Zompist Bboard Again

I've noticed that there exist at least in English a number of phonemically strange words, that are hard to analyze using conventional English phonology. Take geminates, for instance - geminates within the vast majority of morphemes have been lost altogether centuries ago, with most of the remaining...

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 reali...

For some reason, PCs feels wrong, like the "s" could just be part of the anacronym, so the apostrophe sort of separates the "s", highlighting that it's attached as a clitic rather than part of the anacronym. I know this is wrong, but it just feels so right! This could be an infl...

Most of us probably have some idea of what we mean by it when we describe a text as "dry". But are there any words or terms for a text that is not dry, that is perhaps even the opposite of dry? I've never heard anyone talk of a "wet" text, and I'd be pretty weirded out if I woul...

What does "five or so" mean? Does it mean "five or six"? And why did people use "or so" there? The construction "[number] or so" means "about [number]", could be more or could be less by any plausible amount. In the case of "five", you'd e...

Really? Don't all contemporary Romance languages descend from Latin? And doesn't Latin descend from Proto-Italic instead? Proto-Romance refers to the most recent common ancestor of the Romance languages, which is not Classical Latin but a mostly unwritten close descendent of it. It depends. Spoken ...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 11:08 am subsequently

[ˈsʌb̥sɘkwɘntli], [ˈsʌb̥sɘkwɘnʔli]

Zju wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 2:17 pm Does anyone in any dialect say [bi˞d] or [biɹd], etc., or is this an entirely spelling pronunciation? I swear I heard it today somewhere online.

That's how I pronounce "beard".

Second question - virtually all languages of East and Southeast Asia have limited syllabe inventory. This is true even for outliers like Japanese or Manchu Is this such a strong and persistent areal feature? Chinese literary influence on Japanese started in the 600s and was reserved to a small (5-6...

EDIT, unrelated: I try to bring this up whenever I can, since it tends to get forgotten very easily, but English "possessive s" is not a direct descendant of the genitive case on nouns. It is in fact a remnant of the genitive case on pronouns! That's why it's written with an apostrophe; i...

It all seems very simple to me. There is a historical spectrum from preposition to adverb. Stage 1: a preposition frequently appears with a certain verb, subtly changing its meaning. It is still a preposition. For example, "look to." Stage 2: since the preposition has some modifying effec...

Does anyone have [o̞] or like with /l/-elision in almost , already , or all right ? I've noticed my mom has this, where I have [ɒo̯] in almost and [ɒ] without /l/ in already and all right . The only one of these where the vowel can be like [o̞] for me is almost. Already and all right have [ɑ(ɫ)] (I...

In Latin there seems to be an -s thing going on with the nominative case. Many of the second declension masculine nouns end in -us in the nominative singular. Some in -er, but mostly -us (servus) There's also an -us thing going on in the 4th declension again with masculine nouns (arcus) and a -s th...

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs? Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chine...

As mentioned, the Celtic /m/ > /v/ mutation seems to be ultimately based on lenition of intervocalic /m/ to something like [β̃~w̃]. It's the same as the mutation of /b/. The way I would expect [n] and [ŋ] to go if similarly lenited would be to [ɾ̃] and [ɰ̃] respectively. For further developments, yo...

Do you guys (pun intended) know examples of new pronoun being developed other than English you guys/y'all? Dutch has jullie for second-person plural, similar to English. German has man in the sense of "one". Portuguese has a gente for first-person plural (which kind of reminds me of Frenc...

What happened scipu and wordu that exemplifies a distinction between heavy and light syllables? Is the example perhaps misguided? The deletion of word-final u in Old English was weight sensitive. U was retained in scipu, where it was preceded by a single light syllable, but deleted in wordu > word,...

I'm guessing it was speaking specifically of the plurals of nouny things, and not of verby things, but it occurs to me that regular verbs in French would probably qualify: j'écris, tu écris, il écrit, nous écrivons, vous écrivez, ils écrivent , three distinct plural forms, the singular forms having...

I have a number of words with "wrong" Canadian Raising, e.g. I have [əːe̯] rather than the expected [aːe̯] in hydrangea and conversely I have [ɑʁˤ] rather than the expected [ʌʁˤ] in farce and Martha (but note that I have [ʌʁˤ] in marsh and hearth , and interestingly enough parse can go ei...

ration, rational Likewise, I dont remember any specific event in which I said these words out loud with the wrong pronunciation and was corrected, but Im pretty sure that at least for ration I encountered it in print first and assumed it would rhyme with all of the other -ation words I knew. ration...

I vaguely recall reading something about how the Frankish influence resulted in Romance being spoken with word stress shifting from the penultimate to the beginning of the word, accelerating the wearing down Might what you’re remembering be instead the hypothesis that Germanic influence contributed...