demonstrates that the rule dictating words with nominalizing -y is operant, and “allomorphy,” which demonstrates that it is not universal. The stress pattern of allomorphy, necromancy, rhinoplasty is usually treated as regular for -y compound nouns ending i...

Then there is a whole series of Greco-Latinate suffixes that draw primary stress to the syllable before , like -ic. I feel that if I can come up with a set of rules that works for all of these suffixes I will become the Quisatz Haderak. There is a lot of prior work on that class of suffixes. Chomsk...

"Please" has /z/, not /s/. Right. Those unwritten z-s are the bane of non-native speakers like me :(. It's written. With very few exceptions, <Vce> represents /s/; <Vse> represents /z/. There are indeed quite a lot of exceptions to the <Vse> represents /z/ part... including crease, cease,...